Interpret volume, participation, liquidity, order flow, profiles, and execution evidence alongside price.
What it teaches
What volume measures and what it does not, the four price-and-participation combinations, relative volume against a baseline, and whether volume confirms a move or contradicts it. The indicators built out of volume: On-Balance Volume, and the close-location family, Accumulation/Distribution and Chaikin Money Flow. Value: session VWAP and anchored VWAP, the volume profile and the value area with its POC, high-volume and low-volume nodes. The market's own plumbing: bid, ask, spread and order types, time and sales, footprint charts and bid-ask delta, cumulative volume delta, and the order book. Volume and Order Flow Trading Rules turns all of it into explicit, testable rules.
Who it is for
Anyone who has said "that breakout had volume" without being able to say volume relative to what. It assumes you can read a chart and know what a moving average does; it assumes nothing about order books, tape reading or delta. It also suits the reader who has a footprint chart open and is quietly unsure whether the green number means buyers were stronger — the course is explicit that every trade has both a buyer and a seller, and that aggressor classification describes which side crossed the spread, not an unequal number of participants.
Concept dependencies
The relative-volume baseline comparison makes the volume-confirmation test meaningful. Session VWAP is the reference that anchored VWAP moves, and volume profile is what the value area is drawn on. Volume and Order Flow Trading Rules asks for market context, participation, location, aggressive flow and price confirmation. The tape and the book answer different questions: executed transactions and displayed intent.
Where the definitions come from
The labs are simplified on purpose, so each lesson closes with an official reading link to a primary source rather than to a vendor selling order-flow software: CME Group's education material for how exchange volume is counted, what market-by-order data is, and the difference between market makers and market takers; Nasdaq's own glossary for VWAP; and the SEC's investor.gov for order types. Those are definitions from the venue and the regulator — the course's own synthetic examples are illustrations of them, never a substitute.
Every lesson still works with no network at all. Each page is entirely self-contained, and the reference links are the only things on it that point off the site.
Lessons
Explanations, examples, interactive tools, and practice questions.
16 lessons
Educational use only — nothing here is trading advice.
This course teaches interpretation of volume, value, executed flow, and
displayed depth. It does not provide live market data, trading signals,
execution access, profitability claims, or personalized investment
advice. Position risk, portfolio risk, drawdown, and risk-of-ruin are
reserved for Trading Risk Management; strategy validation for Backtesting and Trading Systems.
Data and classification scope. All charts, order books,
tape data, profiles, and executions in these lessons are deterministic
synthetic examples. The course uses stated conventions — relative volume
is current volume divided by a comparable baseline volume; OBV adds the
full bar volume on an up close and subtracts it on a down close;
Accumulation/Distribution and Chaikin Money Flow infer pressure from
close location within the bar and are not trade-by-trade aggressor
measures; session and anchored VWAP use typical price
(high + low + close) / 3 weighted by volume;
the profile assigns each bar to price bins using typical price; the
value area contains approximately 70% of profile volume around the POC;
bid/ask delta is ask-classified volume minus bid-classified volume, and
CVD is its running total. Time-and-sales and footprint classifications
are simplified and explicitly labeled, and order-book examples show
displayed liquidity, which can be added, consumed, moved, or canceled.
Real outputs vary by venue, feed, vendor, asset class, session,
aggregation, and classification method.
Lesson topics
Volume basics
What the number under the chart counts, and what it refuses to say. Volume measures participation, not direction: a completed trade always has both a buyer and a seller, so a tall bar tells you how much changed hands, never who won. These lessons set the reading habits the rest of the course depends on — pairing price progress with changing activity, normalizing current volume against a comparable baseline before anything gets called a spike, and separating expansion from climax and absorption.
Evaluate whether volume supports a breakout, continuation, rejection, or failed move.
Open lesson
Not marked
Lesson topics
Volume-derived indicators
Two ways to turn the volume series into a line you can compare with price. On-Balance Volume accumulates the full bar volume by closing direction; Accumulation/Distribution and Chaikin Money Flow weight where price closed inside each bar's range. Both infer pressure from the finished bar, which is exactly why they come before the tape: they are not trade-by-trade aggressor measures, and the lessons say so where it would be easy to imply otherwise.
Measure where price closes inside each bar’s range and weight that location by volume.
Open lesson
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Lesson topics
VWAP
The average price weighted by volume — what the session actually paid, rather than what it printed last. Volume-Weighted Average Price builds session VWAP from typical price weighted by volume and reads price location around it as accepted value and directional control. Anchored Volume-Weighted Average Price moves the starting point to an event you choose, so the question becomes whether price is accepted above or below the average traded value since that event rather than since the open.
Start VWAP from a selected event and evaluate whether price is accepted above or below the event’s average traded value.
Open lesson
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Lesson topics
Profile and value area
The same trades, reorganized by price instead of by time. A volume profile bins traded volume into price levels and shows where the market spent its activity; the value area, the point of control, and the high- and low-volume nodes name the locations the auction kept returning to and the ones it passed straight through. In these labs the value area holds approximately 70% of profile volume around the POC — a convention, and the lesson states it as one.
Interpret value-area boundaries, high-volume nodes, and low-volume nodes as auction locations.
Open lesson
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Lesson topics
Order flow: book, tape, footprint, delta
Below the bar. Bid, Ask, Spread, and Order Types is the quote itself — bid, ask, spread, and which order types have to pay it. Time and Sales reads the transaction stream by price, size, side classification and pace. Footprint Charts and Bid-Ask Delta splits executed volume into bid- and ask-classified at each price level inside a candle, and Cumulative Volume Delta accumulates that delta through time to compare aggressive flow with price structure. Order Book and Market Depth turns to the order book, where displayed depth is intent rather than trade: liquidity that can be added, consumed, moved, or canceled before anything prints.
Inspect resting liquidity, queue changes, spread, depth, and the difference between displayed intent and executed trades.
Open lesson
Not marked
Volume and Order Flow Trading Rules
Rules
An interpretation stays an opinion until it is written down. Volume and Order Flow Trading Rules converts market context, participation, location, aggressive flow and price confirmation into explicit conditions, states the entry, the invalidation and the exit alongside them, flags the combinations that contradict each other, and exports the whole specification as a machine-readable document you can keep.
Convert market context, participation, aggressive flow, and price confirmation into explicit testable rules.
Open lesson
Not marked
Recommended background
Price structure, trade planning, and the distinction between a signal and a tested rule.
Interop
Volume and Order Flow Trading Rules exports a rule set
The specification lesson documents a trading system. It turns what you have learned into explicit conditions, checks them against each other, and then hands the whole rule set back to you as a file, so it can outlive the browser tab it was written in.
Format: volume-order-flow-rule-v1
What comes out of it
Volume and Order Flow Trading Rules takes the market context you selected, the participation
test, the location the setup depends on — above or below VWAP, above
or below the value area, or at a structural level — the order-flow
condition, the price confirmation, the entry side and trigger, the
invalidation, the exit with its minimum reward-to-risk, and the
situations you decided not to trade at all, and exports the whole
specification as a JSON document stamped
volume-order-flow-rule-v1.
The schema linked beside this is the contract for that shape. It is
worth reading if you would rather keep your rules in your own
notebook or script: match the shape and the same fields carry over.
The schema is strict on purpose —
additionalProperties: false everywhere — so
a field that is not in the contract is a rule that will not validate
rather than a silent extra. Note what the export deliberately does
NOT contain: any measure of what the rule earned. There is no
performance object anywhere in the shape, and
minimumRewardRisk is a constraint you set,
not a result — so a rule that is merely well specified is never
mistaken for one that has been shown to work. Validation is Backtesting and Trading Systems's subject. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded,
and there is no account anywhere in this course.