A price level can contain many orders
A price level is a quoted price with the displayed waiting quantity at that price. Several people's orders can be combined on one row. You usually cannot read their identities or their place in the same-price queue from a five-level screen.
You already met one example in 01.04.01. At ₹500, the HNI's 500-share bid and your ten-share bid sit at the same price, so that price level displays 510 shares. But your ten are behind the earlier 500 because price-time priority still applies inside the level. Summing a row does not reveal your queue position.
The familiar four-order snapshot still totals 1,510 buy shares: 200 at ₹501, 510 at ₹500, and 800 at ₹499. It has three price levels, not four, and no ask side was established in that snapshot.
Orders inside one visible level
This is the unchanged 01.04.01 four-order queue. Drag the arriving seller's quantity; 700 shares stand before your ten even though ₹500 is only the second price level.
This replay changes hypothetical incoming quantity. It does not undo or duplicate your original ten-share purchase, which completed in the story.
Now open a separate five-level board
To inspect both sides, switch to a different, hypothetical Bharat Foods snapshot. It is a teaching board, not a later event in the reader's holding. Its LTP is ₹500. At each level below, the buy price steps down while the sell price steps up. All quantities are shares shown as waiting at that instant.
- Level 1 · bid ₹499 × 200
- ask ₹501 × 100
- Level 2 · bid ₹498 × 150
- ask ₹502 × 200
- Level 3 · bid ₹497 × 250
- ask ₹503 × 300
- Level 4 · bid ₹496 × 100
- ask ₹504 × 150
- Level 5 · bid ₹495 × 300
- ask ₹505 × 250
Walk an order down the opposite side
If no other order changes, an eligible 150-share buyer could take 100 at the best ask, ₹501, then 50 at the next ask, ₹502. The average across those two fills would be about ₹501.33 per share: (100 × ₹501 + 50 × ₹502) ÷ 150. The top ask of ₹501 alone did not describe the whole order.
A seller instead reads bids, starting at ₹499. A 250-share sell could meet 200 at ₹499 and the next 50 at ₹498, averaging ₹498.80 before costs. These are conditional arithmetic examples, not guaranteed fills or trades made by the reader.
NSE calls a feed showing up to five best bid and ask prices Level 2 market-depth data. Five is the display window, not the entire order book. Orders may wait beyond the fifth price, and the visible rows can change before the first share of your order executes.
In the unchanged 01.04.01 queue, why does the five-level view show 510 shares at ₹500 rather than two separate ₹500 price levels?
Use depth for size, not certainty
Depth is useful when your proposed order is large relative to the quantity at the best price. It tells you where price might move if you demand immediate execution in the unchanged displayed book. It cannot tell you that those orders will remain, that hidden quantity does not exist, or that an apparently thick side predicts the next trade's direction.
The next lesson tests a common shortcut: treating more displayed buy shares than sell shares as a forecast. Even the choice of which levels you count can reverse the story you tell.