Auto Anchored Volume Profile Indicator

What it shows

One histogram of horizontal bars along the price scale, split into up and down volume, drawn between the anchor and the latest candle. A red line marks the point of control (POC) and stronger-shaded rows are the value area. Value area lines are in the Style tab, hidden until you tick them.

How Pravex works it out

Pravex finds the anchor time on the chart’s own candles. For Session, Week, Month, Quarter, Year and Decade it is the start of the calendar period that holds the last candle (UTC, weeks from Monday). For Highest High, Lowest Low and Highest Volume it looks at the last Length candles and takes the one with the highest high, the lowest low or the biggest volume.
Auto picks the calendar period from your candle size: any intraday candle uses Session, a daily candle uses Month, candles up to 10 days use Quarter, up to 60 days use Year, and longer candles use Decade.
It reads smaller candles from the anchor to the end, choosing the first of 1, 5, 15, 30 and 60 minutes, 4 hours and 1 day that gives fewer than 5,000 candles. The price range is cut into rows (a fixed row count divides it into that many rows, a fixed row height makes every row that many ticks tall) and each small candle’s volume is shared over the rows it covers, as up volume if it closed at or above its open and down volume if not.
The POC is the row with the most total volume. The value area grows out from it, adding the bigger of the next row above and below, until it holds the chosen share of the volume.

Settings

Setting	Default	What changing it does
Start point	Auto	Where the profile starts. Auto follows your candle size. The calendar choices restart the profile at the start of the current session, week, month, quarter, year or decade. Highest High, Lowest Low and Highest Volume start at a candle found among the last few.
Length	20	How many recent candles to search for the high, the low or the biggest volume. Only the three highest and lowest choices use it, calendar starts ignore it. A longer length reaches further back and gives a longer profile.
How rows are sized	Number Of Rows	Chooses between a fixed number of rows (the anchored range is divided into that many) and a fixed row height in ticks.
Rows (or ticks per row)	24	The row count in fixed-count mode, or the ticks in each row in fixed-height mode. More rows give a finer but noisier picture. Because the height is rounded up to a whole tick, you can get fewer rows than you asked for.
Bar style	Up/Down	Up/Down draws the up part and the down part of each row, Total draws one bar, Delta draws up minus down and colours it by the winning side. The POC and value area always come from total volume.
Share in the value area	70	The share of all volume, in percent, that the value area must hold. A lower share gives a narrower area around the POC, 100 covers every row. It accepts 0 to 100.
Histogram width	30	How much of the box between the start point and the last candle the longest bar may fill. A drawing setting only.
Placement	Left	Whether the bars grow from the left edge (the start point) or the right edge (the latest candle).

How traders read it

An anchored profile answers the question of where the volume has been since an important event. Anchoring to the highest high of the last 20 candles shows where trading happened on the way up and how much of it sits below the current price. Anchoring to the lowest low does the same for a drop.

Picture a made-up case: you anchor to the start of the month and the POC is at 105 while price is at 112. Traders then look at whether price can hold above the value area high, or fall back toward the POC. The anchor choice matters more than any other setting, so try two or three.

When it misleads

The anchor moves. With Highest High and the other candle anchors, a new extreme in the last Length candles moves the start of the profile, so the whole histogram changes shape. With a calendar anchor the profile resets at the start of each new period and is thin for the first few candles. Volume is spread evenly across each small candle’s range and split by candle direction, so the detail is approximate.

Questions and answers

What does auto anchored mean?

You do not click a start point. Pravex picks it from a rule, such as the start of the current month or the highest high of the last 20 candles, and redraws the profile whenever that start changes.

Does the start point move?

Yes. A new highest high, lowest low or biggest volume inside the Length window shifts the start of the profile, and a calendar start moves when a new period begins. Volume in closed candles never changes.

What does Auto pick on a 1-hour chart?

Session, so the profile starts at 00:00 UTC of the current day and runs to the latest candle. On a daily chart Auto picks the start of the month.

Why is there no gold chart on this page?

Spot gold carries no exchange volume, so the profile would have nothing to add up. This page draws bitcoin from Hyperliquid. For gold, the Market Profile TPO page counts time at each price.