Market Profile is a technical concept with a unique charting technique developed by Peter Steidlmayer when he was trading at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), and it was open to the public in 1985. Market profile helps short-term traders identify the activities of Other Timeframe Participants (OTFs) or Long-term players who have money and information power. Thus Market profile helps short-term traders to identify the profitable trade opportunities just by following the OTFs. Many traders don’t understand the influence of time on both the price and opportunity. In intraday trading, the opportunity is inversely proportional to time. An attractive opportunity to buy below value or sell above value will not last long as OTFs act very quickly, and their position size pushes the price very soon to the other side. Another simple example of the importance of time is a price that is not accepted over time is the sign of rejection of that price level. In a candlestick chart, Price variations are plotted in the “Y” axis against the Time “X” axis. In this type of chart, time remains constant throughout the price variations, which means we are not using the time parameter effectively. If most technical charts consider only Price and Volume with a fixed time point (thereby ignoring the effect of time, which is money for traders), Market profile considers Price and Volume, along with TIME, which is an opportunity and therefore MONEY! Now, look at the same day in a market profile chart in the below image. It is evident that the time has been allocated effectively based on the price variations. It gives a 3D view of the price auction with respect to time. Also, you can see the Value Area, unfair high, unfair low and even point of control (POC). This is just an introduction to Market Profile and one can explore many other interesting aspects of the Market profile with this information. How to find the Value Area for Market Profile Charting in Excel? How do I create dynamic cell ranges that will automatically adjust the row height of a formula based on a variable -- and I want to achieve this without VBA. I'm looking for a creative formula solution, even if that means using more than one row and column to hold information. The goal I'm after is to calculate the "Value Area" for Market Profile trading. I have a bunch of price data (open, high, low, close) with volume at different prices. I want to calculate the Value Area High and Value Area Low where 70% of trading volume has occurred. Let me explain the specific Market Profile method that has to be used. To calculate the "Value Area", or VA... Find out the total volume for the day and multiply by 70% (this is easy) Find the Point Of Control, or POC (this is where most of the trading volume happened for the day, I can easily do this too, no problem) Inspect the two prices above and below the POC If the two prices above the POC have more volume, those prices are added to the VA. If the two prices below the POC have more TPOs, those prices are added to the VA. If there is a tie, add both the two prices above and the two prices below. Continue repeating this process until you come to the point where adding two prices would exceed your 70% volume count, at which point you begin adding one price at a time using the same method. Once your 70% volume count threshold is met or exceeded, your Value Area is complete. The upper price of this Value Area is considered the Value Area High (VAH). The lower price of the VA is considered the Value Area Low (VAL). What I'm trying to figure out is how to get around a "tie" when it happens, and when looking at 2 rows at a time would exceed 70%, then have to only look at 1 row at a time. Both of these situations will adjust the range height that I'm calculating. The pic is a visual of what's going on... The letters that make up the shape of the market profile chart are taken from high-to-low prices of 30-minute trading ranges. For example: Letter A represents the entire trading range, from low to high, of the first 30 minutes of trading. Letter B represents the entire trading range, from low to high, of the second 30 minutes of trading. Letter C represents the entire trading range, from low to high, of the third 30 minutes of trading. And so on... So there will always be some overlap when all the letters are pushed together/concatenated. The best market profile video on youtube: https://youtu.be/ektVK_twhc8 https://youtu.be/ceaWHaUOSB0 https://youtu.be/9fn4smc85RU Different indicators using Excel https://indzara.com/stock-market-templates/ Importance of backtesting https://kernc.github.io/backtesting.py/doc/backtesting/#gsc.tab=0 https://youtu.be/qh6K82elRlQ Orderflow analysis
