The path to the cluster chart
You open Footprint for the first time — and get a mess. Numbers, colors, everything flickering, and you can't make out the absorption or the imbalance I was just talking about. Sound familiar? I closed my first cluster chart within a minute and decided it wasn't for me.
It's not you, and it's not the tool. By default Footprint dumps everything on you at once, and for a start you only need a little. But before we configure anything, let's figure out how to even get there — a four-step route from the launched platform to a bar broken down into levels.
First — open a chart. In ATAS's main window, click the Chart button. This opens the instrument manager: favorites marked with a star on the left, categories next to it — US and European futures, stocks, crypto, indices. Pick an instrument. On the free plan, a few instruments are available with delayed data — they have a small blue clock icon next to them, which is fine, there's enough data for learning purposes.
Second — set a period. The top bar has a timeframe menu: standard minutes, hours, days, plus non-standard types — by volume, by delta, tick-based, range. For a start, use the familiar 5-minute — it shows a bar's anatomy well.
Third — switch the display mode to clusters. In ATAS, Footprint isn't a separate indicator — it's a way to show the same candle in an alternative view. There are two ways to do it: switch the display mode from "candles" to "clusters," or simply stretch the candles out horizontally — at a wide enough scale, a candle expands into a cluster on its own, and a quick-control panel appears on the left.
Fourth — pick a mode on the panel on the left. We'll be using Bid Ask mode — it shows both buyers and sellers. From the same panel you can also pick pure delta bias (if the goal is to focus on which side won each price level) or Volume mode (if what matters is seeing zones where trading activity built up and held price).
That's it — you're on the cluster chart. Now for the details — two questions: how to make a cluster readable, and how to make imbalance and absorption jump out at you.
Settings: making the cluster readable
Footprint has dozens of settings, but for now you only need a few. Click the chart settings icon → the Footprint tab: everything related to clusters lives there.
Before we start — an important note. If the instrument is volatile (for example, BTCUSDT, GC, or NQ had a high concentration of price levels per candle at the time this lesson was written), there's a risk of ending up with an unreadable picture.
This happens for two reasons: high volatility splits volume across many price levels (the cluster fills up with lots of zeros and small values), and there end up being so many levels that volume gets smeared across the candle.
The fix is the price scale setting, in the top right corner. In simple terms, you're merging neighboring price levels and adding up their volumes, bringing the number of levels per candle down to something readable. Auto scale is on by default; if your candle looks roughly like the example above, bump up the scale by a few units (or by tens for highly volatile instruments like BTCUSDT).
Target: aim for a scale where most candles show between 5 and 20 price levels — that's a comfortable range for cluster analysis.
Imbalance — ATAS will highlight it for you
Next up is exactly what we came here for. In the last lesson we covered two patterns: imbalance and absorption. Let's set up the chart so each one takes just a couple of seconds to spot. Starting with imbalance — ATAS can highlight it automatically.
Imbalance is enabled in the same cluster settings. The logic behind the highlighting: ATAS compares volumes not within a single row, but diagonally — the bid of one level against the ask of the neighboring one. If one side's excess is bigger than a set threshold, the level gets highlighted. You set the threshold yourself. Set it to 0% and it'll highlight almost everything, which is useless.
A working starting point is around 300%, meaning roughly a three-to-one excess (the same "three to five times" from the last lesson); a reasonable configuration range is roughly 150% to 400%. The higher the threshold, the rarer and stricter the selection.
As a helper tool, you can add the Stacked Imbalance indicator: in the settings you combine several levels into a range and set an imbalance threshold — horizontal levels will appear on the chart at spots with heavy aggression.
And here's the main reason imbalance is useful at all: when highlighted levels stack up, several in a row, that's an imbalance stack — the very trace of a strong, aggressive push we talked about. A single highlighted level is noise; a stack is a zone of interest.
Absorption — your eye plus two helpers
Absorption is trickier, and I'll be honest: there's no separate "highlight absorption" checkbox in Footprint by default, the way there is for imbalance. And that makes sense: imbalance is just a numeric excess, easy for the software to calculate. Absorption is volume against a price that's holding — that requires the context of a bar, which for now you're reading with your own eyes.
So the basic way to catch absorption is your eye, plus the criterion from the last lesson: look for a row where one side has a big number (hit hard at market) and the price didn't move off that level. To make those heavy levels jump out on their own, there are two helpers in the cluster settings.
The first is max-level outlining: ATAS marks the row with the largest volume in the bar with its own frame, and the absorber is often sitting right there.
The second is a relative volume filter: you highlight only levels where volume is above a set percentage of the bar's maximum, so weak rows stop pulling your attention. In the cluster settings, near the bottom, there's a Filters group — add a filter, pick Relative Volume, % of max.vol from the dropdown, and set the threshold around 70% as a starting point — this helps hide lower-volume levels and focus attention on the strongest ones.
Coming up: Footprint is set up now, and you can read a single bar's anatomy. But a single bar is a microscope: it shows what's inside a candle, but not where you stand in the market overall — whether price is lingering here or flying through, where it traded willingly yesterday and a week ago. For that you need a second tool, one that doesn't look inside a bar but at how volume is distributed across all prices at once. That's Volume Profile — and that's where the next lesson begins.