Volume Profile Dynamic | NT8

Included in All Access: one membership gives you this tool plus the full HTech NinjaTrader 8 suite.

An enhanced volume profile you draw anywhere on the chart

A time-based chart tells you where price went. It does not tell you where the trading actually happened. A volume profile turns a piece of the chart on its side and measures how much volume traded at every price, so the prices the market kept coming back to stand out from the ones it passed straight through.

That is where the levels come from. The Point of Control is the price that traded the most volume, the fairest price in the region. The value area is the band around it, by default 70 percent of the region’s volume, where the bulk of the business got done. Its high and low edges are where the market stopped agreeing, which is why traders watch them when price comes back.

Volume Profile Dynamic puts that on whatever part of the NinjaTrader 8 chart you point at. Click where you want it to start, click where you want it to end, and the profile builds inside. Not a session, not a date range, just the move you are actually looking at.

Draw as many as you want

Every region you draw gets its own profile. Put one around this week’s rally and another around the consolidation before it, and compare where the volume actually sat in each. Each region keeps its own levels, its own summary, and its own settings, and a region that scrolls partway off the left edge keeps drawing rather than disappearing.

Choose how precisely it is measured

The profile can be built three ways. Minute is the default and is the one to leave it on: it splits each minute’s volume across the prices it traded at, and it is quick even on a long chart. Tick is the most exact, building from every trade, at the cost of a slower load. Bar uses the chart’s own bars, which is the lightest of the three.

Read the histogram, then the levels

The histogram shows how much volume traded at each price inside the region you drew. The Point of Control is the fattest row. The value area brackets it, and the region’s own high, low, and midpoint frame it. A move you drew a box around becomes a set of levels you can trade against.

Keep the levels that matter, drop the ones that do not

Right-click a region and everything is there: show or hide the histogram, the POC, the value areas, the high, the low, the midpoint and the summary. Levels can be extended near, just past the region, or far, running all the way across the chart, and you pick which levels get extended rather than all of them. The histogram can sit on either side of the region, and a region can be locked, duplicated, or saved as a template once you have it how you like it.

How Dynamic differs from Sessions and Composite

All three build the same profile from the same volume, and the only difference is what decides the range. Sessions cuts the chart at every session boundary. Composite takes one continuous stretch that you dial in. Dynamic takes whatever you draw, which makes it the one to reach for when the thing you want to understand does not line up with a clock or a calendar.

Good fit for

• Profiling a swing, a range, a consolidation, or a single day’s move, exactly as drawn.
• Comparing two or three regions side by side on the same chart.
• Chart questions whose boundaries are set by price action rather than by the clock.