Volume Profile, POC & Value Area Explained
Most explainers stop at the definitions. Point of Control is the price with the most volume. Value Area is the range around it. Value Area High and Low are its edges. True, and not very useful on its own — knowing what something is isn’t the same as knowing what to do when you see it on your chart.
This is the operational version: where these numbers actually come from, what they’re telling you when price interacts with them, and — because a fair number of specific-sounding statistics circulate around this topic — which of those numbers are real.
Table of contents
- Where 70% actually comes from
- Acceptance versus rejection
- Why price tends to reference POC
- The statistics you should be skeptical of
- Where this gets tedious by hand
Where 70% actually comes from
You’ll see it stated everywhere: the value area contains “about 70%” of a session’s trading activity. It’s worth being precise about what kind of fact that is, because it changes how you should use it.
It is not a prediction. It’s a construction rule — a parameter someone chose when defining how to draw the value area, the same way you’d choose a moving-average length. Volume profile traces back to Market Profile, developed by J. Peter Steidlmayer at the Chicago Board of Trade in the 1980s. In his own account of building the method, Steidlmayer describes grouping market activity into a bell-curve distribution, where “the first standard deviation… where the majority of activity takes place (68%) would represent value.” That’s the origin of the number: 68–70% is roughly what one standard deviation captures in a normal distribution, and Steidlmayer used that statistical convention to define where “value” starts and ends.
So when a chart shows a value area at 70%, it isn’t telling you “there’s a 70% chance of X.” It’s telling you “this is the price range the tool was built to treat as the well-negotiated middle of the day’s activity, using the same logic as one standard deviation.” That’s a meaningfully different, more modest claim — and a more useful one, because it tells you exactly what you’re looking at.
[Screenshot: SS-POCVA-01 — labeled profile showing POC, VAH, VAL on a bell-shaped distribution]
Acceptance versus rejection
The operational question isn’t “where is the value area,” it’s “what does price do at its edges, and outside it.” Auction market theory — the framework underneath Market Profile — gives this a specific vocabulary: acceptance and rejection.
When price pushes outside the prior value area and stays there long enough to build a new distribution — meaning trading actually continues at those new levels rather than immediately snapping back — that’s acceptance. The market has negotiated a new price as fair, at least for now. When price pushes outside and then reverses quickly back inside the old value area, without building anything new out there, that’s rejection — often called an “excess” in Market Profile terms. The push outside wasn’t accepted as fair value; it was explored and abandoned.
This distinction matters more than the raw price level. A breakout that gets accepted (new value builds outside the old range) behaves very differently from a breakout that gets rejected (price snaps back), even though both start by “breaking” the same level.
High-volume areas within a profile behave like magnets — price tends to spend more time there because more participants agreed those levels were fair, which is definitionally what a high-volume node is. Low-volume areas, by contrast, are places where the market moved through quickly without much agreement forming — price tends to cross them faster, because there wasn’t much negotiation happening there to begin with. Neither of these is a rule about the future; both are descriptions of what already happened, which is what a volume profile actually shows you.
[Screenshot: SS-POCVA-02 — side-by-side acceptance vs. rejection example]
One practical habit that follows directly from this framework, without needing any invented statistic: note where the new session opens relative to the prior value area. An open inside the old value area suggests the market still broadly agrees with yesterday’s sense of fair price — you’d expect more balance, more two-way trade. An open outside it is a more meaningful signal on its own: the market is starting the day already disagreeing with where value was, which tends to produce a more directional, less balanced session. Neither guarantees a specific outcome, but it’s a genuinely useful piece of context to note before the session develops, and it costs nothing beyond looking at where the open printed relative to yesterday’s range.
Why price tends to reference POC
There’s a reasonable, non-mystical explanation for why traders watch POC so closely: it’s the price at which the most negotiation actually happened. If you’re trying to judge whether the current price is “cheap” or “expensive” relative to recent activity, the point where the most volume traded is a natural reference — it represents the level the market spent the most time agreeing on.
This is a logical explanation for why traders use POC as a reference point, not a statistical claim about how often price returns to it. Those are two different kinds of statements, and it’s worth keeping them separate.
The statistics you should be skeptical of
While researching this article, we ran into several specific-sounding numbers attached to Market Profile and volume profile concepts: a claimed “72% probability” that price revisits the prior POC when the next session opens inside the old value area; an “80% Rule” with a stated “67% accuracy”; a claim that combining Market Profile with volume analysis “increases trade-location accuracy by 25–40%.”
We could not find a disclosed methodology, sample size, or named study behind any of these — they trace to a single source with vague sourcing (“backtesting data,” no author, no published dataset). That’s the same pattern we flagged and rejected in an earlier piece about liquidity sweeps: a precise-sounding number that gets repeated because it sounds authoritative, not because anyone can point to where it came from. We’re not using any of those figures here, and we’d treat them skeptically anywhere else you see them too.
Where this gets tedious by hand
Tracking one session’s value area by eye is straightforward. Tracking whether value is shifting up or down session over session — whether yesterday’s value area held, got partially accepted, or got fully rejected — across more than one instrument, is where doing this manually starts to take real, sustained attention.
One way to handle that is a tool that auto-anchors and updates the profile as new sessions form, rather than redrawing it by hand each day. SSM IQ Volume Activity Map does this — POC, VAH, VAL and the surrounding volume structure, kept current without manual redrawing. That’s not a claim that it predicts where price goes next; it’s a tool for seeing the same acceptance/rejection picture this article describes, without doing the bookkeeping yourself.
Whatever you use to track it, the mechanics don’t change: the value area is a well-defined range, not a probability, and what matters is what price actually does when it gets there.
Related SSM IQ Tools: SSM IQ Volume Activity Map Related Articles: Why Your Order Block Failed: The Volume Context Nobody Checks Source: Steidlmayer, J.P. “Steidlmayer on Markets: Trading with Market Profile” (2nd ed.), Chapter 2.
SSM IQ tools are analytical software, not investment advice. Trading involves substantial risk. Author: SSM IQ Research · We Are Tech Sp. z o.o. · Updated: 2026-08-16