Session Volume Profile Indicator

What it shows

A box for each day, with horizontal bars inside it along the price scale. Each bar is split into up and down volume. A red line marks that day’s point of control (POC), and the stronger-shaded rows are that day’s value area. The value area lines and the developing lines are in the Style tab, hidden until you tick them.

How Pravex works it out

The profile is rebuilt for whole days around the stretch you are looking at. It reads 1-minute candles (30-minute candles when the chart is daily or longer) and moves to a coarser size if the stretch would need more than 20,000 of them.
Candles are grouped by their UTC date. The markets charted in Pravex trade around the clock, so a session is one UTC day, from 00:00 to 24:00.
For each day the price range from that day’s low to its high 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). Each small candle’s volume is shared over the rows between its low and high in proportion to the overlap. A candle that closed at or above its open counts as up volume, any other as down volume.
The day’s POC is the row with the most total volume. The value area grows from the POC by adding the bigger of the row above and the row below until it holds the chosen share of the day’s volume.

Settings

Setting	Default	What changing it does
Session split (not shown)	All	Kept in saved layouts but not shown in the Inputs tab. Pravex splits by UTC day either way, so both choices draw the same profile.
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 each day’s 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.
How rows are sized	Number Of Rows	Chooses between a fixed number of rows (the price range of each day is divided into that many) and a fixed row height in ticks (a wide range then gets more rows).
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.
Carry POC line right	off	Draws the POC line on to the right until a later candle trades at that price, or to the edge of the chart if none does. Handy for seeing which old POCs have not been revisited.
Carry value area high right	off	The same extension for the value area high line.
Carry value area low right	off	The same extension for the value area low line.
Histogram width	70	How much of each day’s box the longest bar may fill. A drawing setting only.
Placement	Left	Whether the bars grow from the left or the right edge of each day’s box.

How traders read it

Compare today’s profile with yesterday’s. When today’s POC sits inside yesterday’s value area the market is often called balanced, and when it jumps outside it the market is said to be looking for a new price. An extended POC from a past day is read as a level price may come back to.

Suppose yesterday’s value area (numbers invented) ran from 98 to 104 with a POC at 101, and today opens at 106. A trader might watch for 104 to hold as support, and treat a close back under it as a sign the move was weak. That is a way of reading it, not a rule.

When it misleads

Each day is cut at midnight UTC, which is a clean rule but not necessarily where your own trading day starts, so a move that spans midnight is split into two profiles. A day that has only just begun has few candles and a thin, unreliable profile. The up and down split follows each small candle’s direction, and volume is spread evenly across each candle’s range, so treat the fine detail as approximate.

Questions and answers

What counts as a session on the Session Volume Profile?

One UTC day, midnight to midnight. Pravex charts markets that trade around the clock, so there is no separate morning or evening session to pick.

What is the difference between the Session and the Visible Range profile?

The visible range profile makes one histogram for whatever is on screen. The session profile makes one per day, so the picture does not change when you scroll.

Why does today’s profile keep changing?

Today’s day is still open, so new candles keep adding volume and the POC can move. Past days do not change.

Is there a gold version of the session profile?

Spot gold carries no exchange volume, so a volume profile has nothing to add up there. This page draws bitcoin instead. For gold, the Session TPO page counts time at each price.