For Business

Indicators

What Is Market Profile

Market profile is a day's half hours sorted by price: each half hour is a letter, written on every price it touched, so a wide row of letters is a price many half hours passed through and a single letter is a price visited once. This paper shows you gold's 18 July 2025 profile built from real quarter-hour bars, the idea as a clock that hands out the letters, the same day on the chart, how the letters add up to a point of control, a value area and a tail, and where the indicator comes from on your platform.

Difficulty
Advanced
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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A day as rows of letters

Market profile sorts a day's half hours by price. Each half hour is a letter, A for 09:00, B for 09:30, up to X for 20:30, and the letter is written on every two-dollar row that half hour touched. Here is gold on 18 July 2025 from 09:00 to 21:00 on the feed's clock. The widest row, 3352, has fifteen letters: fifteen of the twenty-four half hours passed through it. The shaded rows from 3346 to 3358 hold 59 of the day's 79 letters. The row at 3330 to 3334 has only an A: the first half hour went there and nothing came back.

A clock hands out the letters

Picture a clock handing out letters. Every half hour gets the next letter of the alphabet, and it signs that letter on every price it visited, the way a guest signs the book on every floor they stop at. At the end of the day each price keeps the letters that came to it, and the rows of letters make the profile. The shape is made of time: a wide row is a price that many half hours passed through, whatever was traded there. A volume profile counts what was traded at each price; a market profile counts half hours.

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