Taking a Look at Price Distribution Charts

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John Forman - The Essentials of Trading author

Have you seen a chart like this before? (click to enlarge)

This style of chart is known my a number of different terms. Market Profile is one. TPO charting is another. Volume at price is a third. Although they are becoming more prevalent, I’d venture to say that most traders haven’t looked at charts like these before.

The idea of these charts is to identify where the market is spending the most (and least) amount of time. Think of it like taking a bar chart and squeezing all the bars together. That gives you a distribution of prices over the course of a day or week or whatever. (The chart above shows two seperate days).

Two very good books on the subject of what I often refer to as “price distribution charting” are Mind Over Markets and Markets in Profile, both by Jim Dalton.

This charting methodology is the basis for a great deal of what I do in my work as a market analyst, and I went over the methology in the Following the Quest for Value course I developed earlier this year. I definitely encourage you to give a look. It could very well change the whole way you think about the markets and the way prices move.

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