Market profile
Market Profile is a charting method, introduced by J. Peter Steidlmayer, that organises a session's trading by price and time into a bell-like distribution of TPO letters. It gives a vocabulary for the auction: point of control, value area, initial balance, tails and single prints.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
Origins and idea
Market Profile was developed by J. Peter Steidlmayer with the Chicago Board of Trade in the 1980s as a way to display the auction process. The premise is that a market advertises price to find activity: it moves until one side stops responding, then rotates around the prices both sides accept. Organising each half hour of trading by price makes that process visible as a distribution.
Building blocks
| Element | What it is |
|---|---|
| TPO | One letter per price row per time bracket |
| Point of control | Row with the most TPOs |
| Value area | Rows around the POC holding about 70% of the TPOs |
| Initial balance | Range of the first two brackets (first hour) |
| Range extension | Trading beyond the initial balance later in the session |
| Tail | Run of single prints at an extreme |
| Poor high / low | An extreme held by two or more brackets without a tail |
Reading day structure
- A narrow initial balance followed by extension in one direction points toward a trend day; a wide initial balance that holds points toward a range day.
- Value area placement versus the previous session (higher, lower, overlapping) frames the open.
- The profile shape, D, P, b or double distribution, summarises who was active and where acceptance ended up.
- Market Profile describes the auction; it does not forecast it. Pairing it with the footprint shows what happens when price reaches the levels it names.
In Senzoukria
The 'Market Profile (TPO)' overlay on the footprint screen draws Steidlmayer profiles with letters, blocks or bars over a free period rather than a fixed session. Structure options include a value-area band, a mid-point line, 'Naked POC', 'Initial balance' with a configurable number of IB brackets, 'Open & close markers', poor high / low marking, 'Detect HVN / LVN', 'Extend POC / VA to next profile' and 'Auto levels' that merge the last profiles into scored levels. The related volume-based overlay is 'Volume Profile (session)', and the 'Initial Balance', 'IB Extensions' and 'Opening Range' overlays draw the session ranges as standalone levels.
Common mistakes
- Treating Market Profile as a signal system. It is a way of organising data.
- Ignoring the period anchor: a profile anchored on the CME day and one anchored on the RTH open describe different auctions.
- Applying futures session logic unchanged to a 24/7 crypto market; the period must be chosen explicitly.
Related
This page in other languages
Frequently asked questions
- Is Market Profile the same as a volume profile?
- No. Market Profile counts time at price using TPO letters; a volume profile counts contracts at price. They share vocabulary (POC, value area) but the numbers come from different data and can point to different levels.
- Does Market Profile need tick data?
- Not for the letters. A TPO profile only needs the high and low of each time bracket, so it can be built from OHLC bars whose length divides the bracket. Volume-based readings on the same chart do need volume at price.
- What is a poor high or poor low?
- An extreme of the profile that was held by two or more brackets with no single-print tail. The auction did not finish there with a clean rejection, so the extreme is considered unfinished business. Senzoukria's Market Profile overlay can mark these.