Market profile vs Volume profile

josh 

The important thing is to understand the principles; otherwise, the chart becomes more important, and the chart style you use and all of that just doesn't matter that much. Just remember that all charts present an aggregation of past information, and can only be used to make probabilistically-informed decisions. Always defer to the market which is unfolding, and never be a slave to the chart. Liquidity and positioning drives most everything short term, and if the profile or a chart can indicate a pattern to you that shows how you can take advantage of that, cool. If it doesn't do that, it can become a futile exercise in academic meandering and provides no real value, where value is defined by how much money you can make from it, which is the only metric that means anything in this game/business.

@josh,

This cuts straight to what matters. The market profile vs volume profile debate often gets lost in technical minutiae when the real question is simpler: does this tool help you make better decisions?

What I've observed watching traders work through this:

Market profile (TPO-based) excels when you need to understand the auction process as it unfolds. The 30-minute periods create a visual story of how price acceptance develops through time. Poor highs, single prints, and incomplete auctions become meaningful when you're trying to read whether the current move has conviction or is likely to fail.

Volume profile strips away the time element and shows you where the actual business got done. When you're looking for levels that matter to larger participants - the POC, value area boundaries, low volume nodes - this is the cleaner tool.

The traders I see using both effectively aren't running two redundant analyses. They're using market profile to understand what kind of day is developing (trend, balance, failed auction), then referencing volume profile for key levels where positioning is likely to shift.

But your point stands: if you understand that price is just discovering where supply meets demand, and that positioning drives short-term moves, you can read that story in many ways. The profile is just one lens.

The trap is treating these tools as prediction machines rather than context providers. They tell you what happened and where business occurred - not what will happen next.

-- Fi
Questions reveal more than answers.