Volume profile, POC and value area
Price tells you where the market went. Volume profile tells you where it actually did business. The two are not the same, and the gap between them is where a lot of the edge lives.
What a volume profile is
A volume profile turns the chart on its side. Instead of plotting volume against time, it plots volume against price — a horizontal histogram showing how much traded at each level. Long bars are prices the market kept coming back to. Short bars are prices it passed straight through.
Point of control (POC)
The POC is simply the price level with the most traded volume. It is the price the market agreed on more than any other — the fairest price, in the auction sense. Because so much business was done there, it tends to attract price back and often acts as support or resistance on a retest.
The value area
The value area is the band of prices containing roughly 70% of the total traded volume, built outward from the POC. Its upper and lower bounds are the VAH (value area high) and VAL (value area low).
Inside the value area, buyers and sellers broadly agreed. Outside it, they did not — volume thinned out because one side was unwilling. That is why value-area edges matter: they mark where agreement broke down, and they are frequently where the next fight starts.
Why 70%?
The convention borrows from a normal distribution, where roughly one standard deviation covers about 68–70% of observations. It is a convention, not a law of markets — most platforms let you change it, and some traders prefer a tighter or wider band.
How to read it
Three questions do most of the work. Where is price relative to the POC? Is price inside the value area (balance) or outside it (imbalance)? And is it accepting the new level — building volume there — or rejecting it and snapping back inside?
Profile is context, not a signal. It tells you where the market considers price fair. What you do with that is up to your own plan and risk.
On NinjaTrader 8
Imprint Flow overlays the volume profile directly on the footprint, marks the POC, and shades the value area with a configurable percentage — so you can read the profile and the bid/ask detail in the same glance.
Imprint Flow surfaces all of this automatically.
Footprint, imbalances, absorption, and delta. Live on your NinjaTrader 8 chart. $149 once or $29/mo. All sales final.