# Volume Profile: Where the Money Traded A volume profile is a histogram on the side of the chart that shows how much was traded at each price, which tells you where the market did serious business and where it barely stopped. ## Volume at price, not volume over time The volume bars under a chart answer "how much traded in this candle." A volume profile answers a different question: "how much traded at this price," no matter when. It takes every trade in a chosen stretch of the chart, sorts it by price, and draws one horizontal bar per price row. Long bars are prices where a lot changed hands. Short bars are prices the market passed through quickly. This is close to a TPO profile but not the same. A TPO profile counts time at price, so a sleepy hour counts as much as a busy one. A volume profile counts size. Most of the time the two agree. When they do not, for example a level where price sat for hours on light volume, the volume profile is usually the better guide to where real positions were built. The [TPO Profile](#tpo-profile) lesson covers the time side. ## POC, VAH and VAL The **POC**, point of control, is the price row with the most volume. It is where the most contracts changed hands, so it is a price a lot of traders hold positions from. The **value area** is the band around the POC that holds a set share of all volume, usually about 70%. Its top is **VAH** and its bottom is **VAL**. You can read it simply: inside the value area, both buyers and sellers were happy to trade. Above VAH, prices were seen as expensive and mostly rejected. Below VAL, cheap, and mostly rejected. So when price leaves the value area, the question is whether it gets accepted out there, with volume building at the new prices, or rejected back inside. ## High- and low-volume nodes A profile rarely has one neat bump. It usually has several thick areas separated by thin ones. - **High-volume nodes** (HVN) are thick areas. The market did a lot of business there, many traders hold positions from those prices, and price tends to slow down and chop when it returns. - **Low-volume nodes** (LVN) are thin areas between them. The market moved through quickly, often during a sharp move. When price comes back to an LVN it often either rejects it sharply or travels through it quickly to the next HVN. A practical way to think about it: HVNs are places where price likes to rest, LVNs are places where it does not like to stay. ## Naked POCs When a session ends, its POC stays behind as a level. If price has not traded back to it in a later session, it is called a naked POC, shown on the chart as **nPOC**. Naked POCs often act as magnets. The idea is that the previous session's busiest price is still a reference for everyone who traded there, so a return to it is a natural place for those traders to adjust. It does not mean price must go there, and old nPOCs far from price matter less than recent nearby ones. Once price trades back through it, it is no longer naked. ## Three ways to pick the range A profile is only as useful as the stretch of data you feed it. In Market Open, Volume Profile has three modes. - **Session.** One profile per session. Good for building daily habits: yesterday's POC, VAH and VAL as today's reference levels. - **Visible range.** One profile over whatever is on screen. Zoom out and it covers weeks, zoom in and it covers a few hours. Good for spotting the big HVNs and LVNs on a higher timeframe, but it changes every time you scroll, so do not treat its levels as fixed. - **Fixed bars.** One profile over the last set number of bars. It stays consistent as you scroll and moves forward as new candles print. ## Buy and sell volume Each row can be split into buy volume and sell volume, the same aggressor split that the [footprint](#volume-footprint) lesson explains: market buys lifting offers on one side, market sells hitting bids on the other. A row that is mostly sell volume at the low of a range, while price did not go lower, hints that someone absorbed that selling with limit orders. A row that is mostly buy volume at a high that failed hints the opposite. Do not over-read it. Over a full session most rows end up fairly even, and a lopsided row only means something at a level that matters already. ## When the profile is estimated A true volume profile needs trade-by-trade data. Market Open builds profiles from recorded footprint data where it exists, since about 14 October 2026. Where it does not, the profile is estimated from candles. Hover the legend: the tooltip says "Footprint data" or "Estimated from candles". An estimate from candles has to guess how each candle's volume was spread across its high-low range, and which part of it was buying. The overall shape is usually close enough to find big HVNs and LVNs. The exact POC row and the buy and sell split are less reliable. Treat an estimated profile as a sketch, and give more weight to levels drawn from real footprint data. ## A worked example Say ETH spent most of yesterday between 3,880 and 4,010. The session profile has its POC at 3,950, VAH at 4,010 and VAL at 3,880. There is a thin LVN around 4,030 to 4,050, left by a quick spike that faded, and an nPOC from three days ago at 3,820. This morning price drops to 3,870, just under VAL. Two outcomes are worth planning for. If the next candles push back above 3,880 and volume starts to build inside value, the move down was rejected, and the POC at 3,950 is the natural target. If price stays below 3,880 and the profile starts to thicken down there, value is moving lower, and the nPOC at 3,820 becomes the obvious next level. You do not have to guess which one happens. Decide in advance what each would look like, then wait. ## Honest limits Volume profile describes where trading happened, not why, and not what comes next. On thin markets a few large trades can create a POC that nobody else cares about. Session boundaries are a choice, and a different choice gives different levels. Pair the profile with a reference like [VWAP](#vwap) and with your own levels instead of using it alone. ## Try it on Market Open 1. Open ETH, go to Indicators, category Order flow, and add Volume Profile. Searching Volume Profile, VPVR or Session volume finds it too. See [Chart tools](#chart-tools) for the full settings. 2. Set Mode to Session and Value area % to 70. Find the POC, VAH and VAL labels for yesterday. 3. Turn on Naked POCs and set the maximum number to 5. Note how far each nPOC sits from price. 4. Switch Mode to Visible range, zoom out to a few weeks and mark the two thickest HVNs and the clearest LVN. Then try Fixed bars and compare. 5. Under Style, set Placement to Left or Right and adjust Width % so the profile does not cover the candles you are reading. Pick Buy and Sell volume colours you can tell apart easily. 6. Hover the legend and check whether you are looking at "Footprint data" or "Estimated from candles". 7. Add an alert on POC, VAH or VAL, and practise trading around those levels in the demo account via "Try demo" before acting with real money. _Educational content, not investment advice. Leveraged trading can lose more than your margin._