Methodology & sources

How this material is written, what gets a number attached to it, and what does not.

Three labels, applied to every claim

Verified — traced to a primary source: an exchange specification, a platform's own documentation, a regulator's text, a peer-reviewed paper. The source is named.

Field heuristic — widely used by practitioners, never replicated publicly. It is still useful; it is not a law, and it is labelled every time it appears rather than once in a footnote.

Opinion — a judgement call. Marked as such so you can disagree with it without having to reverse-engineer where the reasoning turned.

Why the charts are synthetic

Every figure is produced by a generator that simulates a session from a written scenario and a fixed random seed. Nothing is a screenshot.

There are two reasons, and both are hard constraints rather than preferences. Exchange market data is licensed, and redistributing it — including derived views of it — is not permitted under standard subscriber agreements. And third-party platform interfaces are the property of their vendors.

The upside is didactic rather than merely legal: a synthetic session can be built to show one thing clearly. The structures are real in the sense that matters — they come out of a simulated matching mechanism, not from a drawing tool — while the data itself is invented, and the figures are reproducible from the scenario file.

The numbers in the text match the numbers in the figures

Each generated figure emits its own measurements. The prose quotes that file rather than an approximation, and a build check fails if the two ever drift apart. It sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between a chart that illustrates a claim and a chart that decorates one.

Authorship

Published under the Orderflow Atlas name rather than a personal one. What matters for a written reference is that the reasoning is checkable and the sources are named — both of which survive a pseudonym. What does not survive it is an appeal to authority, which is exactly what this material is written to avoid.