Derivatives

Taker buy/sell ratio

What share of the day's traded volume was started by an impatient buyer, willing to pay the price already sitting on the book.

Why it matters

In every trade there's somebody who was waiting with a resting order (maker) and somebody who crossed the spread to execute now (taker). This ratio measures the share of volume that came from the impatient buy side: 0.5 is balanced, above is net buy-side aggression, below sell-side. It's the only series on this site that measures urgency rather than price or quantity.

Build it yourself

Drag the day's total volume and the buyer-initiated share of it.

Ratio = Buyer-initiated volume ÷ Total volume
Taker buy ratio

If you drag buyer-initiated volume above total volume the result goes past 1, which is impossible: buyer-initiated volume is a PART of the total, not something separate.

Illustrative example numbers for practice — not real data.

How it's calculated, step by step

  1. For each daily BTCUSDT candle, Binance publishes two figures: total volume and how much of it was buyer-initiated.
  2. Ratio = buyer-initiated volume ÷ total volume. If volume is zero, nothing is stored.
Descriptive. There's a research result here worth telling in full. This DAILY version was tested as a signal on 2026-09-05 and came out worse than chance. The same variable was then tested HOURLY across 536,130 observations and there is information: an hour of unusually aggressive buying is followed by reversal over the next two hours, replicated across 14 of 14 assets and confirmed out of sample. The conclusion isn't that the variable is useless, it's that aggregating it to a whole day destroys the signal. And even hourly, the edge lives inside the spread: the out-of-sample break-even cost is 0.8 basis points against a real taker fee of 2-4. Shown here as context, not as a rule.

Chart

This is real Bitcoin data, computed from the blockchain — not the illustrative example above.

Data last updated on 2026-09-09.

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