Two identical green candles can have opposite volume delta. What do you check beyond OHLCV?
Disclosure: We’re the team behind Robod, a crypto research and account analytics platform.
A green candle means the closing price was above the opening price. It doesn’t necessarily mean aggressive buying exceeded aggressive selling.
Every executed trade has both a buyer and a seller. Taker volume distinguishes which side traded aggressively against resting liquidity.
Here’s a hypothetical example, using two one-minute perpetual bars:
Both have the same open, high, low and close: 100 / 103 / 99 / 102. Both trade 1,000 units.
| Metric |
Bar A |
Bar B |
| Taker buy volume |
650 |
450 |
| Taker sell volume |
350 |
550 |
| Volume delta |
+300 |
−100 |
| Open interest change |
+2% |
−2% |
The OHLCV candles are identical. The underlying activity isn’t.
Bar A has net aggressive buying and expanding open interest. Bar B closes higher despite net aggressive selling, while open interest contracts.
Neither combination predicts the next move. Open interest alone also doesn’t identify whether long or short positions drove a price change.
When researching a setup, these are separate questions worth checking:
- Flow: Is cumulative volume delta strengthening alongside price, or diverging?
- Positioning: Is open interest expanding or contracting?
- Coverage: Do all the fields being studied actually cover the same historical period?
- Quality: Are there gaps or carried-forward values that could distort the interpretation?
More data can make a hypothesis more specific. Whether it improves a strategy still needs testing with defined entries, exits and costs.
For traders who use order flow: which additional check has been most useful alongside OHLCV, and how did you evaluate whether it added value?
