dom ladder
A standard order book is a snapshot: what size sits at each price right now. It does not tell you what just disappeared, what just appeared, or how fast. DOM V2 builds the column for that — book deltas, classified prints and multi-timeframe value, live — and draws the call wall and the put wall through the ladder, so the level and the liquidity at the level are one picture.
The problem
By the time you see the print on the tape, the participant who made the decision moved a second or two ago. What matters is the change: the size that was pulled before price got there, the size stacked in behind it.
Order-flow platforms show the ladder; positioning services show the wall. When price reaches the call wall you want to see the absorption on the ladder at the same moment, not in a second window.
A depth ladder is the most information-dense surface in trading, and it is why many traders never use one. It should be able to tell you what it sees.
What Sharpnel does
The column other ladders forgot. It visualizes what is being pulled out of the book and what is being stacked in, so a bid that disappears before price arrives reads differently from a bid that holds.
Prints are classified by aggressor side, the tape is reconstructed rather than dumped, and the value area from more than one timeframe sits on the ladder as persistent context lines that survive the scroll.
The call wall, the put wall and the gamma flip are drawn through the ladder at their live prices, recomputed about every 60 seconds. When price gets to a wall, the ladder is already showing you what sits there.
Footprint V2 splits every candle into bid and ask volume per price with imbalance colouring, a delta profile and absorption detection. Pharos, the terminal's voice, says when bids outweigh offers at a level, or when it is the third push into the wall without follow-through — and says nothing when nothing is happening.
| The job | A standard DOM | Sharpnel DOM V2 |
|---|---|---|
| Liquidity | Size at each price, right now | Size, plus what is being pulled and stacked, live |
| The dealer walls | In another tool | Drawn through the ladder, recomputed intraday |
| Context | Scrolls away | Persistent value-area and VWAP lines through the whole ladder |
| When bids outweigh offers at the wall | You notice, or you don't | The terminal says so |
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