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Liquidity & Order BooksIntermediate · 7 min read

Order-book basics: depth, spread and imbalance

The order book is the live list of resting buy (bid) and sell (ask) orders at each price level. Depth is how much size sits at each level; spread is the gap between the best bid and best ask — a wider spread usually means thinner, less liquid conditions.

Order-book imbalance compares total bid depth to total ask depth near the current price. A heavy bid imbalance suggests more resting buy pressure than sell pressure at that moment — useful context, but not a signal on its own, since a large resting order can be pulled instantly.

AI NinjaTrader pulls genuine Kraken order-book snapshots rather than estimating this from candles — when a snapshot isn't fresh, liquidity evidence is marked unavailable rather than guessed.

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