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If Steidlmayer co created Market Profile then who created Volume Profile? I know to some this is a insignificant question but I like to do a bit of history on the tools that I use to better understand their origins and improvements over time.
Understanding who what and why helps me out. Knowing a bit of the inner mechanisms of a tool gives me a better grasp on what it is and how its to be used.
The creators of market profile and volume profile are the same. TPO's were used as a proxy for volume when computers weren't prevalent. The idea that time spent at a given price = volume. With the advent of computers and the ability to count and display volume intraday we don't have to guess by using TPO's, we get the real volume profile information.
Trading: The one I'm creating in the present....Index Futures mini/micro, ZF
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Back in the day on the floor trading in the pits traders did not have solid idea how much volume was being traded. They wrote down their own volume on paper cards and turned it in at the end of the day. Then looking back they could see how much volume was traded. Hence Market Profile. Because they DID have time and price during the day. Volume Profile is just the nature grow of market profile.
The "card"....
Ron
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...My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy...
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Very interesting detail there. It makes sense why they would use time back then. Being that volume would be delayed they needed something that was readily available to them to measure that Bid/Ask activity. Which was TIME.
Simply meaning the more Time that Price would spend at an area would indicate some type of activity was taking place there.
I think they are the same and I have heard from one of Mr. Staidlmayer's friends that Volume Profile was just a name to allow TOS to NOT pay trademark or copyright fees.
These replies are both very good. The original Market Profile showed the areas of price that were visited within 30 minute segments (because there was no real volume information, and 30 minutes was a pretty small period of time when they didn't have tick-by-tick computer feeds. -- Also, pit traders had to turn in their trade cards every 30 minutes, so that was when the data was available.) These gave "TPO's" (Time Price Opportunities) that built up a profile of trading at different price levels that is very similar to the Volume Profile.
When we had reliable trade-by-trade volume data, the same basic idea could be refined using the volume transacted at each price level. Many people will still use both the price-only Market Profile alongside Volume Profile, extracting similar information from each.
(The original question was about who created Volume Profile as opposed to the original Market Profile -- I confess that I am not sure, and do not have time right now to do a good search on it. Perhaps Jim Dalton, author of "Markets in Profile" and "Mind Over Markets" comes to mind. I know he has used both in his webinars. I am not sure who was the first one to do it.)
Once we had good volume information, plotting the volume transacted at each price was a natural application of the basic profile idea, so it was an evolution more than a revolution.
Volume profile existed long before ThinkOrSwim, which is only a few years old, and it is different, although they will render fairly similar profiles of trader activity at different price levels. Market Profile is based on whether a given price level was visited, even once, during the trading day. Volume Profile shows the actual volume transacted at each price level.
It is true that the CME has the rights to the price-based Market Profile, and it does even today extract a fee from platforms that use it (which they generally pass on to their users.) Volume profile, which many find more useful, does not have any such issues.
TOS has a "TPO" profile indicator, which is the same as Market Profile but is not limited to 30-minute bars, and a "Monkey Bars" bar type, which is standard time-based Market Profile. I don't know how they deal with intellectual property issues, other than the fact that they are not fixed on 30-minute time spans. TOS also has a Volume Profile, which gets around the CME property rights simply by being based on different statistics, as are all Volume Profiles.
This is what may become "The Grail" for newbies, as well as a place for heated debates.
What I envision is a sticky thread where a consensus can be formed, on "what really matters".
Example:
Volume Profile: Thread One
Market Geometry: …
Fastest answer...Markets are an auction. Auctions seek to balance buyers with sellers. Balance and imbalance creates slow or sharp moves to facilitate trade.
1. It is the price level where the most trading occurred at a given moment. The Point Of Control or POC.
2. 70% of the range around that creates Value Area High and Value Area Low, which can also be important levels or VAH VAL
3. Low Volume Nodes or LVN - within that range can also be important levels.