UMR Orderflow Heads-up Display

A Sierra Chart heads-up display that combines FLOW, TAPE, PRICE, BOOK, PRESS, and STATE so you can read continuation, conflict, and absorption on one screen.

Most order-flow tools make you do the last step in your head.

You watch trade volume, trade count, price, DOM imbalance, DOM change pressure, and maybe a composite line. Then you still have to answer the only question that matters:

What is the market actually doing right now?

UMR Orderflow Heads-up Display is built to answer that question faster.

Instead of leaving you with five disconnected readings, it turns them into a compact Region 1 HUD with an optional market-state readout underneath. At a glance, you can see:

  • what the tape is doing
  • what price is doing
  • what the book is doing
  • whether the market is aligned, conflicting, absorbing, drifting, or fading
  • how long the current bullish or bearish directional bias has lasted

The Problem With Raw Order Flow

Most dashboards stop here:

FLOW   TAPE   PRICE   BOOK   PRESS
 +18    -11     -9     +22     +19

That is useful, but it still leaves you with mental work:

  • Are buyers actually winning?
  • Is this continuation?
  • Is this absorption?
  • Is price weak, or just lagging?
  • Should this read as neutral, conflicted, or still directional?

A flat average can make that worse:

BOOK   +22
PRESS  +19
TAPE   -11
PRICE   -9
FLOW   +18
--------------
AVG     +7.8

That average says “slightly bullish.”

The real read might be:

  • passive buyers are supporting
  • tape is still mixed
  • price is still lagging
  • shorts should be careful
  • this may be bullish absorption, not clean continuation

The average compresses structure into one number. UMR Orderflow Heads-up Display tries to keep the structure intact.

What The Study Shows

The HUD is built from six signals:

FLOW   TAPE   PRICE   BOOK   PRESS   STATE

Each circle answers a different question:

  • FLOW Trade volume pressure. Who is doing size?
  • TAPE Trade count pressure. Who is printing more often?
  • PRICE Last trade price versus rolling mean.
  • BOOK Current DOM imbalance.
  • PRESS Recent DOM change pressure from depth snapshot changes.
  • STATE The derived market regime.

The first five are the ingredients. STATE is the interpretation layer.

The Core Idea

This study does not treat every signal like an equal vote in a flat average.

It groups the market into three lenses:

              +------------------+
              |      STATE       |
              |  Market Regime   |
              +---------+--------+
                        ^
                        |
      +-----------------+-----------------+
      |                 |                 |
  Support          Aggression          Price Bias
  BOOK + PRESS     FLOW + TAPE         PRICE

That makes the read more useful in trader language:

  • Support What is the passive side of the book doing?
  • Aggression What is the active tape doing?
  • Price Bias Is price actually responding?

From there, STATE asks:

  • Are they aligned?
  • Are they fighting each other?
  • Is support absorbing weak prints?
  • Is price drifting without confirmation?
  • Is aggression fading?

That gives you real labels instead of vague cancellation.

How The Labels Work

The classifier reduces the market into:

  • Support: bullish / neutral / bearish
  • Aggression: bullish / neutral / bearish
  • Price: bullish / neutral / bearish

That creates 27 possible combinations.

Full continuation

Support    Bullish
Aggression Bullish
Price      Bullish
=> Bull Trend Agreement

This is the cleanest bullish state:

  • buyers are showing in the book
  • buyers are winning the tape
  • price is confirming

The bearish mirror is:

Bear Trend Agreement

Absorption

Support    Bullish
Aggression Bearish
Price      Bearish
=> Bullish Absorption

This is one of the most useful reads in the whole model:

  • passive support is bullish
  • active trading still looks bearish
  • price still looks bearish
  • the support layer is absorbing that weakness

That is not neutral. It is a specific condition.

The bearish mirror is:

Support    Bearish
Aggression Bullish
Price      Bullish
=> Bearish Absorption

Initiative

Support    Neutral
Aggression Bullish
Price      Bullish
=> Bull Initiative

Tape and price are leading, but the DOM is not strongly confirming yet.

Drift

Support    Neutral
Aggression Neutral
Price      Bullish
=> Price Lift

That is weak bullish drift. Price is up, but book and tape are not pushing with it.

The bearish mirror is:

Price Leak

Markets do not always move with perfect confirmation. These weaker states matter.

Why PRESS Matters

BOOK and PRESS are related, but they are not the same thing:

BOOK  = what the DOM looks like now
PRESS = how the DOM has been changing recently

Two books can look the same right now and still mean different things:

Case A
Bid depth: 800
Ask depth: 400
Recent change: stable

Case B
Bid depth: 800
Ask depth: 400
Recent change: bid just stacked quickly

BOOK sees both as bullish imbalance.

PRESS helps you separate:

  • stable support
  • active stacking
  • active pulling
  • fresh pressure shifts

That extra layer is one reason the study can call absorption more cleanly than a simpler HUD.

Why STATE Beats A Flat Composite

A flat composite often does this:

Bullish + Bullish + Bearish + Bearish + Bullish
-----------------------------------------------
                 near zero

That usually gets read as:

mixed, probably no edge

But many mixed markets are not random. They are structured conflict.

Example:

BOOK   Bullish
PRESS  Bullish
TAPE   Bearish
PRICE  Bearish
FLOW   Slight Bullish

A flat average drifts toward neutral.

The market-state model can say:

Support strong
Aggression mixed
Price weak
=> Bullish Absorption

That is much more actionable. It changes behavior:

  • avoid pressing shorts
  • wait for prints to confirm before chasing longs
  • expect reversal risk to rise

The point is not to force the market into bullish or bearish. The point is to stop throwing away structure.

How The Readout Is Structured

When Display Mode = HUD + STATE Summary, the text under the circles is split into three layers:

Bullish Absorption (18s)
Sup Bullish | Agg Bearish | Px Bearish
Passive support is absorbing bearish prints.

1. Headline

Short regime label. Examples:

  • Bull Trend Agreement
  • Bear Initiative
  • Price Lift
  • Bullish Absorption

2. Factor line

The raw ingredients behind the label:

Sup Bullish | Agg Bearish | Px Bearish

3. Narrative

A short plain-English line explaining the setup.

That is where the study becomes readable for a human, not just technically correct.

There is also a lighter mode:

Display Mode = HUD + STATE Headline

That gives you:

Bullish Absorption (18s)

without the factor line or narrative.

What The Timer Means

The timer in brackets does not track one exact headline string anymore.

It tracks how long the overall STATE direction has stayed:

  • bullish
  • bearish

So if the study rotates through several bullish sub-states, the timer keeps going. It only resets when:

  • bullish flips to bearish
  • bearish flips to bullish
  • the model returns to neutral or unavailable

That gives you regime persistence instead of headline persistence.

You can also see:

green headline, no timer
red headline, no timer

That is not a bug.

It means the label is weakly directional by name, but the final derived STATE score is still neutral overall.

How To Read It In Practice

Use a simple order:

1. Read STATE first

Start with the headline. That tells you the regime.

2. Read the factor line second

This tells you whether the regime comes from:

  • support
  • aggression
  • price

3. Use the circles for texture

The circles still matter because they show magnitude and activation.

Example:

Headline: Bullish Absorption (22s)
Detail:   Sup Bullish | Agg Bearish | Px Bearish

Circles:
FLOW   +8
TAPE  -14
PRICE -17
BOOK  +24
PRESS +19
STATE +21

That tells a richer story than the headline alone.

4. Use persistence to judge freshness

Bull Trend Agreement (3s)   -> fresh alignment
Bull Trend Agreement (47s)  -> persistent alignment

Fresh and persistent are not the same trade.

Where This Study Is Strongest

This study is strongest when you care about:

  • continuation versus absorption
  • passive support or resistance versus active aggression
  • whether price is confirming or lagging
  • reading conflict without flattening it into zero

It is less useful if you only want:

  • one momentum oscillator
  • a pure DOM tool
  • a pure tape tool

This is a synthesis study.

A Good Way To Deploy It

Best setup:

Instance 1 -> Region 1 -> HUD + STATE Summary
Instance 2 -> Region 2 -> Trace View Only

That gives you:

  • fast live regime reading in Region 1
  • history and shape in a lower panel

The HUD answers:

What is happening now?

The trace view answers:

How did we get here?

If you want only the circles and scores, use:

Display Mode = HUD Only