Heikin-Ashi vs Footprint Charts
Heikin-ashi averages each bar with the previous one, so the values shown are calculated rather than traded and the intrabar detail is gone entirely. A footprint chart shows the volume at every price inside the bar and which side was the aggressor, keeping all of that detail.
These are the two extremes of how much a chart can tell you about a single bar. One reduces the bar to a smoothed color; the other expands it into a column of prices and volumes. Everything else follows from that.
What each one is
Heikin-ashi averages each bar’s values with the previous bar’s. The close is an average of the bar’s four prices and the open is the midpoint of the previous heikin-ashi bar, so neither is a traded price. Heikin-Ashi covers the formulas.
A footprint chart shows the volume traded at each price inside the bar, split by whether each trade hit the bid or lifted the ask. Footprint charts covers how to read one, and candlesticks covers the plain bar both depart from.
One discards and the other retains. Whereas heikin-ashi replaces four real numbers with two calculated ones, a footprint keeps every trade that made those four numbers, which is a difference of several orders of magnitude in what is on screen.
Where they differ
How much survives the drawing. A heikin-ashi bar is a body and a color. A footprint bar is a column of price levels with two volume figures beside each, so one bar of the second carries more data than a screen of the first.
Whether the numbers are real. Every figure on a footprint is an observed trade. On heikin-ashi the open never happened and the close is an average, so a level taken from one is a level that did not exist.
Where each works. Heikin-ashi needs only four prices, so it runs on every instrument and every feed. A footprint needs time-and-sales with trade direction, which means futures or listed stocks, and it does not exist on spot foreign exchange in any honest form.
What each does to your judgment. Heikin-ashi makes it easier to sit still, because the bars that would have frightened you are hidden. A footprint makes it harder, because there is enough detail to support a story about every single bar.
Where they agree
Both are backward-looking. Neither predicts anything, and the extra resolution on one of them does not change that.
Neither tells you whether a trend exists. Whether the market alternates or persists is a property of the traded prices themselves, and no drawing convention of any kind alters it.
Both cost the same to trade — the spread and commission are set by the market and the broker, not by how the bars are drawn.
And both are variations on the same underlying candle, so whatever the market did is unchanged underneath either.
Which one to use: Heikin-Ashi or Footprint Charts?
Run heikin-ashi when your mistake is exiting good trends too early. Hiding the bars that trigger that reaction is a legitimate fix for a behavioral problem, and it costs you nothing you were using well.
Run a footprint when your mistake is misreading what happens at a level. If you keep getting caught by breakouts that were never supported, the intrabar detail is the only thing on a chart that would have told you.
Run heikin-ashi if you cannot get real tape data. On any instrument without a consolidated tape it is the honest choice, because a footprint there is precise numbers about a sample you did not select.
And never take a price from heikin-ashi in either case. Orders need traded numbers, and this chart type does not have them.
Why the extremes fail in opposite ways
Because too little information invites overconfidence and too much invites invention. A smoothed chart looks decisive when the market is not, and a footprint supplies enough numbers to justify whatever you already believed about the bar.
And because thin conditions break both. A wide bar on nothing is smoothed into a confident color by one and dissected into meaningless detail by the other, when the true reading is simply that nobody was there.
The original data
Heikin-ashi appears in 74 titles at a median of 20,370 views across 59 channels. Footprint charts appear in 17, at a median of 22,330 across 15.
Seventeen footprint videos from fifteen channels — barely more than one each. Against heikin-ashi’s 74 videos at about the same median audience. The tool that is free and looks better in a thumbnail wins the coverage; the one behind a paid data feed holds a similar audience per video on a fraction of the uploads, whichever carries more information.
On the chart above only one of them can answer. The smoothed bar has already discarded the evidence, and that is the trade you make when you choose it.
When it fails
The characteristic failure is picking the chart that looks most professional rather than the one that addresses your actual error. A footprint on a swing trader’s screen is a paid subscription supplying intrabar detail that will be irrelevant by the time the position is decided, and it invites reading a story into every bar. Heikin-ashi on the screen of somebody who keeps entering breakouts that fail hides precisely the alternation that would have warned them. Both are then blamed for results that came from choosing a tool against a problem it does not touch.
A second failure is placing orders off heikin-ashi values, where the open never traded.
A third is drawing a footprint on spot foreign exchange, where the aggressor side is inferred rather than reported and the display gives no sign of it.
A fourth is treating a long heikin-ashi color run as strength, when run length is a property of the smoothing.
And a fifth is abandoning plain candlesticks entirely, which leaves no real prices anywhere on the screen.
Related
Heikin-Ashi covers the averaging formulas. Footprint charts covers the intrabar detail and the data it requires. And candlesticks covers the plain bar both are built from.
One of these makes a decision for you by discarding the evidence, and the other hands you all the evidence and no decision. Most people would be better served by whichever one matches the mistake they actually make, rather than by whichever looks more professional.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.