The TPO concept, also known as “Market Profile”, was formulated by J. Peter Steidlmayer in the 1980s. TPO helps traders visualize the progression of prices as the profile’s period evolves and the concentration of prices at specific levels over the period. You can also use the corresponding values from the accompanying Volume Profile to corroborate the significance of each TPO level with its volume:
The left profile in the chart above is TPO. The profile on the right is the optional Volume Profile. Each TPO profile represents a fixed daily, weekly, or monthly period. You can define the profile’s horizontal (time) and vertical (price) granularity from the indicator’s settings.
The size of the time blocks dividing each period determines the profile’s horizontal granularity. You can choose a block size between five minutes and four hours. Each successive time block is associated with a letter that signifies when it occurred in a period. The profile first uses uppercase letters from A to Z, then uses lowercase letters if more are required. “A” blocks appear for each price level visited during the first time block, “B” blocks appear for levels with price activity during the second time block, and so on.
The size of each row in the profile defines its vertical granularity. The indicator can determine the row size automatically, or you can manually specify the number of ticks per row.
A companion Session TPO indicator, which splits profiles across configurable sessions instead of absolute periods, is also available.
Users with Premium and higher-tier plans will find both versions of the TPO indicator in the “Technicals/Profiles” section of the “Indicators, Metrics & Strategies” window.
Splitting and merging profiles
You can interactively split or merge individual profiles, which is particularly handy when you want to examine specific regions on the chart with different levels of detail. To use this feature, right-click a profile’s blocks and select the appropriate action from the contextual menu. Note this feature is not available for the Session TPO.
Distributing blocks across a period
Instead of visualizing aggregated blocks in a single profile, you can distribute them across each time block throughout the profile’s period. This functionality can help you understand the calculation of a profile’s constituent blocks and the flow of price activity over time. To enable this view, use the “Split by blocks” checkbox in the indicator’s “Settings/Style” tab.
Key levels
You can use the checkboxes in the “Settings/Style” tab to allow the profile to display several key price levels, including VAH, VAL, midpoint, open, close, single prints, and poor high/low.
Our Help Center pages on TPO and the Session TPO provide information to help you make the most of these indicators.
We hope you find this highly-requested feature as useful as we think it’ll be, and please do keep sending us your feedback and suggestions so we can make the platform the best it can be. We build TradingView for you, and we’re always keen to hear your thoughts.
— Team TradingView