We can see most of the trading took place in the middle. We can see that the upper and lower areas have relatively fewer contracts traded. We get a very different view of the market when we look at the volume profile. With traditional technical analysis, we’d be looking at the above chart and considering the swing high and swing low as possible support and resistance. That’s why we can trade a million futures contracts in a market like the E-mini S&P500, put in decent swings in both directions, and end up close to where we started. On most days, in the majority of futures markets, trading is primarily driven by short term speculation. It is key for traders to display volume profile information in an easily visible space on your trading workstation. Most Traders use volume profile to identify support and resistance trading levels. Volume Profile plots a vertical histogram to reveal dominant and significant price levels based on volume. Traders should adopt the volume profile indicator to their trading style. For day trading without charts, we are mostly interested in the total number of futures contract volume traded at each price for the current trading session.Īn alternative volume profile technique divides the total volume into either buy volume or sell volume and then makes that information easily visible to the trader. This trading indicator is known as volume profile. So, if we aren’t using charts, what are we using? Quite simply, we are looking at the amount of volume traded at each price.

Charts, however, tend to be a little misleading in terms of where other traders’ positions are. They are conditioned to see charts as the start and the end of trading.

Is day trading without charts an amazing feat that can only be achieved by the elite few? Or is it possible that it’s something quite straightforward? The bottom line is that most retail day traders start learning to trade from books, courses, or internet forums where the main focus is on chart reading and technical analysis.

Free volume profile indicator