The MarketDelta Blog

Market Profile charts are a specific chart type within MarketDelta. They provide the ability to display price activity in a novel way, with an emphasis on price distribution rather than time. For an introduction to Market Profile, click here.

Saving Screen Space

Not everyone has the luxury of multiple large computer monitors. And those who do will wish to get the most out of their screen space. When displaying Market Profile charts, it is often necessary to scroll through previous profiles to find where price found “value” and created a distribution, and to compare the current price distribution to prior distributions.

But as you can see above, a single day’s profile can take up a lot of room onscreen. Here, we fit only 2 full days of activity, and part of a third.

Here are some tips to get the most out of your screen’s real estate, if you wish to view as many profiles on the screen at the same time, without losing information,

Consider overlapping the volume profiles with the TPO profiles.

Double click the Profile chart to get the chart settings, and then configure the following option:

After making this change, your profile will resemble:

As you can see, you immediately start to see additional profiles on the screen. Even in this small picture, we’ve added about 30% more price distributions in the same screen space.

View Letters as Blocks

While some traders place an emphasis on the actual letter names that appear in the Profile brackets, others are content to just see the overall price distribution as a whole. Or it is sufficient for some to simply view the differing bracket colors. In these examples, the Letter Color is set to “Market Day” which provides a unique color for each segment of the day: morning, late morning, lunch, early afternoon, later afternoon and close.

If you are content not to see the actual letters, this setting can really open up some screen space, making it easy to view many profiles on one screen:

The result look like:

We are now viewing twice as many Profiles in the same screen space as the original setting. This makes it easy to see how the market changed value perceptions over time, without excessive scrolling.

Finally, hit the “Tab” key on your computer keyboard to turn off the Info Bar along the left edge of your chart to get even more room onscreen. (And this “Tab” again to turn it back on.)

You can also show the price scale on only one side of the chart rather than both sides, by visiting these same chart preferences.

Combining Distributions

A market may “bracket,” or “rotate,” for many days at a time before it breaks out to a new bracket in search of new value.

For this reason, it is often necessary to “merge” multiple Market Profiles into one “composite” profile to make it easy to identify these distributions. Consider the following market activity that takes place over several days:

The first three days had POCs at nearly the same price, with overlapping Profiles and nearly centered value areas across the same distribution.

On the fourth day, price broke out above this distribution and started rotating. The following day continued this rotation around the same area (though slightly higher).

One could interpret these five days as occurring across only two main distributions.

To create the two composite profiles, you need to merge the first three days, then split the fourth day and merge its two pieces with the profiles to the left and right of that day.

This is very easy to do.

First, right-click on the first profile and choose the following option:

Once you are done, you can do the same again, so the third day also becomes a part of that composite profile.

Then you will see the following, at which point you are ready to split the fourth day into two profiles by right-clicking on the fourth bracket of that profile, and using the same menu:

After you split, you see this:

Finally, you can merge the two profiles on the right together, and also merge the left profile with the first part of the split. Ultimately, you end up with the two distributions:

Shortcuts

You may find that you are quickly moving through a new Market Profile chart and create splits and merges frequently along the way. The right-click menu options may take up more time than you’d prefer when making many composites quickly.

Consider these shortcuts:

Merge with Control + Click

Hold down the Control button when you click on a profile, and it merges automatically to the profile on its right.

Split with Control + Shift + Click

Hold down both the Control and Shift buttons when clicking on a bracket to split a profile at that bracket.

Expand a Profile with Shift + Click

To toggle between a Profile distribution graphic and a conventional 30-minute bar chart display (also called “splitting”), just hold Shift and click on the Profile. This can make it easier to identify the exact bracket where you wish to split the Profile into a new Profile.

Zoom with Shift + Scroll Wheel

Hold down the Shift button while you use the mouse’s scroll wheel to zoom in and out on a chart. This is another way to convert Profile letters to blocks, if you scroll out far enough.

Processing Speed

You will notice that you can split and merge Profiles much more quickly if you are working with minute data rather than Tick data. Consider downloading 30-minute bars if you want to more quickly navigate the Profile chart when splitting and merging.

This video shows how to merge profiles together to create custom composite profiles but also still maintain some single daily profiles. The specific example it shows is how to show days 1 to 4 as single daily profiles, followed by days 5 to 8 as a single composite profile, followed by days 9 and 10 as single daily profile.

Click Here for the FAQ.

In Joe’s newsletters he uses MarketDelta for all the charting examples. He has some very nice charts and we often get inquiries on how to set your charts up like his. With Joe’s permission, he has made the charts available below.  Save the chart definition to your computer and then click File | Import | Chart Definition.  Full instructions on importing chart definitions can be found at this FAQ.

Monthly Profile Indicator Chart Definition (Right click, save as)  – More info on the indicator applied to this chart can be found here.

Joe can be contacted directly at:
jjmertes [at] josephjames.com
1.704.892.2537
www.josephjames.com