Education · Stage 9 · 04
The six DOM columns
A ladder with six columns beside it, each answering one question about the price in front of you. This is a working layout rather than a theory — and one of the six answers the problem the order book article deliberately left open: how to tell defending from bluffing.
Mak · 3 min read · Stage 9, article 4 of 5
The six
1 · Leg-to-leg delta
Net aggression accumulated from one swing to the next, reset at each turn. The value in the middle of a leg matters far less than how each leg compares with the one before it.
Legs that need more and more aggression to cover the same ground are describing something different from legs that need less. That is the delta article, applied to structure instead of to bars.
2 · Profile beside the ladder
The previous stage, in a narrow strip: fat prices and thin ones, right next to where price currently is. Its job here is to answer «has this price mattered before?» without switching windows.
3 · Price tick by tick
The tape, aligned to the ladder. What is printing at each price, in what size, and how fast. Small clips arriving repeatedly at the same price while size keeps reappearing is the signature the absorption article described.
4 · Resting liquidity
The visible book, several levels deep, and the thing to read is its shape: symmetrical, skewed to one side, clustered at a single price, or empty. A single fat cluster a few ticks away is a different market from evenly spread size.
5 · The pole stack — the important one
This column does not show what is resting. It shows the change: whether orders are being added at a price or removed from it, as it happens.
Which matters because of exactly what the order book article warned about — displayed size is not commitment, and a wall can vanish without a single trade. This column is the difference:
- Size growing as price approaches
- Somebody is adding orders while price comes towards them. They are not avoiding being filled — they want to be. That is a level being defended with money.
- Size shrinking as price approaches
- Orders are being pulled before price arrives. Whatever that size was for, it was not for trading here, and the «support» on the ladder is about to stop existing.
Two identical-looking numbers on the ladder, two opposite situations, separated by this column alone. It is the single most useful thing in the layout.
6 · At bid / at ask
Executed volume split by which side crossed, running for the current period. The delta article in miniature, live, at the level you are watching.
Reading all six together
The playbook this site is built on is clear about how to use them, and the useful part is not the case where everything agrees:
When they all point the same way at a level, that is the strongest evidence this layout can produce. When two or three conflict, the reading is «stand aside and wait».
That second sentence is the one worth keeping. Six windows will rarely agree completely, and a method that only produces an answer when they do is a method that produces very few answers — which is the correct number for most days.
What none of the six do, individually or together, is tell you what happens next. They tell you, in unusual detail, what is happening now at one price. That has been the honest limit of every instrument in this path, and it does not change by adding a sixth column.