Naked POCs and unfinished auctions on the footprint

What it does

The POC of a bar is the price level with the largest total volume (bid + ask); on a tie the first level encountered wins. A POC is naked when no subsequent bar's low-to-high range contains that price. The newest bar is excluded from the candidates, because its POC can change on the next tick and the marker would flicker, but its range still tests the older POCs. Each naked POC is drawn as a dashed line from its bar to the right edge of the chart (stopping 60 px before the price axis), at 50 % opacity, with a small diamond at the origin.

An unfinished auction follows the historical convention of this chart: the top level of a bar with zero buy volume and non-zero sell volume is an unfinished high, and the bottom level with zero sell volume and non-zero buy volume is an unfinished low. The marker is placed at the bar's high or low. A high is considered tested once a later bar trades above it, a low once a later bar trades below it; tested markers are not drawn. Highs are drawn as an amber up-triangle, lows as a purple down-triangle, each with a faint dashed extension to the right.

Settings

How to use it

• Both overlays are computed on the loaded bars by the asynchronous runner and pushed to the renderer; they are recomputed on every bar update with a 200 ms throttle.
• Naked POC lines extend to the right until a bar trades through the price, then disappear. There is no age limit in the computation: a POC left naked at the start of the loaded history stays drawn as long as the bar is loaded.
• The Unfinished Auctions settings pane shows a Study guide card labelled Auction extremes · zero-side convention with the kind Specific convention, unit Instrument price and required data Aggregated bid/ask price levels.
• The same rules exist as Library studies (naked-poc and unfinished-auction-marker) for charts that run the series engine.

Limits and pitfalls

The guide card states the limit explicitly: some platforms call an extreme with both sides positive an unfinished auction, which is a different convention; this marker makes no promise of a retest. The zero-side rule depends on the source reporting per-side volume on the extreme level; a feed that aggregates or drops small prints can create or remove markers.

Naked POCs only consider bars that are loaded on the chart. A POC that was tested before the first loaded bar is unknown to the computation, and a level tested during a gap in history is still shown as naked. Display-row grouping does not affect either rule: both read the original per-tick levels.