Overview
Stacked imbalances mark consecutive price levels where the same-direction buy/sell imbalance repeats — a classic footprint pattern used to flag potential absorption or aggressive one-sided pressure.
What's covered
- Single-level imbalance — A price level where buy volume overwhelms sell volume (or vice versa) beyond a set imbalance ratio threshold — the same underlying concept as the imbalance text type, used here to build a multi-level pattern.
- Stacking — When the same-direction imbalance repeats across a run of consecutive price levels, the platform marks it as "stacked" — a stronger signal than a single isolated imbalanced level, since it shows sustained one-sided pressure across a price range rather than a single print.
- Imbalance ratio threshold — Controls how extreme the buy/sell skew at a level must be before it counts as imbalanced — a tighter ratio flags more levels (more noise), while a looser ratio flags fewer but more significant ones.
- Minimum stack count — Sets how many consecutive imbalanced levels are required before the platform highlights it as a stack — raising this filters out short, low-conviction runs and surfaces only the more developed patterns.