Order flow
The stream of executed buy and sell orders hitting the market. Reading order flow means watching who is trading aggressively — market buyers lifting offers versus market sellers hitting bids — rather than just where price is.
The market-structure glossary.
Short, plain-English definitions of the terms Glimpse uses to read the Bitcoin market. Every read on the free Market OS is built from these.
CVD (cumulative volume delta)
A running total of aggressive buy volume minus aggressive sell volume. Rising CVD means market buyers are dominating; falling CVD means sellers are. Divergences between CVD and price can hint that a move is running out of fuel.
Taker flow
Trades from takers — participants who cross the spread and execute immediately against resting orders, paying the taker fee. Taker flow is the aggressive side of the book, and its balance is what CVD accumulates.
Open interest
The total number of derivative contracts currently open and not yet closed or settled. Rising open interest means new money is entering positions; falling open interest means positions are being closed. Read alongside price, it distinguishes fresh trends from short-covering.
Funding rate
A periodic payment exchanged between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract to keep its price tethered to spot. Positive funding means longs pay shorts (crowded longs); negative funding means shorts pay longs. Extreme funding often marks crowded positioning.
Liquidation
The forced closure of a leveraged position when its margin can no longer cover losses. The exchange closes the position at market, which can accelerate a move as cascading liquidations add one-directional pressure.
Liquidation map
A model estimate of the price levels where clusters of leveraged positions could be force-closed, built from public candle volume and open interest across leverage tiers. It is not real exchange liquidation orders — exchanges do not publish those. See the liquidation map methodology.
Order book depth
The quantity of resting limit orders stacked at each price level on the bid and ask sides. Deeper books absorb larger orders with less price movement; thin books slip further. Depth shows where liquidity sits, not where price must go.
Point of control (POC)
The price level with the highest traded volume over a chosen period — the fattest part of the volume profile. It marks where the most business was done and often acts as a magnet or a pivot for future price.
Value area
The price range, centered on the point of control, that contains roughly 70% of a period's traded volume. Price inside the value area is considered accepted; price outside it is being tested and may revert or extend.
Price structure
The arrangement of highs, lows, support, and resistance that describes how price is behaving — trending, ranging, or breaking. Structure is the frame the other reads (flow, funding, liquidations) are interpreted against.
Trade-only API key
An exchange API key granted permission to place and close orders and read positions, but not to withdraw or transfer funds. It is how Glimpse executes without ever being able to move a user’s money. See security.
Risk gate
The decision layer that sits between a market read and execution, deciding whether a setup clears the bar to become a trade and sizing the risk if it does. In Glimpse it is the “Gate” step of the desk loop — see the method.
Drawdown
The peak-to-trough decline of an account or equity curve, usually shown as a percentage. Max drawdown is the worst such decline over the record and is a truer measure of pain than headline return, since two systems with the same return can have very different drawdowns.
Expectancy
The average result you can expect per trade, combining win rate with the size of wins and losses. A high win rate can still have negative expectancy if the losses are larger than the wins — which is why the track record pairs win rate with net result, drawdown, and sample size.
See these reads arranged on one screen in the free Market OS, or put the numbers to work with the free crypto futures calculators. General information, not investment advice.