Volume confirmation
The practice of reading a price move together with the number and size of the trades that carried it.
How to read the number
The same price change on a dense stream of trades and on a sparse one describes different situations: in the second case few participants stood behind it.
When the metric lies
A burst of volume is easily mistaken for interest in the business: it also arrives on expiry, on index reviews and when a large parcel changes hands between two holders.
Also known as: volume confirmation