Market Profile

Market Profile is the original auction-market tool developed at the Chicago Board of Trade. It plots price vertically and uses letters (A, B, C, ...) to represent 30-minute time-period occurrences, one letter per cell touched during each half-hour, producing a distribution whose shape encodes market behavior.

Core concepts: Initial Balance (the range set in the first hour), Value Area (70% of TPOs), Point of Control (longest TPO row), and day types (Normal, Trend, Double-Distribution, etc.) that describe how price behaved across the session. Market Profile shares much with Volume Profile but tracks time rather than volume. They often show similar structure on liquid markets. The method emphasizes concepts like "market acceptance" (price traded within an area for multiple periods) versus "rejection" (price entered an area and left quickly), concepts that predate modern ICT/SMC terminology by decades.