José Luis Rodríguez
Author of ORDER FLOW — Market Mechanics
José Luis Rodríguez is the author of ORDER FLOW, a technical book on reading order flow in CME futures. Every example and setup in it is built on a single market, the Nasdaq-100 E‑mini (NQ), trading breadth for depth.
His work covers footprint charts, delta and CVD, absorption, imbalances and volume profile, and turns on one distinction: what market data records versus what a trader infers from it. Much of what he writes is about the practical limits of volume-based analysis.
The book
The book was published on 6 September 2026 in two independent editions, with the same content and an ISBN each.
-
English edition
ORDER FLOW — Market Mechanics
- ISBN
- 9798171900076
- 484
- pages · Paperback
- Published
- 6 September 2026
-
Spanish edition
ORDER FLOW — La Mecánica del Mercado
- ISBN
- 9798186017783
- 507
- pages · Paperback
- Published
- 6 September 2026
What it contains
Six parts and twenty chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue. Chapters 8 to 16 develop nine setups, each with its context, conditions and invalidation. The book closes with a market microstructure glossary (Appendix A) and pre-session and post-session checklists (Appendix B). Its final part is about what order flow cannot give you.
See the full table of contents
The approach
Order flow records what has already happened. A footprint shows executed transactions and how they split between aggressive buyers and sellers. It is used to confirm or reject a prior hypothesis about the session.
Many thresholds are conventions. The 3:1 imbalance ratio, the 70% value area and the two swings compared in a divergence are often presented as properties of the market. They are choices made by whoever is looking, which is why they have to be fixed before looking at the chart.
One market, studied in depth. The logic of the auction carries over to other markets with a centralised order book, but every example in the book is grounded in NQ.
The charts in the book and on this site are diagrams designed by the author to explain the mechanics, not screenshots of real trades.
Articles on this site
- What order flow is and what it records
- How to read a footprint chart
- Absorption vs exhaustion: telling them apart
- Footprint imbalances: when they mean something
- Delta and CVD: what they measure
- Volume profile: POC, value area and its limits
- Bid/ask footprints vs tick-direction data
- What a footprint chart cannot show
- Why NQ imbalances do not read like ES imbalances
- Delta divergence depends on which swings you compare
- Unfinished auctions: three definitions, one cell
- Settlement is not the close
- Trend day or failed breakout: where the delta peaks
- Stacked imbalances: initiation or climax
- Naked POC: what counts as a fill
- Where the regular session ends, and the prior-day high
Elsewhere
Contact
For press enquiries, interviews or questions about the book: joseluisrodriguez.escritor@proton.me