24h turnover screener scenarios: how to catch a spike in activity

The 24h turnover screener answers one question: where is trading unusual right now. It does not pick a coin: every pair is checked once a minute, and an alert arrives when activity on a pair passes the threshold you set. What separates the screener's three conditions is what current activity is compared against — the pair's state a few hours ago, an absolute dollar sum, or its own norm over the last twenty minutes.

In short

The screener has three independent conditions, and they answer different questions: the activity trend over hours, a large flow in dollars within one minute, and a sharp spike against the coin's own norm.
The multiple against its own norm is the only condition whose single threshold stays meaningful on bitcoin and on a thin altcoin alike.
Per-minute turnover is an estimate from the difference between two snapshots of the 24-hour counter, not an exact per-minute volume.
A turnover spike means trades have already happened, but says nothing about direction: read it together with price and open interest.

Three conditions, and the question each one answers

The conditions are independent: you can run any one, any two, or all three. A coin still produces a single alert, carrying every condition that fired.

Condition	What you set	The question it answers
Volume change	percentage and interval	has the pair's 24-hour turnover become noticeably larger or smaller than a few hours ago
Per-minute volume	a sum in millions of dollars	did a large flow in absolute money pass through in the last minute
Spike vs average	a multiplier	how many times busier this minute is than a normal minute for this same coin

The screener sees spot and futures alike — the filters let you keep just one market. The same section holds the floors on 24-hour turnover and open interest: they cut out pairs where any anomaly is explained by a single order. What turnover is, and how it differs from volume in coins, is covered in “What trading volume is”.

Scenario 1: activity is up and holding

A slow condition for slow questions: not “what just blinked” but “which pair has been trading busier than usual for an hour”.

Why the percentage here is small

The comparison is of 24-hour turnover, whose denominator is a whole day, so it moves slowly over an hour. An ordinary hour is roughly 4% of daily turnover. Which means +4% in an hour says the hour traded about twice as busy as usual. Hence the anchor: 4% over 60 minutes is a notable event, not a rounding error.

You can ask about fading too

The percentage accepts a negative value: −8% over 4 hours means activity is falling and the pair is cooling off. An illustrative example for when the point is to avoid a fading market rather than to catch a spike.

Where the scenario breaks

Daily turnover moves across the market in step: during a macro release, or on a broad bitcoin move, dozens of pairs clear the threshold at once. Such a batch carries as much information as one alert, so this condition is normally paired straight away with a per-coin cap and a pause between alerts.

One move, one alert

The condition is checked on the transition: it has to hold now and not have held a minute ago. Without that, an elevated pace lasting an hour would send a message every minute.

Scenario 2: a spike against the coin's own norm

Here the threshold is neither money nor a percentage but a multiplier: how many times larger the minute's turnover is than the average of the previous 20 minutes on the same pair. One multiplier is meaningful for bitcoin and for a thin-book altcoin alike — each has its own norm.

The form's default is 5. Five times a normal minute. The larger the multiplier, the rarer and more exceptional the hits: a multiplier in the tens leaves a handful of alerts a day.
It needs data. With fewer than ten usable minutes inside the twenty-minute window there is no alert at all: a norm built on three points passes randomness off as an anomaly.
One spike, one alert. On the previous minute the multiple had to be below your multiplier.

In the alert this reads as the multiple plus the norm itself: “× 12.40 of average (baseline ≈ $210K, 20 min)”. The second half matters more than the first: a 30× multiple over a thousand-dollar norm is thirty thousand dollars, which is nothing.

Where it breaks: the norm window is short. If activity built up gradually over the last half hour, the norm rose with it and the spike will not clear the threshold — this condition catches sharpness, not level. And if the pair's data had a gap, the screener stays quiet on it for one minute: better to miss one honest spike than to read a hole as an anomaly.

How the screener helps

A turnover spike is visible on the chart you already have open — and it starts on the pair you never opened. Every minute the screener compares turnover on every pair across 10 spot and 9 futures venues against that same pair's earlier state, and sends an alert when activity passes your threshold. The alert carries the venue, the multiple against a normal minute or the dollar sum for the minute, the turnover change in percent and dollars, and the price change.

Open the 24h turnover screener

Scenario 3: a large flow in a single minute

A threshold in money, not percent

The value is set in millions of dollars: 0.5 means $500K in a minute, which is the form's default. An absolute threshold needs no conversion and does not depend on the coin's usual activity — which is exactly why it is not universal: $3m a minute is an everyday occurrence on a large coin and a rare event on a mid-cap.

How per-minute turnover is computed

Exchanges do not publish exact per-minute volume in their batch feeds, so it is estimated from the difference between two snapshots of the 24-hour counter: this minute's turnover minus that of the same minute a day ago. On most pairs the error is small, but if that minute a day ago happened to be busy, the estimate comes out low. A negative difference means “we don't know” — no alert then.

A multiple is sturdier than an absolute threshold

The same error affects the multiplier less: it distorts the current minute and the norm it is compared with in the same way. So for unfamiliar coins the multiple is the safer choice, and the absolute threshold suits coins whose size you already know.

The wash-volume filter

Next to the screener settings in the cabinet there is a separate filter: every spike gets a verdict — clean, suspicious, or washed — and only the clean ones reach you. Two things are worth knowing. It checks the per-minute conditions only and does not filter the interval percentage: a change over several hours is not a signature of wash trading. And it drops an individual venue rather than the whole coin — washed turnover on one exchange does not kill an honest hit on another.

What to do with the alert: turnover together with price and OI

Turnover shows the intensity of trading, not the direction. Direction appears when price and open interest stand next to it, since OI answers whether the money stays in positions. Both lines are in the same alert.

Combination	What it means
Turnover ↑ OI ↑	trading is busier and positions are opening: new money enters the pair and stays there
Turnover ↑ OI flat	money passes through the pair without settling: intraday trading or a shift between venues
Turnover ↑ OI ↓	the activity runs on positions closing, some of them by force
Turnover ↑ price flat	large trades are not moving the quote: the book absorbs them, and direction cannot be read

These combinations come with one limit: the open-interest line exists only for futures venues — on spot there is none. And there is no need to match two alerts by hand: turnover, price, and OI conditions fold into a single rule in the custom screener, and the alert then arrives only when all of them line up inside one window.

What a turnover alert does not tell you: who traded, and why. A spike looks the same whether a large participant is entering, exiting, or moving between exchanges. What to check before deciding is in the article on false hits, and position size and stops are in risk management.

24h turnover screener FAQ

What does a turnover spike mean?

Noticeably more trades passed through the pair in a short time than usual. It is a fact about the past: the trades have already happened. A spike shows no direction — a large participant entering looks like one exiting. Direction is read together with price and open interest.

How does the screener compute per-minute turnover?

From the difference between two 24-hour volume snapshots on adjacent minutes, multiplied by price. Exchanges do not publish exact per-minute volume in batch feeds, so this is an estimate: it equals this minute's turnover minus that of the same minute a day ago. A negative difference counts as unknown, and no alert is sent.

What multiplier should I set for a volume spike?

The form defaults to 5 — five times a normal minute for that same coin. The higher the multiplier, the rarer the hits. Look not only at the multiple but at the norm the screener prints in the alert: thirty times a thousand-dollar norm means nothing.

Why do alerts arrive in a batch across different coins?

The change in 24-hour turnover moves across the market in step: on a broad move, or during a macro release, dozens of pairs clear the threshold at once. The cure is not a lower threshold but a per-coin cap, a pause between alerts, and the turnover and open-interest floors.

Can I get an alert when activity falls?

Yes, the turnover change percentage accepts a negative value: −8% over 4 hours means activity on the pair is dropping. The condition fires on the transition, that is, at the moment the decline first passes your threshold.

How is “volume change” different from “per-minute volume”?

The first compares the pair's 24-hour turnover with its own turnover a few hours earlier — a question about the trend in activity. The second looks only at the last minute and answers about absolute dollar flow. Different questions, and you can run both.

What is the wash-volume filter?

A separate setting next to the 24h turnover screener: every spike gets a verdict — clean, suspicious, or washed — and only the clean ones reach you. It checks the per-minute conditions, does not filter the interval percentage, and drops an individual venue rather than the whole coin.

How the screener computes turnover and what goes into an alert is covered in “24h turnover screener”. Every form field, along with the ready-made sets, is in the turnover screener settings. Price scenarios are in the price screener use cases, and open-interest ones in the open interest use cases.