Market Profile Glossary

A balance area occurs when value is accepted and price is considered fair. A move out of balance generally requires new information to take the auction to new highs or new lows.

A balanced session is when the market auctions go back and forth from one price level to another but maintains most TPOs in an overlapping range. Also considered balanced is when several consecutive days exhibit overlapping range, and more importantly, overlapping value areas, as the market consolidates within a trading range.

Note – Balance areas provide the trader recognizable areas, where lacking new information, high odd, relatively low-risk trades can be placed with the expectation that price will revert to the center of the range, at minimum, if not to the other range extreme.

Excess, commonly referred to as buy tails, sell tails and single prints, frequently highlights the end of one auction and the beginning of another.

No excess is frequently a sign that the auction in that direction has not been completed or has not reached exhaustion.

The Profile is now shown in its extended form. The IB, or initial balance, represents the first hour of trading and as such is represented by letters A and B together.

Using Central Time, letter A extends from 8:30 AM to 9:00. Letter B extends from 9:00 to 9:30 AM.

Note – WindoTrader clearly marks the IB on every Profile with a vertical line, and is shown here in green to the left of A period. The day’s opening print is the green dot that appears on the IB line.

Long liquidation typically creates the ‘b’ formation or pattern.  The stem of the ‘b’ must initiate the formation or pattern.

The Market Profile is a graphical display of the auction-market process based on market-generated information.

The structure reflects participants’ opinions during the auction process. Price is visually represented on the vertical scale while time is visually represented on the horizontal scale.

The completed Profile shows what happened, when it happened, and who was involved.

This example Profile above shows a day session of the e-mini S&P futures contract. However, Market Profiles can be used for any instrument or trading product from the 30-year bond to Apple stock.

Frequently Profiles are classified in patterns, a b pattern indicates liquidation, a p pattern indicates accumulation and a D pattern indicates balance or consolidation.

Note – Viewing the Profile in the ‘collapsed’ format reveals the bell curve of the distribution: the area where the majority of traders came together to conduct business, as well as the extremes where price was deemed either too cheap or too expensive.

Note – The Market Profile provides a way of organizing market-generated data and is not a trading methodology.

One-time-framing is a term that can be applied to any time frame, 5 minute, 15 minute, daily, weekly and so on. As shown here, it refers to the 30-minute bars. It portrays a directional move as in a trending market.

One-time-framing generally makes higher highs or lower lows, depending on whether price is going up or down. There can be inside bars; they do not end one-time-framing.

The POC is the acronym for Point-of-Control.

The POC is simply the longest row of Time, Price and Volume (TPOs) occurring closest to the center of the range during a session.

The POC is the price where the most trading activity occurred during an entire session and is also considered the fairest price in the session.

A migrating POC indicates directional movement to discover fair value.

Note – WindoTrader colors the POC to easily identify it as the auction develops during a trading session. In the example above the final POC location is the green line of TPOs. The prior migrating POC locations are colored bright yellow.

The term range can refer to a session range, a daily, weekly or even monthly range.

The initial balance, the IB, is considered the first hour’s range.

Range extension is market activity that auctions beyond the IB high and or low and tends to indicate that the longer time-frame trader has entered the market.

When there is range extension the perception is that price was either too cheap, too expensive, or that a news event changed the current fair value.

Our example above shows A period with a fairly wide range, and B period, an inside bar.

Short covering typically creates the ‘P’ formation or pattern. The stem of the ‘P’ must initiate the formation or pattern.

Single prints, including tails, are frequently seen at the top and the bottom of the profile. They are formed by price moving quickly away and require at least two TPOs to be confirmed.

• A buying tail occurs at the bottom of the range.
• A selling tail occurs at the top of the range.
• Tails occurring in the last period of the session are called spikes because they cannot be confirmed by a following time period.

Sometimes single prints are seen separating distributions within a Profile, often either as a double-distribution day or on a trending day.

Note – Single prints on extremes (tails) are important auction terms; they frequently mark the end of one auction and the beginning of another.

Time, price and volume (TPOs) are the three main components of the auction process. Jim Dalton, author of Mind Over Markets and Markets in Profile, states:

• Price advertises all opportunities.
• Time regulates all opportunities.
• Volume determines the success or failure of advertised opportunities.

The value area represents the first standard deviation of a completed session or approximately 68% of the trading activity beginning from the point-of-control (POC),(the mean).

Value develops as the day progresses through each half-hour TPO period.

The 2^nd and 3^rd standard deviations contain 95% and 99.7%, respectively, of a day’s time, and or trading volume.

Value-area relationships from day-to-day are described as: higher, lower, overlapping, overlapping higher/lower and inside.

Note – Value-area relationships can help traders discern the conviction of both directional and balancing sessions.

Volume areas include high-volume nodes (HVNs), and low-volume nodes (LVNs), as part of the volume profile.

An HVN is a level or area where there was a high volume of trading activity. Conversely, an LVN is a level or area where price moved rather quickly and trading activity was much lighter by comparison.

Note – There is a difference in the value areas. On the left of the above example value is determined by time as in TPOs, while on the right value is determined by the volume of trades executed.