Unfinished auction

A bar high or low where both sides still traded. The idea comes from how an auction ends — and the footprint shows you whether it did.

How an auction ends

Price probes up until it runs out of buyers willing to lift, or down until it runs out of sellers willing to hit. At the point where it turns, one side of the book stops getting filled.

That is what a finished auction looks like on a footprint: at the bar's extreme row, one half is empty. The market reached far enough that nothing traded on that side, and turned.

An unfinished auction is the opposite — at the extreme row, both halves printed. Buyers and sellers were both still transacting at that price when the bar closed. The probe did not end because it ran out of counterparty; it ended because the clock ran out.

What OrderVane checks

For each closed bar, OrderVane looks at exactly two rows: the highest and the lowest.

Only closed bars are tested. The bar still forming does not have a final high or low yet, so there is nothing to judge.

Not the same as a zero print

These two are easy to confuse because both are about a row where the two halves are uneven — but they look at opposite conditions in opposite places.

• Zero print — one side printed nothing, on a row inside the bar.
• Unfinished auction — both sides printed, on the bar's extreme row.

OrderVane checks interior rows for zero prints and the first and last row for unfinished auctions, so the two never claim the same price on the same bar.

What the mark looks like

A thin purple line extended to the right from the bar, with a label showing which end it came from:

• UA▔ — the bar's high
• UA▁ — the bar's low

The bar character in the label is a position marker, not a direction call. It tells you which extreme produced the mark, nothing more.

Purple is used only here, which keeps it separate from the gold dashed naked POC and the cyan solid zero print. Unlike those two, the UA label stays on the line even after it fades — the extreme it came from is still the useful part of the label.

When the mark is retired

The mark stops at the bar where price touched that level again — the bar's high-to-low range covering the price, wicks included. From there it drops to a faint version for a few bars (Level lifecycle fade bars, 3 by default) and is then removed.

Coming back to the level is sometimes described as the auction being repaired: price returned and traded there again. OrderVane uses touch as the test and does not make a claim beyond that.

Turning it on

Unfinished auction marking is off by default. Switch it on in Settings, or in the on-chart quick menu under LEVELS.

If you are turning on several level families at once, do them one at a time. Naked POC, zero print and unfinished auction all draw thin horizontal lines, and until you have learned the colours they look alike. The Overlay legend (top right, collapsed by default) names whichever families are currently on your chart.

Unfinished auction marking is part of OrderVane Pro, which is where footprint cells live.

Honest limits

• Two rows per bar, maximum. Only the high and the low are tested, so a bar contributes at most two marks.
• It is a volume test, not a shape test. The check is whether both halves of the extreme row printed. It does not consider how the bar closed, how long price spent at the extreme, or what came after.
• It depends on your data feed. If your broker does not report a price-by-price breakdown for a stretch, there are no cells there and therefore no marks. OrderVane does not infer them.
• It is a description, not a signal. The mark says an extreme closed with both sides trading, and whether price has been back. What that means for a trade is your call — the tool does not place orders and does not tell you which way to go.

Related

• Stacked imbalance zones — consecutive one-sided rows forming a band
• Zero print — one side printed nothing, inside the bar
• Naked POC — a bar's most-traded price that has not been retested
• How to read a footprint bar — where these rows come from
• All docs