For traders who are done being inconsistent and want a real process.
Value Area and POC
Where the market agreed on price yesterday shapes how it behaves today. Build the value area yourself, then drag price in and out of it and watch the auction respond.
The idea in one minute
Think of a night market. Most of the business happens in a busy stretch in the middle. Out at the edges, a few people wander through and keep walking.
A session works the same way. The POC, short for point of control, is the single busiest price: the price where the most volume traded. The value area is the range around it where most of the day's volume traded, usually taken as about 70 percent. Its top is the value area high, VAH, and its bottom is the value area low, VAL.
Inside value, buyers and sellers agree. Outside value, price is testing: will anyone do business up here, or down here? The answer is either acceptance, and value moves, or rejection, and price comes back. That one question drives most of what you see the next day.
Build the value area
The bars on the right are the volume profile: each row is a small band of prices, and the longer the row, the more volume traded there. Start at the POC. Look at the row just above and the row just below, and add whichever traded more. Repeat until the area holds the percentage you want. Watch it grow.
Go deeper: why 70 percent
It comes from statistics. In a bell shaped distribution, about 68 percent of everything sits within one standard deviation of the middle. Traders rounded it to 70 and it stuck. It is a convention, not a law of the market, and you can change it in most platforms.
Platforms also differ slightly in how they add rows. Some compare one row at a time, like this page, and some compare two rows at a time. The edges can land a tick or two apart. What matters is using the same setting every day, so yesterday and today are measured the same way.
Drag price in and out of value
Yesterday's profile is on the left, with its value area shaded. Drag today's open anywhere: inside value, above it, below it. Then choose how the market treats prices outside value, and watch the first hours play out.
What is the auction telling you?
Five mornings. Each shows yesterday's value and today's first hours. Pick what the auction is saying.
How I use it
Yesterday's value high, value low and POC are on my chart before the open. The first question every morning is simple: are we opening inside value or outside it?
Inside, I expect rotation, and I am careful about chasing moves in the middle of it. Outside, I watch the first test of the old value edge. If it holds and price builds time out there, value is moving and I want to be with it. If price falls back inside, I start thinking about the other side of value.
Checkpoint
Checkpoint4 quick questions on value
What is the value area?
Price opens inside yesterday's value and stays there. What do you expect?
Price trades above the value high, finds no new business and falls back inside. What often comes next?
How do you know price has been accepted outside value?
Recap
- The POC is the busiest price. The value area is where about 70 percent of the volume traded around it.
- Inside value, expect rotation between the edges.
- Outside value, the market is testing. After a rejection, price often travels back through value to the other side. Acceptance moves value.
- Acceptance is time and volume, not one spike.
This is the core of auction market theory, and the Mentorship is where you learn to trade it.
The Mentorship
You just learned to read value. Now learn to trade it.
Knowing it is one thing. Trading it live is where most traders fall apart: they hesitate, enter late, get stopped out, and watch the move go without them.
The free lessons show you what the market is doing. The Mentorship teaches you how to trade it.
You can keep piecing it together from free videos for months, jumping between strategies. Or you can learn it properly, in order, with me in your corner.
- Direct access to me. Stuck on a setup, a level or a losing streak? Ask me directly in the Discord. No more guessing alone.
- The complete Mentorship course. Not the free intro. My full process, step by step: how I read the day, plan my levels, and enter, manage and exit my trades.
- The Discord community. Traders working the same process as you. You're not doing this alone anymore.
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