The indicators of the MATE suite

Historical tick data from your provider. No Tick Replay needed: it loads its own tick series and classifies against the recorded bid/ask (exact by default; Tick Replay available as an optional mode).

Ticks Per Row, Display Mode (candle + footprint or footprint only), imbalance ratio & filter, alerts.

Every row is one price. On the delta side, the left number is selling into the bid and the right number is buying into the ask. Imbalances compare diagonally — buys at one price vs sells one tick below, because that is how the ladder actually fights — and the dominant cell lights up. Three or more stacked imbalances become a zone that extends forward as support/resistance; when it breaks, it flips into a trapped-traders zone: fuel for the other side. A dot on a cell marks a single print at or above your Big Print threshold.

In Data Series, keep your candles small — 1 or 2 (minute, range or volume) — so the footprint stays readable. There is no universal Ticks Per Row: it depends on your instrument AND your candle size — the bigger the candle, the more rows it stacks, so raise Ticks Per Row until the cells read comfortably.

Give the tick series a few seconds to load; on very long charts, reduce the days loaded.

Filled chip = absorption (the number inside = contracts it swallowed) · hollow chip = pulled wall (the size that vanished) · border color = side (blue defended from below, red from above) · green border = iceberg · a mark that fades = that level was later broken.

Check that your data subscription includes Level 2 — and remember the map starts painting from now, not from the past.

Each letter is one time bracket that visited that price (A the first, B the next…), so a long row means the market spent time there — acceptance. Singles — rows printed by a single bracket — mark where price crossed fast, without acceptance. A poor high/low, an extreme where two or more brackets stopped at the same row, is unfinished business that tends to get revisited. Naked POC/VPOC lines extend from past sessions until price finally touches them.

Merge Session Right (build composites), Remove Merging, Split Session At Letter (cuts exactly at the letter under your cursor), Unsplit Session, and Split/Unsplit Letters. Your merges and splits persist — they survive reloads and restarts.

Make sure the configured session matches your instrument's trading hours.

One bubble is one institutional execution at its true size — area proportional to volume, the exact number inside, color by aggressor side, and a golden ring on the largest event in sight. When big prints keep stacking at one price they build an accumulation level: its badge (“708 S54%”) reads 708 contracts, 54% of them sold — not just where size worked, but which side was doing it.

Raise or lower the threshold — it's always the first knob.

Each bar is that candle's tape speed; the live bar updates with every tick — it never waits for the close. Read the multiple, not the raw number: ×1.0 is that instrument's normal pace, higher multiples mean the tape is running hot, and the QUIET / NORMAL / FAST / EXTREME state says it at a glance. The first time you load it you'll see “calibrating…” for the first few candles: the indicator is learning that instrument's normal pace. That's expected, and it takes under a minute of active market.

With providers that supply historical tick data, the histogram arrives with the chart's entire past already drawn; if your connection doesn't offer it, the indicator itself tells you and builds from the moment you open the chart.

Volume profiles (value areas, POC), the delta tools and the Footprint — all in the suite. Together they reveal absorptions (price frozen, tape racing), dead levels (price frozen, tape slow) and the algo bursts that precede breakouts.

Each histogram bar is the net aggression of that candle — positive, market buys dominated; Delta % normalizes it by volume so a quiet candle can still show conviction. The CVD is the running total: the trend of aggression. When price makes a new extreme and the CVD refuses to follow, that move carried less aggression than it appears — the classic divergence (optional marks included).

The per-candle total matches NinjaTrader's native volume — compare them anytime.

One horizontal bar per price at the chart's edge — blue, net buying won at that price; dark red, net selling won; the longer the bar, the bigger the net fight. It answers who is winning at each price inside the window you anchored — which is why Anchor Mode matters: Session is today's whole story, Rolling only your last N minutes.

Rolling mode needs its first window minutes to fill.

Tick data.

Everything lives in the right-click menu — “Add Fixed Range Profile Here”, “Remove This Profile”, “Remove All Fixed Range Profiles”; drag the edges to move or stretch; Delta Placement and projected levels.

The profile is the auction of only the bars you framed. Its POC is where that episode did most of its business (the fight's center of gravity), the value area is where it was accepted, and the delta side shows who was paying at each row. Frame an impulse or a battle zone and the shape tends to answer who won it.

Your ranges auto-save per instrument — they survive reloads and restarts.

One profile is one auction at your chosen scale. Its POC is that window's fairest price; VAH/VAL frame where roughly 70% of its business happened. The same price can be expensive for the day and cheap for the week — that is exactly why running two (one per border) and letting the scales disagree is so informative.

Add it twice — one per panel edge — to face two windows off against each other.

The center line is the average price actually paid in the session, weighted by volume — the market's running fair price. The bands measure how stretched price is from that average, in deviations or quarter-range. Prior Values freeze the previous period's VWAP and bands on today's chart: reference levels many desks benchmark against, which is why they tend to get tested.

Check session hours and time zone — a VWAP is only as good as its session definition.

Every line carries its label on the chart, and each one is born at its exact minute — the overnight range completes at the open, the IB after its first minutes, and so on. They matter because they are the references the whole market watches: the first touch of a fresh level tends to be the most informative, and that is exactly what the alerts watch.

It hasn't been defined yet — every level is born at its exact time. Not a bug: honesty.

A small text line on your chart — gray on black, everything healthy; amber, a sustained warning above your thresholds; dark red, a real problem. It watches three things by pure listening: your data feed's delay, your order round-trip (submit to ack) and NinjaTrader's own UI thread. It never touches your orders — and if you never notice it, everything is fine.

Each row compares today against your instrument's own normal — current value, typical value and percent of typical — built from your lookback (median or mean, your choice). That turns raw numbers into context: an Initial Balance at 150% of typical is a very different day from one at 60%.

That's deliberate — not enough complete sessions yet for an honest average.