TPO (Market Profile)

TPO builds the classic Market Profile: for every bar, a letter is stamped onto each price row that bar traded through. Rows visited often grow wide; rows the market passed through once stay a single character. What the profile measures is time at price, not volume — which is what separates it from Volume Profile sitting beside it in the Add menu. A price can hold size in one print, or hold the market for an hour; those are different facts, and this is the one that shows the second. The shape is the point. A balanced session builds a bell around a middle it keeps returning to; a trend session builds a thin, elongated profile that barely revisits anything.

Adding the indicator

Open the chart settings panel and use the Add button in the Indicators section. One TPO instance can be active per chart.

What it draws

Element	What it is
Letters	One per bar per row touched. Each period gets the next letter, so the alphabet reads as the session’s clock.
POC	The Point of Control — the row with the most letters, in yellow.
Value Area	The band around the POC holding the bulk of the session’s time, its letters picked out and the area shaded.
Single prints	Rows touched exactly once — the thin patches a market usually revisits.
Initial Balance	The range of the session’s opening window.
Naked levels	POC, Value Area and single-print levels from earlier sessions that price has not traded back through since. They persist until it does.

Settings

Setting	Options	What it controls
Type	Regular (default), Fixed Range, Fixed Interval	Recalculate every N periods, profile one explicit window, or profile a recurring daily time window.
Period / Unit	1 day (default)	How often Regular starts a fresh profile — in minutes, days, weeks or months.
Range start	Blank by default	Where a Fixed Range profile begins. Blank means the most recent session.
Interval start / end	13:00–17:00 ET	The recurring window Fixed Interval profiles each day.
Row size	Auto (default), Custom	Auto sizes rows from the instrument’s own recent range, aiming for a readable profile on any symbol. Custom sets the row height in ticks.
Prev Sessions / Ranges / Black Box	On, on, off	How much of the completed sessions to the left stays drawn.
SP Lines, FR Marker, Tick Levels		The single-print lines, the Fixed Range start marker, and per-row gridlines.
Hide distance %	5	Naked levels further than this from the last price are hidden, so only the ones in play are drawn.
Text, Font, Colours		Letter size and family, and a colour per element.

Reading notes

Auto row size targets a row count, not a tick count. A fixed tick height that reads well on a penny-tick equity collapses a quarter-tick futures profile into three rows; sizing from the instrument’s own range keeps the profile legible on both.
POC and single prints appear from the fifth period. Before that there is not enough of a profile for either to mean anything, so the letters draw alone.
On daily and higher charts the profile is a composite: one bar is one period, so a blank Range start profiles the last twenty bars — roughly a month on a daily chart — one letter per day.
A completed session’s naked levels appear once the next session opens, since a level only counts as untouched after the session that made it has ended.
Replay is supported, including historically correct naked levels at any point in the day.

​Adding the indicator

​What it draws

​Settings

​Reading notes

Adding the indicator

What it draws

Settings

Reading notes