Market Profile
J. Peter Steidlmayer's framework, developed at the Chicago Board of Trade in the 1980s, for reading markets through the distribution of time and price. TPO charts as a map of consensus and rejection.
Overview
Market Profile was conceived by J. Peter Steidlmayer at the Chicago Board of Trade in the 1980s, as a graphical framework for visualising the relationship between price and time. Working from the pit, Steidlmayer observed that markets dwell in some price areas and rush through others, and that this difference encodes participant consensus and disagreement in a directly readable form.
What a Market Profile chart shows is not price itself, but how much time was spent at each price. Each thirty-minute interval of a session is assigned a letter (A, B, C, …); within each interval, the letter is plotted at every price that traded. The resulting chart resembles a sideways bell curve — the Time-Price Opportunity (TPO) chart.
The core idea is simple: the market "accepts" prices where it dwells and "rejects" prices through which it merely passes. Reading the map of acceptance and rejection is, in effect, reading participant psychology.
The Esoteric Volumes · By Application
What lies beyond this point is opened only to those who have applied.
Capital, discipline, psychology. The chapters that sit behind technique describe the bone-work that keeps an operator in the market for years. Access requires a written application, reviewed by hand.