The plain count of shares or contracts traded — it confirms how much conviction backs a move, but on its own it never says which way that move is headed.
Volume was printed on the ticker tape itself, decades before any of the calculated oscillators in this course existed.
Early tape readers like Richard Wyckoff built whole methods around reading volume alongside price action, well before charting software existed.
Volume bars became a default strip under nearly every price chart, in every era of charting technology since.
Serious use today always pairs volume with the price action it's confirming — never reads alone.
Each bar is the raw number of shares or contracts traded that period, often colored by whether the close was up or down — no cumulative running total, no averaging.
A breakout on volume well above the recent average suggests genuine participants stepped in behind the move, not just a thin, easily reversed print.
A huge volume bar describes size, not direction — the same heavy print can accompany a breakout up or a breakdown down, and volume alone never tells you which.
That break came on volume well above the recent average — genuine conviction, and the rally that followed held.
That cycle's final new high printed on noticeably lighter volume than the highs before it — a real warning sign that preceded the subsequent decline.
Price breaks above a well-known resistance level on volume roughly triple its 20-day average. A trader treats this as a strong signal. Reasonable?
Volume spikes to its highest level in months. A trader immediately buys, assuming heavy volume must mean an upside move is starting. Sound?
Price makes a marginal new high, but the volume behind it is noticeably lighter than the volume behind the prior highs. Worth noting?
Price above, volume below, watched tick by tick on the left — and the mark it leaves in the ledger on the right. A genuine heavy-volume breakout, a mirrored heavy-volume breakdown — and a thin breakout that quietly failed.
A breakout appears. Judge whether the volume behind it is genuinely heavy relative to the recent average — then call it: trust the break, or doubt it.
The classic error is reading a volume spike as a signal by itself. The discipline is mechanical: read what price did first, then use volume purely to judge whether real conviction backed that move.
Volume was on the tape before any of the calculated indicators in this course existed, and it still does exactly one honest job: telling you how much conviction showed up, never which way it's headed.
Price shows what happened. Volume shows how much it mattered.