LTF Volume Microburst Bubbles : Reading Continuation and Reversal From Volume Bubbles

What Exactly Is “LTF Volume Microburst Bubbles”?

You’ve had the moment: you’re scrolling a chart and one candle traded an absurd amount. What a standard volume bar won’t tell you is when inside that candle the volume hit, and which way it was pushing. Volume that got sold into with a long upper wick and volume that ripped straight off the lows look completely identical on the histogram.

“LTF Volume Microburst Bubbles” is the tool that breaks that open. It splits each candle on your chart into shorter-timeframe candles and pulls out only the moments where volume ran well above its normal level. From there it works out whether that burst — the microburst — was buy-side or sell-side, and drops a bubble onto the price chart.

The whole idea is catching the short bursts of genuinely aggressive trading happening inside a single candle.

What You Actually See on the Chart

There’s a lot going on once it loads. Every element has a clear job though, so it stops feeling busy the moment you’ve sorted them out. Let’s start with a map of where everything sits.

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What "LTF Volume Microburst Bubbles" Draws on Your Chart

Bubbles and levels plot on the price chart, the score plots below. They are linked, showing the same candle in two different ways.

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The price chart and the lower pane are showing the same candles in two different forms. Look straight down from any bubble and you’ll always find a score column. Here’s what each element means.

Element	Where	What it means
Bubbles (circular markers)	Price chart	A volume burst fired inside that candle. Green means buyers on top, red means sellers
Number inside the bubble	Price chart	Total volume of the spikes that qualified (shown as K, M or B)
Horizontal levels	Price chart	Drawn from the low (bullish) or the high (bearish) of the candle where the burst started
Coloured candles	Price chart	Candles where the score reached the signal threshold get painted in
Score columns	Lower pane	The Microburst Score. Positive is buyer dominance, negative is seller dominance
Triangles	Lower pane	Marks the score reaching the signal threshold
Yellow diamonds	Lower pane	Flags extreme volume at 5x the baseline or more
Faint background shading	Lower pane	That candle contains a burst. The more concentrated it is, the stronger the shade

Bubble Size and Bubble Shade Mean Two Different Things

This was the part I found most interesting. Size and colour depth carry separate pieces of information.

Size is about how much volume came through. More precisely, it measures the burst volume against the average lower-timeframe volume inside that candle and scales up in steps. When several times the usual size floods in at once, you get a big, hard-to-miss bubble.

Colour depth, on the other hand, is about score strength. Reach the Signal Threshold and you get the full, vivid colour; sit around 25% of it and the bubble comes out dark and muted. So a big but washed-out bubble means plenty of volume traded, but it was fighting itself. A small but vivid bubble is the opposite — less size, but cleanly one-directional.

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Bubble Size and Bubble Shade Are Two Different Things

Two green bubbles can be saying completely different things depending on their size and shade.

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Read those two axes together and bubbles that look similar can mean completely different things. Watch out for the big-but-faint type like ③ in particular. At first glance it looks like a strong signal.

Hover a Bubble and You Get the Full Breakdown

This is one you lose out on if nobody tells you. Hovering over a bubble brings up the details of that burst: whether buyers or sellers dominated, the score itself, what percentage of the signal threshold it reached, how many lower-timeframe candles qualified as spikes, the highest volume multiple recorded, the total burst volume, and the concentration.

It’s where you find out whether a burst came from one single spike or was spread across five of them, which matters a lot when you’re judging how much a signal is worth. I check this on anything that looks interesting.

How a Microburst Gets Detected

Knowing why it behaves the way it does lets you judge signal reliability for yourself. Skipping the heavy stuff, here’s the flow.

1Split the current candle into shorter candles

With Auto Lower Timeframe enabled, the timeframe it pulls from is chosen off your chart timeframe. Here’s how it maps out.

Chart timeframe	Lower timeframe used
1 minute	10 seconds
5 minutes	1 minute
15 minutes	3 minutes
1 hour	15 minutes
4 hours	1 hour
Daily	4 hours
Weekly / Monthly	4 hours (when at least one session is enabled)

Broadly, it’s cutting each candle into four to six pieces. That’s enough granularity to judge whether a burst happened or not.

2Compare each one against “normal” volume

Every lower-timeframe candle gets measured against a baseline of what normal volume looks like. That baseline is a smoothed average over the period set in Volume Baseline, which defaults to 50. The key part is that it judges on the gap from normal for that symbol and that time of day, not on raw volume size. That’s exactly why it feels the same whether you’re on a heavily traded pair or a quiet one.

3Only spikes clearing both filters get counted

Here’s where it separates itself from a plain volume-spike detector. To qualify, a candle has to tick both boxes.

1. Volume at or above Spike Threshold times the baseline (2.5x by default)
2. The body of that lower-timeframe candle covering at least Min Body Efficiency (0.10 by default) of its full high-to-low range

That second filter earns its keep. Candles where volume exploded but price got rejected straight back with a long wick are treated as directionless and thrown out. In practice it strips out a decent chunk of the “huge volume, went nowhere” noise.

Here are steps 1 to 3 in one picture, opening up the inside of a single 5-minute candle. This is the 1-minute view the indicator works from internally.

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One Candle, Split Into Lower-Timeframe Candles and Filtered Twice

What you see here are the 1-minute candles the indicator looks at internally. Each group of five between the dotted lines equals one candle on a 5-minute chart.

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Look at the last group on the right. Three candles clear the threshold line, but only two are counted as bursts. The last one has plenty of volume, but its body is under 10% of its range and price went nowhere, so it gets thrown out.

4Score it on directional bias and concentration

Qualifying spikes get sorted into buy-side and sell-side, and the imbalance between them is measured. What makes it interesting is that concentration is layered on top of that.

Bursts packed into one or two standout candles score higher than the same size spread thinly across many. Orders slammed in all at once get weighted more heavily than a slow, grinding bid.

Flip that around and you get the other case. When buy and sell bursts cancel each other out inside the same candle, the score stays near zero no matter how much volume traded. Heavy trading with a washed-out bubble simply means both sides were slugging it out.

On Default Settings, There Are Hours Where Nothing Fires

This is the single most important thing to know about running “LTF Volume Microburst Bubbles”, so it gets its own section.

There’s a session filter built into it, and out of the box only London and New York are switched on. Sydney and Tokyo are off.

Volume trading outside an enabled session is excluded from the calculation entirely. Load it onto a Bitcoin chart on defaults and a huge Asian-session volume burst produces exactly zero bubbles. That’s what’s behind the “why is nothing showing up in the morning” thing.

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On Defaults, Bursts Outside the Enabled Sessions Are Ignored

The shaded windows are the London and New York sessions, the two enabled by default.

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The big red candle on the far left clearly traded far more than the candles around it. It still gets no bubble, simply because that time window isn’t part of the calculation at all. The indicator isn’t broken.

Worth knowing as well: when sessions are enabled, each one keeps its own separate baseline. It’s quietly smart, because it stops naturally thin Asian-session volume from being measured against busy New York activity. Everything gets judged as “unusual for this time of day”.

Working With the Burst Levels

The auto-drawn levels are every bit as useful as the bubbles themselves.

A bullish burst that has just started gets a green line from that candle’s low; a bearish one gets a red line from the high. While bursts keep firing back to back, no new line is added — it’s always drawn from the first candle of the sequence. On top of that, a new line in the same direction won’t be drawn until New Level Cooldown (15 bars by default) has passed.

From there, the line keeps extending to the right until a close breaks through it (below it, in the case of a green line). Once that happens the extension stops and the level has done its job. It stays visible on the chart, but a line that’s stopped growing is a price area that has already been taken out.

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How a Burst Level Is Drawn and When It Retires

A level starts from the first candle of a burst and keeps extending right until a close breaks it.

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The use case is simple enough: while price is holding above a green line that’s still extending, that area is being respected as support. Whether it actually holds a pullback is a mixed bag — I’ve watched it work cleanly and I’ve watched price slice straight through. Realistically, don’t lean on it alone, and prioritise the ones that line up with levels you’d have drawn yourself anyway.

Where It Earns Its Place in Live Trading

Confirming Trend Continuation

The most natural use of all. When a pullback in an uptrend ends and price starts pushing again, a large, deeply coloured bullish bubble tells you real money is behind the move. It gives you a way to separate a weak bounce that sellers are fading from one that’s getting genuine fresh buying.

Same story on a range break. If price clears the top and no bullish bubble prints while the score stays flat, there’s a good chance you’re looking at a break on thin participation. I’ve dodged a few fakeouts on exactly that read, so as a breakout filter it’s genuinely strong.

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A Breakout With a Bubble vs One Without

Two breaks of the same range high can play out very differently depending on whether buying actually burst inside the candle.

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What matters is whether the breakout candle itself carries a bubble. A bubble that shows up a few bars after the break is often just late buyers chasing a move that already happened, so I don’t give it the same weight.

Questioning a Move That’s Gone Too Far

A violent bearish bubble at the tail end of a long grind higher. A violent bullish bubble at the bottom of a flush. Those can be the first sign of money arriving from the other direction.

That said, a bubble on its own can’t tell continuation from reversal. The author says as much, and I’d agree. It only works as a reversal read once you take location into account — recent swing highs and lows, support and resistance. A big bubble printed in the middle of nowhere is often just trades clustering.

Treat the Yellow Diamonds as Their Own Signal

The yellow diamonds in the lower pane fire when lower-timeframe volume reaches 5x the baseline or more. That 5x figure is fixed and isn’t exposed in the settings.

It’s evaluated independently of the score and the signal threshold, so you’ll sometimes get a diamond while the score stays low. That’s abnormal volume hitting from both directions at once, and it tends to show up right before or right after violent moves. I treat it as its own separate read on volatility expanding.

Which Trading Styles Suit It

Style	Fit	Notes
Scalping	Excellent	Ideal on 5m–15m for catching instant bursts of flow
Day trading	Excellent	15m–1H. Meshes well with session-based analysis
Swing trading	Good	Works on 4H–daily, though signals thin out
Position trading	Limited	On weekly and above the lower-timeframe data gets too coarse to add much

A Closer Look at the Settings

Detection settings

Spike Threshold is the first dial to touch. The 2.5 default is fairly relaxed, and choppy conditions turn into a wall of bubbles. When Bitcoin is swinging hard, pushing it to around 3.0 leaves only the bursts that actually stand out. Quiet market and no bubbles at all? Drop it to around 2.0 instead.

The 0.10 default on Min Body Efficiency is very permissive. Anything with a body worth 10% of its range gets through, so wick-heavy conditions let noise in. If you only want clean directional bursts, lifting it to around 0.20 makes a noticeable difference. Push it too far, though, and the wild candles that print during fast moves all get filtered out — which is exactly when you want to see them — so I’d stay under 0.3.

Shortening Volume Baseline makes it accept recent heavy activity as normal much faster. The knock-on effect is that spikes stop registering through the back half of a sustained volume build, so if you’re tracking continued inflow, keeping it near the default of 50 is the safer call.

Display settings

The 2000-bar default on Max Level Age is fine on a daily chart, but very long on 5m or 15m. If old lines hanging around forever bothers you, dropping it to somewhere between 300 and 800 cleans the chart right up.

Setups by use case

Goal	Direction to take
Faster reads for scalping	Spike Threshold 2.0, Signal Threshold 30, Volume Baseline 30
Cutting noise, keeping only the best	Spike Threshold 3.0–3.5, Min Body Efficiency 0.20, Signal Threshold 45
Crypto around the clock	All four sessions off (turning them all on does not give you 24-hour coverage), everything else tuned from defaults
US cash session only	New York only, Session Time Zone on Market Local
Swing trading, big inflows only	4H and above, Spike Threshold 3.0, Max Level Age left long

Strengths and Weaknesses

Things to Know Before You Rely on It

Values Move While the Candle Is Live

This one is baked into how it works. On the candle currently forming, lower-timeframe data keeps stacking up, so the score shifts as the candle develops. A signal can clear the threshold mid-candle and then be gone by the time it closes.

Closed candles, on the other hand, never get re-evaluated after the fact. Nothing shifts position, and past bubbles don’t vanish or appear later on. What can happen is the chart running out of lower-timeframe data — scroll far enough into the past and the display simply stops.

Bubbles Are a Record, Not a Forecast

A big bubble doesn’t mean price goes that way. All it shows is trading that has already happened. A large bearish bubble partway through a flush is evidence of capitulation — and it might equally be the point where the selling runs dry.

I don’t take entries off this alone. Confirming trend direction, or adding an “is there actual money behind this” layer on top of levels and moving averages you already trust, is where it makes the most sense to me.

You’re at the Mercy of the Volume Data

True of any volume tool, but whatever volume data your exchange or symbol reports feeds straight into the output. Crypto volume differs exchange to exchange, and some markets — FX being the obvious one — report tick counts rather than traded size. Even on Bitcoin, switching the exchange you’re charting changes how the bubbles come out.

Pairing It With Other Indicators

Pair with	What you get
Moving averages (200 EMA and similar)	Lock in trend direction and only take bubbles pointing with it
Horizontal levels and pivots	Filtering to bubbles at key prices sharpens the reversal reads
Oscillators like RSI	Treat opposing bubbles at overbought or oversold levels as early reversal clues
ATR	Check whether volatility is expanding to judge how much weight a bubble deserves
A standard volume indicator	Compare total candle volume against the burst volume inside it

The combination I liked most is with a moving average. Once trend direction is settled, counter-trend bubbles can be dismissed as temporary bounces and only the aligned ones get used as continuation evidence. It simplifies the decision enormously.

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Let a Moving Average Set the Direction, Then Only Take Bubbles With It

While price holds above the EMA, only bubbles pointing up count toward the decision.

• EMA50

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On the right side of the figure, two sell bubbles print back to back near the highs. Taken on their own, that looks like a possible top. But price never loses the EMA, and the buy bubble that follows kicks off a fresh high, so those sell bubbles read as profit-taking on a dip. If a sell bubble came with price breaking below the EMA, that’s when I’d start questioning the trend.

Getting It Set Up

1Add the indicator

Open the Indicators menu at the top of your TradingView chart, search for “LTF Volume Microburst Bubbles” and add it. You’re good if a score pane appears below and bubbles plus levels show up on the price chart.

2Match the session settings to what you trade

Do this before anything else. All four off for crypto, New York only for US equities, and so on down the list.

3Dial in how many bubbles you get

Too many bubbles, raise Spike Threshold; too few, lower it. On whatever timeframe you normally watch, landing somewhere between a handful and a dozen or so per day tends to be the workable range.

4Scroll back and see how it behaved

Before you trade off it, go back through past pumps and flushes and see how the bubbles printed. Getting a feel for what counts as abnormal on your own symbol makes live decisions dramatically easier.

Overall Verdict

“LTF Volume Microburst Bubbles” shows volume as where, which way and how concentrated, rather than simply how much. It surfaces information a standard volume histogram will never give you, so anyone looking to take volume analysis a step further will get a lot out of it.

What I rate most is the two-channel design — size and shade carrying different information — along with the hover breakdown. Once you can read “big but faint means both sides were fighting”, the chart genuinely looks different.

The shame is the trap sitting in the defaults, where entire sessions produce nothing and people may write it off as broken without ever finding out why. Check the session settings the moment you load it. That’s the one thing not to skip.

It isn’t a standalone trading system, but as a way of adding “is money really moving here” to analysis you already do, it’s very good indeed. If you’re trying to avoid breakout fakeouts, or want to know whether a bounce off a dip is the real thing, it’s well worth a look.