Volume profile

Construction

Every trade is assigned to its price level and its quantity is added to that level's total. The totals are drawn as bars perpendicular to the price axis. The period can be a bar, a session, a rolling window of bars, or a composite of several sessions; the choice of period changes the profile entirely, so the window is part of the definition.

Sub-features are computed from the histogram: the point of control is the level with the largest total; the value area is the contiguous range around it that holds a chosen share of the total, 70 percent by convention; high and low volume nodes are local maxima and minima of the histogram.

• Unit: contracts or lots for futures, base quantity or notional for crypto; the profile is only comparable within one unit.
• Resolution: one row per tick, or a coarser bucket for instruments with very small ticks.
• Split variant: each row can be divided into volume at the bid and volume at the ask, which is the footprint's data in profile form.

Reading the shape

• A single wide peak is a balanced profile; trading was concentrated around one accepted price.
• Two peaks separated by a thin middle indicate two accepted ranges with a rejected zone between them.
• A profile that is thin at one end and thick at the other shows a move that was accepted at the thick end only.
• Low volume nodes are the levels price passed through without trading much; they are where price tends to move quickly again.

In Senzoukria

The heatmap screen has a Volume profile section with POC colour, Value area colour and Rest colour, plus a Profile history setting whose hint describes it as the depth of history the volume profile and the POC / VAH / VAL lines are built on, accumulated live and independently of the heatmap ring, with switching retroactive. The footprint chart has its own Volume Profile settings, which the footprint layer setting refers to when explaining how HVN/LVN bands and the session POC, VAH and VAL lines sit relative to the candles.

Indicators in the Profiles & levels group derive from the same histogram: Session POC (developing), Session VAH/VAL (developing) and Rolling VPOC; Value Area Width (ticks) in the Volume group measures the per-bar profile.

Common mistakes

• Comparing profiles built over different windows as if they were the same object.
• Reading the profile as a prediction. It records where trading occurred; it does not say where it will occur.
• Building a profile from bars without per-price data and treating it as a tick-level profile; a bar-based approximation spreads volume across the bar's range.