Market Profile is more of a trading tool for short-term and intraday traders to visualize the market activity in the form of price distribution and take trading decisions based on the price distribution activity. In this tutorial, you will be learning how to implement the market profile trading process in your trading.
Here are the 5 major processes that will help improve your market profile chart reading like an expert.
1)Top-Down Analysis
2)Trade Preparation
3)Identifying Trade Location
4)Trade Management
5)Trade Monitoring
Top-Down Analysis
This is the phase where we get to know the overall idea about the ongoing trend across multiple timeframes(monthly, weekly, daily). The overall goal of Top-Down analysis is to get a 360-degree perspective on the markets. It includes observing the market profile chart, identifying the nuances, deriving the market context, and marking the short-term and intraday references on the market profile charts.
Top-Down analysis is all about collecting the data but it is not a buy/sell trade decision phase. Market-generated information is collected and organized in an orderly manner.
Top-Down analysis involves collecting market volatility information, upcoming economic events, earning announcements, ongoing market sentiments/new-based sentiments, and upcoming market holidays.
Trade Preparation
Trade Preparation is more of a mental game visualizing the possible auction scenarios based on the current trading context. It is more of a what-if scenario and hence one should prepare for at least 2-3 possible trading scenarios based on the current short-term context. In this phase, traders should start cultivating odd-based thinking based on the ongoing trading context and visual nuances.
For Example,
i)what if the market opens with a gap up/gap down
ii)what if the market opens inside the range and trades inside the range
iii)what if the market does look above/below the balance and fail/look below or above the balance and accelerates?
This phase is not prediction phase based but mentally conditioning the mindset to tackle any surprise the markets are likely to throw during the live market auction. so that trades can adapt and prepare themselves to tackle any challenging situations
Identifying Trade Location
This phase is the challenging phase for the market profile trader to identify a trade location where the trading opportunity comes with lower risk to initiate trades. Traders need immense patience to identify the trade location. Very few trading opportunities arise around the open and most of the best trading opportunities happen during the middle of the trading day. It is more of a waiting game.
Screentime experience plays a major role while identifying trade location. It is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Identifying Trade location involves
1)Observing the Auction around the open
2)Monitoring the Volume flow for the day
3)Understanding the Market Confidence
4)Observing Visual References
5)Observing auctions around Short term references/ Intraday references
6)Understanding trade inventory conditions.
Trading decisions are going to be dynamic as the trader has to immerse him/herself into the auction principles to stay focused not only on the price action but also on the intraday nuances, developing market profile structures to take objective trading decisions. Mental balancing is required to flexibly adapt and trade the uptrend/downtrend/sideways markets.
Trade Management
This is the trade execution phase where once the trading opportunity is identified one should be calibrating how big/small the trading opportunity is and what kind of trades to execute to control the risk
Here is a list of methods how traders can control their risk
- Placing a structural stop-loss
- Initiating Hedged trades for positional trading (Hedged Futures, Credit Spread, Debit spread) based on the trading opportunity
- If the holding positions are shorter one can consider trading with naked futures/ naked options trading.
- Stepping away from the trade if there are no trading odds in favor.
Trade Monitoring
Monitoring the trade for continuation is one of the key processes that differentiates professionals from other traders. It is not about monitoring for stop loss hit or target hit. It is all about reasoning whom we are competing with based on the market-generated information from the market profile.
Only traders who have a continuous market profile practice and better screen time experience can think in terms of odds and evaluate the odds of market reversals or continuation of the ongoing trend in the market.
Trade Monitoring involves continually observing the weaker hand and stronger hand activity through profile structures and trading nuances and thereby taking dynamic trading decisions about where to hold the positions, continue the trade, or even add to the winning trades.
If reversing the positions from long to short/short to long what are the underlying reasons behind that?
Hope this brief tutorial helps you to implement your trading process surrounding the market profile trading context.
nice article sir, it involves almost all HEADING/TITLES one must go through in details.