The Playbook 09: value area 40% vs 70%

A bar's value area is the band around its POC that holds a chosen share of the bar's volume. Some traders draw it at 70%, some at 40%. This video builds both boxes on the same bars of one ES day, measures every return the same way, and then counts 23 days. It says what the percentage changes, not where price goes next.

Building it

Inside one bar, volume is not spread evenly across prices. The row that traded the most is the bar's POC. Start at the POC row, compare the row just above with the row just below, add the bigger one, and repeat until the band holds the chosen share. Rows are whole rows, so the band can hold a little more than the share you asked for.

The POC does not depend on the percentage. Only the height of the band changes, and a 40% band always sits inside the 70% band of the same bar. Across 23 ES days of 1-hour bars, the 70% band was about half the bar's height and the 40% band about a quarter.

The playbook

1. Use bars of 15 minutes or longer (1-hour bars here). Pick the percentage and write it down.
2. After the bar closes, wait for price to leave the box — a later bar that trades entirely above or below it.
3. The return is the first bar after that whose high-to-low range reaches the box. Wicks count.
4. At the return bar's close, write one word: held (closed back outside, on the side price left from), inside (closed inside the box) or through (closed past the far edge).

The real day — 3 November 2026

ES December 2026 (EPZ26), 1-hour bars, 3-tick rows (OrderVane's default footprint row size), times in Chicago (CT).

Same bars, same returns, same closes. The only thing that changed was the percentage. Bar B's "held" at 40% was decided by a single tick: the box bottom was 7609.50 and the close 7609.25.

Twenty-three days, counted the same way

12 October to 11 November 2026, 506 one-hour bars. The same steps were run with the value area box, and again with a control box: the same number of rows, placed in the middle of the bar, ignoring volume.

The percentage moved returns between inside and through. The share that held was about the same at 40% and 70%, and a box drawn in the middle of the bar, with no volume in it, held about as often as the value area.

These are 23 days of one market, one bar size and one row size, and "held" is measured at one close. A number like 55% is a count of what happened. It is not a signal and it is not a promise.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:25 Today
• 0:43 Building the value area
• 1:31 What the percentage changes
• 2:00 The playbook steps
• 2:54 A real day: 3 November 2026
• 4:23 23 days of data
• 5:17 Counts, not signals
• 6:00 The takeaway

About this video

The narration is AI-generated (Google NotebookLM) from a source document we wrote. The chart data are the trades Quantower recorded for ES; the value areas are computed with the same code OrderVane uses. The product screen at the end is a real capture of OrderVane Pro v1.15 on ES 1-hour bars (a different day), with Footprint value area style set to Both; the default is dotted lines. In OrderVane Pro the share is the Value Area percent setting, also in the quick panel's STYLE group as Value area %. The product is on OrderVane Pro. The previous episode is The Playbook 08: taken or pulled.