Trading term
What is Taker buy/sell ratio?
The taker buy/sell ratio is the volume that traded by crossing the spread to buy, divided by the volume that traded by crossing the spread to sell, over a period. A reading of 1.2 means aggressive buyers traded 20% more volume than aggressive sellers. It measures which side was impatient, not which side was bigger on the book.
Every trade has a passive side that rested an order and waited, and an aggressive side — the taker — that crossed the spread to get filled now. Exchanges tag each trade with which side was the taker, so a period's volume splits cleanly into taker-buy and taker-sell. Most perpetual futures venues publish the ratio of the two every few minutes, and any candle feed that reports taker-buy volume next to total volume lets you compute it yourself.
On crypto perpetuals the number lives in a narrow band around 1, a hair under it: bitcoin's daily median over six years is about 0.99, and the middle 90% of days sit between roughly 0.90 and 1.09. It moves with the day's candle almost one for one — a green day is a day buyers crossed the spread faster than sellers, so the ratio and the return describe the same event. Its correlation with the next day's move, or the next hour's, rounds to zero.
The reading order-flow traders watch is the disagreement: a sharp fall with the ratio above 1, or a sharp rise with it below 1, meaning resting orders rather than market orders moved the price. Such days used to precede better-than-average weeks, but they have become rare on the major contracts as the passive side of the market has thickened.
For example
Bitcoin closes up 5% and the daily taker ratio reads 1.06. That is the normal pairing — on big up days the ratio sits above 1 about nine times in ten — so it confirms the candle rather than adding to it. If instead the day had closed down 4% with the ratio at 1.04, that would be a disagreement: sellers moved the price from the book while the takers were net buyers.
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That's Taker buy/sell ratio in theory — it clicks when you read it on a live chart. Practise it hands-on in the TradeWize Premium Futures & Derivatives track.
Explore Premium →Why it matters to you
It is the one positioning gauge that measures size rather than headcount, which is why it behaves nothing like the long/short ratio. Knowing that its resting state is close to 1, that it is the candle restated, and that it does not forecast turns it from a 'buyers are in control' reflex into a description you can read correctly.
⚠ Reading the level as a signal
A ratio above 1 tells you the candle was green, and a ratio below 1 that it was red. It does not tell you what the next candle will be — six years of Binance data put the correlation with the next day at about zero, and the most extreme readings were followed by ordinary weeks. The only reading with any history behind it is the disagreement between the ratio and the candle, and that has nearly stopped occurring.