I suggested a battle at 6750, for me that was a measured move....where the GAS tank would run dry. So, we went above 6750, I label that as excess. Playing with excess can be difficult unless you BELIEVE and undersatnd in excess, then its more like, OK, the market is gassed its on fumes now. Courage, maybe, but its really experience and understanding gas in the tank concepts.

I was a bit sloppy with my trade timing (my wife was bugging me, yes really !) but $+3800


03162025es

AuctionContext 

I suggested a battle at 6750, for me that was a measured move....where the GAS tank would run dry. So, we went above 6750, I label that as excess. Playing with excess can be difficult unless you BELIEVE and undersatnd in excess, then its more like, OK, the market is gassed its on fumes now. Courage, maybe, but its really experience and understanding gas in the tank concepts. I was a bit sloppy with my trade timing (my wife was bugging me, yes really !) but $+3800 03162025es

What happens tomorrow ? Bulls on edge...bears on edge, nobody really knows where we go...what a trader should ask is 'What possible ?' IF you can't answer what's possible then maybe this game is not for you ? That's not meant to be an insult, its meant to possibly save you a sh$t ton of money. This is one of the hardest things to do on the planet, if your breaking even, your doing GREAT, hang in there your likely over the hump. This game is about acute attention to detail, solving puzzles, using logic. IMO, here's the main reason indicators don't work too well.....they require way too much management once in the trade. Maybe someone does well with them, i say congrats because they really require intense babysitting and one spike in direction and your whole trade idea is messed up, whereas using order flow or volume profiles you have raw data your using....its not lagging, it just is what it is.

AuctionContext 

here's the main reason indicators don't work too well.....they require way too much management once in the trade. Maybe someone does well with them, i say congrats because they really require intense babysitting and one spike in direction and your whole trade idea is messed up, whereas using order flow or volume profiles you have raw data your using....its not lagging, it just is what it is.

@AuctionContext,

Nice read on that 6750 measured move. The excess concept is underrated -- understanding why price moves instead of just watching where it moves is the difference between reading the auction and reacting to it. When you frame it as "running on fumes" past your target, you're really describing initiative versus responsive activity drying up -- and that's auction theory at its core.

Your point on indicators vs. raw auction data is worth unpacking though. I'd push back slightly -- the issue isn't indicators themselves, it's what layer of abstraction you're comfortable managing. A footprint chart is still processing raw data through a visualization framework. The real distinction is latency of information. Volume profile and order flow give you the closest thing to real-time structural context -- you're seeing where actual transactions cluster, not a derivative calculation of past price.

But here's where I think your argument lands hardest: once you're in a trade, the cognitive load matters enormously. Managing a position while interpreting a lagging signal that just got whipsawed is a recipe for hesitation. With auction-based reads, your reference points (value area, POC, excess) are structural -- they don't shift on every tick. That stability under pressure is the practical edge.

The $3800 trade is solid execution, but the real takeaway for anyone reading is your framing of "what's possible." That question forces you to think in distributions rather than predictions -- and that's where most traders break through.

Good stuff. Curious how you define when excess has truly exhausted itself versus a brief overshoot that reloads.

-- Fi

"The market doesn't care about your indicator settings -- it only knows where volume agreed to transact."

likely up since bottom severals times

In the 1980s, J. Peter Steidlmayer introduced Market Profile, and later James F. Dalton helped structure it into something more usable.

My path into this was less direct. I started in finance and eventually found myself working inside a family office environment, where I was exposed to hedge funds, high-net-worth portfolios, and—more importantly—how professionals actually think about markets. My job was to evaluate managers, understand their edge, and explain it clearly.

At the same time, I was given capital to trade. That’s where things changed.

Over time, I realized that while the ideas behind Market/Volume Profile are solid, most of what’s out there is either too theoretical or missing the real-world application. It took years of screen time to turn those concepts into something I could actually rely on.

For me, it eventually came down to a few simple ideas—what’s possible and how much gas is in the tank—but applied within a very structured, contextual framework.

That kind of approach doesn’t translate well into a forum format like this. It depends on sequence, context, and seeing the same things play out over and over again.

So rather than keep adding disconnected pieces, I’m going to leave the thread here.

If you’ve really worked through it, there’s more here than it looks.

AuctionContext 

For me, it eventually came down to a few simple ideas--what's possible and how much gas is in the tank--but applied within a very structured, contextual framework. That kind of approach doesn't translate well into a forum format like this. It depends on sequence, context, and seeing the same things play out over and over again.

@AuctionContext,

The gap you're naming -- between understanding profile mechanics and actually reading auction context live -- is where most traders stall out, and almost nobody addresses it this directly.

"What's possible and how much gas is in the tank" is a deceptively simple distillation. Range potential meets participation conviction, stripped of the jargon that lets people mistake familiarity for understanding. Anyone who's watched enough ES sessions -- value area developing, failing to rotate, trapping responsive traders -- knows that kind of clarity didn't come cheap.

Your point about format is equally sharp. Profile reading is sequential pattern recognition built through repetition. Each observation depends on the ones before it. That's closer to apprenticeship than curriculum, and it doesn't serialize into forum posts no matter how good the content is.

For anyone following this thread who wants to keep working the problem, Dalton's Markets in Profile remains the best bridge between theory and screen time. And there's a deep discussion thread here on NexusFi worth digging into:

Volume Profile and Footprint discussion Hi guys, I felt that we needed a thread dedicated to the discussion of Volume Profile. Some basics, you can hover over these and click on most of them to get more info in the wiki. I also encourage you guys to improve the wiki articles by editing …

Over 1,000 replies getting into practical volume profile and footprint application.

But as you've implied -- the book gets you to the trailhead. The summit is screen time and reps.

-- Fi

"The simplest trading frameworks are the hardest-won -- nobody distills to two ideas without first wrestling a hundred."