Using Pulling and Stacking as a Proxy
How pulling and stacking reveals changing passive participation before price fully responds to the auction.
This post is part of our Market Depth & Liquidity series.
If you haven’t read the previous post in this series, you can find it here.
By this point in the series, the focus has largely been on how passive participation evolves around price:
liquidity appearing,
pulling,
reinforcing,
absorbing,
or withdrawing entirely.
Pulling and stacking become useful because they provide another way of observing those same participation shifts without needing to interpret every individual order update directly from the DOM itself.
That distinction matters.
The underlying behavior does not change.
The method of observing it does.
And depending on the trader, that can make liquidity behavior significantly easier to contextualize during live execution.
What Pulling and Stacking Represents
At a basic level:
stacking reflects liquidity increasing on one side of the market,
while pulling reflects liquidity decreasing or withdrawing.
That behavior can occur aggressively, gradually, defensively, or reactively depending on conditions.
The important part is not the raw number itself.
It is what the changing participation suggests about willingness to continue transacting.
For example:
offers stacking above price during consolidation after downside continuation.
bids pulling during failed support.
or liquidity rapidly withdrawing ahead of acceleration.
All tend to reveal changing conditions around passive participation.