A Volume Spike Is a Question, Not a Signal
Why treating every tall bar as urgency creates noisy decisions, and how to narrate relative volume first.
Tall volume bars travel well in screenshots. In live review they often mean only that participation rose — not that you must act.
Relative volume against the recent average, and against the same time of day, tells a clearer story than absolute height. A spike into resistance with fading follow-through is a different sentence from a spike that expands a break with sustained prints.
In Volume Foundations Studio we ask students to write what the bar is asking before they invent an answer. That habit alone cuts a surprising amount of forced entries.
Once the question is clear — participation, absorption, or dry-up — order-flow detail becomes useful instead of decorative.