VOLUMENTUM USER MANUAL

About This Manual

This manual describes Volumentum v2.3 — what it detects, how its settings work, and how to use it in practice. It covers every user-facing setting in the indicator and explains the underlying order-flow concepts well enough that a trader new to footprint analysis can use it productively, while a footprint veteran can skip directly to the settings reference.

The manual is organized in the order most users will need information:

Sections 2–3 explain what Volumentum is and the market-microstructure concepts it relies on.
Section 4 walks through getting it on a chart and reading the output.
Section 5 is the complete settings reference, organized by UI group.
Section 6 covers the anchor line and its interaction.
Sections 7–9 cover practical workflows, common questions, and limitations.

Quick Start

Apply Volumentum to a footprint (cluster) chart in ATAS — a chart type that exposes per-tick bid/ask volumes within each candle.
Leave all settings at default for the first session. The defaults are conservative and produce readable output on most instruments.
Locate the vertical anchor line on the chart, labeled “Volumentum Anchor.” This marks where scanning starts — bars to the left are not analyzed. Drag it to widen or narrow your analysis range.
Watch for colored rectangles appearing at price levels inside candles. Each rectangle marks one tick where the indicator detected an aggressive imbalance.
Once you understand the default output, return to Section 5 and tune ratios, stack size, and filters to match your instrument and style.

What Volumentum Detects

Volumentum scans each candle’s per-tick footprint data and identifies prices where one side of the order book overwhelmed the other by a configurable ratio. It marks these prices on the chart, classifies them as imbalance or absorption based on where the candle closed relative to the level, and persists each mark as a zone that can be touched, deleted, or extended as price returns.

The indicator is purely a detector: it does not generate buy/sell signals, does not predict price, and does not aggregate across candles into composite levels. Each tick within each candle is evaluated independently. The trader interprets the resulting marks.

The Two Detection Pipelines

Horizontal imbalance: At a single price level, compare the ask volume against the bid volume at the same price. If one side meets the configured ratio against the other, that price is flagged. This is the simpler of the two definitions: “at this exact tick, buyers (or sellers) dominated.”

Diagonal imbalance: Compare the ask volume at one price against the bid volume at the price one tick below. If the upper ask meets the ratio against the lower bid, the upper price is flagged as bullish; the mirror compares the lower bid against the upper ask for bearish flags. This is the traditional definition from cluster-chart literature and captures aggression that moves price between adjacent ticks.

Both pipelines can run simultaneously (“Both” mode), and when they do, their detected prices merge into a single set per direction before stacking is evaluated.

Stacking

A single flagged tick is rarely tradeable in isolation — random one-tick imbalances occur frequently in any volume profile. Volumentum filters by stacking: it groups dominant ticks that are adjacent in price (within one tick of each other) and only displays groups that meet a minimum length. A stack of three contiguous dominant bullish ticks is a meaningfully concentrated zone of aggressive buying; an isolated single tick usually isn’t.

Each tick in a qualifying stack draws its own rectangle. The minimum stack size is a visibility filter, not a merging operation.

Absorption Reclassification

When a bullish imbalance is detected at a price but the candle ultimately closes below that price, the aggression failed — buyers were absorbed by an even larger seller. Volumentum can recolor these zones as bearish absorption (and bullish absorption for the mirror case). The detection logic remains the same; only the rendering color changes when the close contradicts the aggression direction.

Absorption reclassification is enabled by default and can be turned off to view raw imbalance detection only.

Order-Flow Concepts You Need

This section is for traders new to footprint analysis. If you already know what bid/ask volume within a candle means and how imbalance is conventionally defined, skip to Section 4.

Bid vs Ask Volume Within a Candle

A standard candle records open, high, low, and close — four prices for the whole bar. A footprint candle records something richer: at every price the candle traded, how many contracts hit the bid (sellers were aggressive — they sold into the resting bid) and how many lifted the ask (buyers were aggressive — they bought from the resting ask). Each price level inside a single candle is one row, with its own bid and ask volume counts.

This per-level breakdown is the data Volumentum reads. The indicator requires a chart type in ATAS that exposes this data — typically called a cluster chart or footprint chart. Time-based or candle-based charts that don’t decompose volume by price will not produce useful Volumentum output.

What “Aggressive” Means

In a market, both sides of every trade are present by definition — every buyer needs a seller. The distinction footprint analysis draws is which side initiated. If buyers were patiently sitting on the bid and a seller hit them, sellers were the aggressors. If sellers were patiently offering at the ask and a buyer lifted them, buyers were the aggressors. The bid and ask volumes in footprint data are the aggressive volumes — what was crossed into the resting book.

Imbalance, in this context, means one side’s aggressive volume was substantially larger than the other’s at a specific price. The ratio you configure says how substantial.

Imbalance vs Absorption

Imbalance at a price is the raw observation: one side was aggressive. The interpretation of that observation depends on what happened next:

Successful imbalance: Aggressors at that price drove the candle in their direction. A bullish imbalance where the candle closes above the level represents buyers who got what they wanted — the level becomes potential future support if revisited.
Absorption: Aggressors at that price could not move the candle in their direction. A bullish imbalance where the candle closes below the level represents buyers who got eaten — somebody on the offer had enough size to absorb all that aggressive buying and even push price the other way. The level becomes potential future resistance.

Volumentum’s absorption flip implements exactly this: if a detected imbalance and its candle close disagree on direction, the zone gets recolored to reflect the absorber, not the aggressor.

The Stack — Why Adjacency Matters

Markets routinely produce isolated single-tick imbalances that mean nothing — a small order printing at an odd price, a midnight gap settle, normal noise. What changes the picture is concentration: several consecutive ticks all showing the same direction of aggression. Three adjacent dominant ticks tells you the aggression spanned a price range, not just one number. That spatial concentration is what makes a zone tradeable.

Volumentum’s stack-size filter encodes this. A minimum of two adjacent ticks (the default) drops most single-tick noise while still letting genuine small-stack signals through. Raising it to three or four filters for stronger zones at the cost of fewer signals.

Setup and Reading the Output

Installation

Volumentum is an ATAS indicator and installs through ATAS’s standard indicator-management workflow. Refer to your platform’s documentation for adding custom indicators.

Chart Type Requirements

Volumentum requires per-tick bid/ask volume data inside each candle. In ATAS this typically means using a cluster chart configuration that exposes the GetAllPriceLevels API the indicator depends on. If you apply Volumentum to a chart type that doesn’t provide this data, nothing will be detected — there’s nothing to scan.

Reading the Output

Two visual elements appear when the indicator is active:

The anchor line: A vertical line with the label “Volumentum Anchor” at the top. Scanning starts at this line and continues to the right toward the live bar. Bars to the left of the anchor are not analyzed. Drag the line to adjust where analysis begins.
Imbalance rectangles: Thin horizontal rectangles, one tick tall, drawn at the specific price tick where the imbalance was detected. The rectangle extends horizontally from its origin candle out either a fixed number of candles (Fixed Width mode) or to the live bar plus a look-ahead tail (Regular mode). Color encodes both direction and whether the zone is a raw imbalance or an absorption.

Color Conventions

Four distinct colors carry the indicator’s classification:

Bullish Imbalance — buyers were aggressive at this price and the candle closed in their favor.
Bearish Imbalance — sellers were aggressive at this price and the candle closed in their favor.
Bullish Absorption — sellers were aggressive but the candle closed against them; a larger buyer absorbed the aggression and pushed price up. The level becomes potential support.
Bearish Absorption — buyers were aggressive but the candle closed against them; a larger seller absorbed the aggression and pushed price down. The level becomes potential resistance.

Each color is independently configurable. Absorption colors default to slightly more opaque (more visually prominent) than plain imbalances because absorption is typically the more actionable signal.

Zone Lifespan

Once drawn, a zone persists until one of three things happens:

Price returns and touches the zone’s tick price. Depending on the Lifespan of Zones setting, the zone either disappears entirely (Delete on Touch) or stops extending forward in time but remains visible (Plotted Until Touched).
In Fixed Width mode, the zone reaches its configured number of candles past its origin and stops extending — but it remains on the chart as a historical mark.
In the background, zones touched more than 5,000 bars ago are pruned from memory to keep performance steady on long sessions. This is invisible to the user; touched zones are already off-screen by the time pruning happens.

Settings Reference

Settings are organized in ATAS’s indicator-properties panel into seven groups, presented below in the order they appear. Every setting is described with its purpose, default value, and practical guidance for tuning.

Range & Handle

Controls where analysis begins on the chart.

Initial Coverage (Bars) Default: 500

Number of bars back from the live bar where scanning begins. The anchor line on the chart marks this position.

Increasing this value extends analysis further into history at the cost of more processing on chart load. Decreasing it focuses analysis on the recent session.

Can also be set by dragging the anchor line on the chart — the two methods are equivalent.

Start Handle Color Default: Teal (semi-transparent)

Color of the vertical anchor line and its label.

Choose a color that contrasts with your chart background but doesn’t compete with the imbalance rectangles for attention.

Imbalance Detection

Controls the core scanning logic — what counts as an imbalance and how stacks are filtered.

Pipeline Default: Both

Which detection method to run.

Horizontal: compare bid vs ask at the same tick. Simpler, captures pure single-level aggression.

Diagonal (Traditional): compare upper-tick ask against lower-tick bid (and the mirror). The conventional cluster-chart definition.

Both: run horizontal and diagonal simultaneously; detected prices merge into a single set per direction before stacking.

Running Both produces the most signals and is the default. Switch to Diagonal alone if you want to match the output of traditional footprint indicators exactly.

Minimum Stack Size Default: 2

Minimum number of consecutive adjacent dominant ticks required for the stack to display.

1 shows every dominant tick including isolated ones (noisy). 2 (default) filters single-tick noise while preserving most genuine signals. 3 or higher demands stronger concentration and produces sparser, higher-conviction zones.

Each tick in a qualifying stack still draws its own rectangle — this setting filters which stacks display, not how stacks render.

Imbalance Ratio Default: 2.0

Minimum ratio between the dominant side and the opposite side.

At 2.0, a bullish flag fires when ask volume is at least 2× bid volume at the same tick (horizontal) or against the lower bid (diagonal).

Lower values produce more signals; higher values demand stronger imbalances. Typical range is 2.0 to 4.0 depending on instrument liquidity and personal preference.

Ignore Zero Prints Default: Off

When off, an imbalance can fire when one side has zero volume — interpreted mathematically as infinite ratio, the most extreme imbalance possible.

When on, any tick where one side has no volume is skipped entirely. Use this on thin instruments where one-sided prints are common but uninformative noise.

Volume Filter

Filters out stacks where the dominant-side aggressive volume falls below a threshold.

Enable Volume Filter Default: On

Master toggle for the volume filter.

When off, every stack that meets the stack-size and ratio criteria displays regardless of volume. When on, the dominant-side volume across the entire stack must meet the configured threshold.

Volume Filter Mode Default: % of Candle Volume

Fixed Amount: thresholds below are read as absolute contract or share counts.

Percentage: thresholds are read as a percentage of the originating candle’s total volume.

Percentage adapts naturally to session conditions — what counts as a meaningful imbalance at low volume differs from peak hours. Fixed mode is more deterministic and useful for backtesting against a known threshold.

Minimum Bid Volume Default: 10

Applies to bearish signals (bid is the dominant side). Fixed mode: the absolute bid volume across the stack must meet or exceed this value. Percentage mode: the bid volume must meet or exceed this percentage of the candle’s total volume.

Minimum Ask Volume Default: 10

Applies to bullish signals (ask is the dominant side). Fixed and percentage behavior mirror the bid filter above.

Colors

Visual encoding for the four detection outcomes plus the master absorption toggle.

Bullish Imbalance Default: Teal (low opacity)

Color for raw bullish imbalances — buyers were aggressive and the candle closed in their favor.

Bearish Imbalance Default: Pink (low opacity)

Color for raw bearish imbalances — sellers were aggressive and the candle closed in their favor.

Absorption Color Flip Default: On

Master toggle for absorption reclassification.

On: imbalances where the candle closed against the aggression direction are recolored with the absorption palette.

Off: all detected zones display with the imbalance palette regardless of close position — useful when you want to see raw detection output without absorption interpretation.

Bullish Absorption Default: Teal (high opacity)

Color for bullish absorption — sellers were aggressive but a larger buyer absorbed and pushed price up. Typically rendered more opaque than plain imbalances since absorption is more actionable.

Bearish Absorption Default: Pink (high opacity)

Color for bearish absorption — buyers were aggressive but a larger seller absorbed and pushed price down.

Display Options

Controls how zones are sized and aligned on the chart, and what happens when price returns to a zone.

Lifespan of Zones Default: Deleted If Touched

Deleted If Touched: when price touches a zone’s tick price, the zone disappears from the chart. Best for keeping the chart clean and focused on untested levels.

Plotted Until Touched: when price touches a zone, the zone stops extending forward but remains visible as a historical mark. Best for tracking which levels have been tested.

Zone Width Default: Fixed Width

Regular: each zone extends from its origin candle to the live bar, plus a look-ahead tail set by Width/Look-Ahead. New zones near the live edge stay readable instead of being squeezed against it.

Fixed Width: each zone spans a fixed number of candles from its origin bar, regardless of distance to the live bar. Best for keeping older zones visually contained.

Width/Look-Ahead (Candles) Default: 5

Fixed Width mode: total number of candles each zone spans from its origin bar.

Regular mode: number of candles the zone extends past the live bar as a look-ahead tail.

Larger values produce more visually prominent zones at the cost of more chart clutter, especially when many imbalances stack vertically near the same time.

Rectangle Alignment Default: Candle Center-to-Center

Center-to-Center: rectangles run from the center of the origin candle to the center of the destination.

Left-to-Left: rectangles run from the left edge of the origin candle to the left edge of the destination.

Center alignment looks more natural; left alignment makes the origin candle visually clearer at the cost of a slight visual offset.

The Anchor Line

The vertical line labeled “Volumentum Anchor” controls where analysis begins on the chart. Its position is equivalent to the Initial Coverage (Bars) setting — the two are different views of the same value.

Why It Exists

Footprint scanning is computationally heavier than typical indicator math because each candle’s per-tick data must be enumerated. Limiting analysis to a relevant range keeps performance steady and focuses output on the part of the session the trader cares about. The anchor line is the most direct way to set this range.

How to Use It

Locate the vertical line on the chart. It carries a small label at the top — “Volumentum Anchor” — colored to match the Start Handle Color setting.
Hover the cursor near the line. The cursor changes to a horizontal-resize indicator when within ±5 pixels of the line.
Click and drag to a new position. The line follows the cursor in real time during the drag.
The indicator snaps the line to the nearest candle and recalculates the analysis range. All zones outside the new range are discarded; new zones are scanned within the new range.

Behavior Notes

The anchor cannot be dragged to or past the live bar — the indicator enforces a minimum of one bar between the anchor and the live edge, since analyzing only the live bar produces no historical context.
Dragging the anchor triggers a full recalculation, which can take a moment on long ranges or thinly-divided cluster charts. The chart will redraw once scanning completes.
The anchor position persists with the chart’s saved state. Closing and reopening the chart restores the anchor to wherever it was last placed.

Practical Workflow

First Session With a New Instrument

When applying Volumentum to an instrument you’ve not used it on before, leave all settings at default and observe the output through a full session. The defaults are conservative and produce readable signals on most major futures, equities, and high-liquidity crypto pairs without modification.

After observing one session, evaluate the output by these criteria:

Too few signals overall — lower the Imbalance Ratio to 1.5 or 1.75, or reduce Minimum Stack Size from 2 to 1.
Too many signals, hard to read — raise the Imbalance Ratio to 2.5 or 3.0, raise Minimum Stack Size to 3, or raise the Volume Filter thresholds.
Signals look right but lots of noise on light-volume bars — switch Volume Filter Mode to Percentage and set thresholds around 15-25% of candle volume.
Signals look right but disappear on heavy-volume bars — switch Volume Filter Mode to Fixed Amount with thresholds appropriate to the instrument’s typical print sizes.

Reading Stacks

A single rectangle is one tick of detected aggression. Three rectangles stacked vertically at adjacent ticks is a stronger zone — aggression spanned a price range. Five or more stacked rectangles is a notably aggressive sweep, often coinciding with breakout moves or stop runs.

Pay attention to:

How wide the stack is in ticks — wider means aggression covered more price.
How dense the color is — opaque (absorption) stacks are typically more actionable than translucent (imbalance) ones, because absorption marks levels where larger participants demonstrated they were willing to defend the area.
Where the stack sits relative to current price — zones above current price tend to act as resistance, below as support. The Lifespan of Zones setting controls whether tested zones remain visible.

Combining With Other Tools

Volumentum identifies points of aggressive participation. It does not say whether those points will hold or break, nor what direction price will take from them. Practical use typically combines Volumentum zones with one or more of:

Volume profile or VWAP for higher-timeframe context on where current price sits in the broader distribution.
Market structure analysis — swing highs/lows, trend lines — for directional bias.
Time-based context — sessions, news releases, scheduled liquidity events — for when aggression is more or less informative.

Volumentum is most useful as a refinement tool: confirming that a level identified by other means actually saw aggressive participation, or showing why a level held or failed by exposing the absorption that occurred there.

Troubleshooting and FAQ

Nothing displays on the chart

The chart probably doesn’t expose per-tick bid/ask volumes. Volumentum requires a cluster or footprint chart configuration. Check that your chart type is one that ATAS treats as cluster-compatible. If you see footprint numbers inside your candles, the data is present.

Also confirm the anchor line is positioned to the left of where you’re looking. Bars to the left of the anchor are not scanned; if the anchor is too close to the live edge, recent history won’t be analyzed.

Too many signals — chart is cluttered

Raise the Imbalance Ratio (start at 2.5 or 3.0) and increase Minimum Stack Size to 3. If the chart is still busy, raise the Volume Filter thresholds — in Percentage mode, try 25-40%.

Too few signals — barely anything appears

Lower the Imbalance Ratio to 1.5 or 1.75. Reduce Minimum Stack Size to 1 to see all detected ticks. Check whether Ignore Zero Prints is on — turning it off can dramatically increase signals on instruments where one-sided ticks are common.

Colors look wrong — bullish zones appear bearish-colored

Absorption reclassification is doing exactly what it’s supposed to: a detected bullish imbalance whose candle closed below the level is reclassified as bearish absorption. If you want to see raw imbalance detection without this flip, turn off Absorption Color Flip in the Colors group.

Zones disappear when I expect them to stay

Lifespan of Zones is set to Deleted If Touched. Switch to Plotted Until Touched to keep tested zones visible. Note that this setting only affects zones touched by future price action — zones whose origin bar moves out of the analysis range (e.g., from dragging the anchor right) are discarded regardless of this setting.

The indicator is slow to recalculate

Scanning is per-tick across the configured range. Decrease Initial Coverage to a smaller range, or drag the anchor closer to the live edge. The first calculation after a chart load is always the most expensive; subsequent live-bar updates only process the current bar.

Why are my live-bar zones flickering?

On the current bar, every new tick may add or remove imbalance signals as bid/ask volumes accumulate. The displayed zones for the live bar update tick by tick to reflect the current state. Once the bar closes, the zones stabilize and no longer change. This is expected behavior, not a bug.

Limitations and Design Notes

What Volumentum Does Not Do

It does not generate buy or sell signals. It marks levels of interest; you decide what to do with them.
It does not aggregate across candles. Each candle is scanned independently. Multi-bar accumulation patterns are not detected.
It does not look forward. Detection happens after a bar has the data Volumentum needs (the live bar updates tick by tick; closed bars are finalized). The indicator does not predict where new imbalances will form.
It does not weight zones by recency, magnitude, or any other priority. All zones that pass the configured filters are drawn equally; visual prominence comes only from color (imbalance vs absorption) and the user’s chosen palette.

Per-Tick Independence

Each tick in each candle is evaluated independently against the configured ratio. There is no smoothing, no rolling window, no consideration of what happened on previous bars. This is deliberate — the indicator’s job is to surface observable facts about a single candle’s per-tick footprint, not to interpret patterns across bars. Interpretation is the trader’s job.

Why Adjacent-Only Stacking

Stacking groups dominant ticks that are exactly one tick apart in price. It does not bridge gaps. If a candle has dominant bullish ticks at prices 100.00 and 100.50 but nothing at 100.25, those are two separate stacks of length 1 — not a stack of length 2 spanning a gap. This reflects the order-flow definition: a real concentration of aggression covers consecutive prices, not scattered ones. Bridging across gaps would produce false signals on candles with low liquidity at intermediate ticks.

Handling of Zero-Volume Ticks

Within a candle’s price range, some ticks may have traded contracts while others did not. Volumentum internally fills in any gaps with zero-volume placeholder ticks so the diagonal evaluator can correctly examine adjacent prices. The Ignore Zero Prints setting controls how these zero-volume ticks (and any naturally zero-on-one-side ticks) are treated: when on, ticks with zero on one side are skipped entirely; when off, they participate in the math, including the mathematical edge case where zero opposing volume is treated as the most extreme imbalance possible.

Closing Note

Volumentum is a microscope, not a compass. It shows you, with precision, where the aggressive participation in each candle occurred. It does not tell you which direction to trade. Used well, it adds a layer of resolution to chart reading that’s invisible without it — making it possible to see, after the fact, exactly why a level held or failed, and during the session, exactly where the largest hands have shown their cards.