Overview
Imbalance is the bid-ask text type with one addition: a box drawn around any price where one side heavily outweighs the diagonal price level next to it.
What's covered
- Reading diagonally — an imbalance compares a price to the level diagonally adjacent to it, not directly across. Buys are compared diagonally down-left; sells are compared diagonally up-right. A box means one side has overpowered the other by at least the configured ratio.
- Set the imbalance percentage — this is the minimum ratio required to flag a box (e.g., 250% means one side must be at least 2.5× the other). The video's own working setting is around 350–400%; lower thresholds flag far more levels, while higher thresholds flag only the most extreme ones.
- Ignore zeros — prevents levels from auto-flagging as imbalanced purely because the opposing level printed exactly zero.
- Show imbalance boxes — determines how a flagged level is marked: a box drawn around the number, or the text itself rendered in a different color for a lighter visual footprint.
- What an imbalance is actually telling you — one side overwhelming the other at a price. On its own, it doesn't say whether that's fresh positioning or existing positions closing — the video is explicit that open interest is what disambiguates that.
- Trapped traders and stacked imbalances — imbalances at a high or low that price then reverses away from are a classic trapped-trader signal, and stacked imbalances (three or more in a row) build into support/resistance levels — both covered in their own dedicated material.