The Curve
by s7ven
The Tape · Order flow
Tools that discard time and organise activity by price, from a tradition that treats the market as a continuous auction.
A histogram of traded volume plotted against price rather than time, showing where activity concentrated.
Its shape depends entirely on the period you choose to build it from. A session profile, a weekly profile and a composite profile of the same market describe three different things.
See also VPOC, value areaThe single price level with the greatest traded volume in a given profile.
It can move during a session as volume accumulates, and a profile with two nearly equal peaks has a VPOC that flips between them on small changes. Treating it as a fixed level is a common error.
The price range containing a set proportion of a profile's volume, conventionally around seventy percent, bounded by the value area high and low.
The seventy percent figure is a convention inherited from Market Profile, chosen for its rough correspondence to one standard deviation in a normal distribution. Traded volume is not normally distributed, so the correspondence is loose.
See also Market ProfileLocal peaks and troughs in a volume profile. A high volume node is a price where a great deal traded; a low volume node is a price the market passed through quickly.
Both are usually identified by eye, with no standard definition of how prominent a peak must be to count as one.
Total traded value divided by total traded volume over a defined period.
It originated as an execution benchmark for institutions filling large orders across a day, not as a chart line. Its anchor point determines everything about it.
See also anchored VWAPA VWAP whose accumulation begins at a manually chosen point rather than at the session open.
The choice of anchor is discretionary, which means the line can be made to pass through almost anywhere by picking a convenient starting point. Worth remembering when one appears to fit perfectly in hindsight.
A display that records which prices traded during each time bracket of a session, building a distribution from time rather than volume.
Developed by Peter Steidlmayer with the Chicago Board of Trade in the early 1980s. TPO stands for time price opportunity; each letter on the chart marks one bracket in which a price traded.
See also single printsPrice levels touched during only one time bracket of a Market Profile session.
They mark prices the market moved through without spending time, and are interpreted as areas where the auction was one-sided.