Volume Profile — where the auction agreed on value
Time-based candles tell you WHEN price traded. The volume profile tells you how much traded at each PRICE — a horizontal histogram of accepted value. The fat part is where the market spent its size; the thin parts are prices it rejected. It's Auction Market Theory made visible.
How to read it
- POC (Point of Control) — the price with the most volume, the auction's fairest price. Drawn as the solid line. Price gravitates back to it; it flips support↔resistance.
- Value Area (VAH / VAL) — the band holding 70% of the volume, bounded by the Value Area High and Low (dashed). Inside = accepted value; an open and hold outside is initiative, a poke and reject is responsive.
- Shape — a single fat node (P-shape / b-shape) is a trend day's resolution; a balanced bell is rotation. Low-volume nodes between fat ones are gaps price travels fast through.
- Buy vs sell split — Perplog colours each level by aggressor: green = buyers paid up, red = sellers hit. A green-dominant POC under price is real demand, not just where it sat.
How Perplog computes it — falsifiable, open source
- Visible range (VPVR) — the profile is rebuilt every frame from the footprint cells of the bars currently in view, so it follows your zoom and pan exactly. No fixed lookback to misremember.
- POC = the price bucket with the highest total volume (ties broken low, deterministic).
- Value Area — classic Steidlmayer expansion: start at the POC, repeatedly absorb the heavier of the two neighbouring buckets until 70% of total volume is enclosed.
perplog-core::orderflow::profile::value_area, unit-tested. - Aggressor split — each level's green/red comes from the taker side of every trade at that price, the same data the footprint uses. One source, two views.
What only Perplog can do
Drop your entries onto the profile and the question answers itself: did you buy inside value or chase outside it? Did your stop sit below the VAL where it belonged, or inside the node where it was always going to get tapped? The profile is the map; your fills are the receipts — and only Perplog has both.
Open the terminal -> · Indicators → Volume Profile.