Naked POC

A POC that price has not come back to. The idea is simple; what makes it usable is being precise about when the line stops.

What a POC is first

Inside a single bar, volume is not spread evenly across prices. Some price traded far more than the others. That price is the bar's POC — its point of control.

On a footprint bar you can see it directly: it is the longest row. OrderVane fills and outlines it in gold with a star marker, so you do not have to compare numbers to find it. See how to read a footprint bar for the rest of the ladder.

A POC is a statement about one bar, not about the session. Session POCs and volume-profile POCs are different objects built over a longer window; the term is shared but the scope is not.

What makes it "naked"

A POC is naked when price has not traded back to it since the bar closed.

That is the whole definition. It is a fact about what has happened, not a forecast about what will. The bar agreed most heavily on that price, then left, and has not been back.

You will see three names for the same thing:

• Naked POC — the most common in order-flow tools
• Virgin POC — same meaning, more common in Market Profile writing
• Untouched POC — plain description, used when a tool avoids jargon

They refer to the same object. OrderVane labels the line nPOC.

What the line looks like

When the extension is on, OrderVane takes the POC of each closed bar and draws a dotted line to the right from that bar, in the same gold as the POC cell itself. Sharing the colour is deliberate — the line and the cell are the same fact, seen at two scales.

The line carries a small nPOC label. Only naked lines are labelled; faded ones are not, because at that point the label is clutter rather than information.

When the line stops

This is where the concept becomes usable or useless, so OrderVane is specific about it.

A line stops at the bar where price touched that level — meaning the bar's high-to-low range covered the price. Wicks count. From that bar the line no longer extends; it drops to a faint version for a few more bars and is then removed entirely.

• Touch, not close. A bar that only wicked through the level has still traded there.
• How long the faint version lasts is set by Level lifecycle fade bars (3 by default). Set it to 0 to have touched levels disappear on the next bar.
• The whole lifecycle can be turned off with Level lifecycle enabled, in which case lines are not retired at all.

Why fade rather than delete? A level that was just retested is often still worth seeing for a few bars — you want to know it was there and that price reached it. Deleting it the instant it is touched removes the evidence that anything happened.

Turning it on

Naked POC extension is off by default — it draws one line per closed bar, so on a crowded chart it is a lot of ink, and that should be your choice rather than ours.

It is also in the on-chart quick menu under LEVELS, alongside the other level families — zero print levels, unfinished auction and stacked imbalance zones. Switching them on one at a time is easier than all at once, because at first the lines look alike.

Naked POC extension is part of OrderVane Pro, which is where footprint cells live.

Honest limits

• It is bar-scoped. Every closed bar has a POC, so on a long chart there are many candidates. OrderVane keeps the most recent ones and drops the oldest when the registry gets large.
• Touch is geometric. The test is whether a bar's range covered the price. It does not ask how long price stayed there or how much traded — only whether it reached.
• A naked POC is a description, not a signal. OrderVane marks where the level is and whether price has returned. What that means for a trade is your call — the tool does not place orders and does not tell you which way to go.

Related

• Session levels — the session-scoped cousin: previous-session VAH, VAL and POC
• Volume shelf — a level defined by volume share rather than by one bar
• Stacked imbalance zones — consecutive one-sided rows forming a band
• Zero print — a row where one side of the book printed nothing
• Unfinished auction — both sides still trading at a bar's extreme
• How to read a footprint bar — where the POC comes from, and the rest of the cell language
• All docs