Session levels

A footprint bar tells you what happened inside one bar. Session levels tell you which prices the market has already spent time agreeing on.

Setting names are shown in English because that is how they appear in the Quantower settings window.

What gets drawn

OrderVane builds the previous session's volume profile and keeps it on the chart while today trades. It is on by default.

• The previous session's volume profile, drawn on the left of the session it belongs to — so you can see where that session built value and where it left gaps.
• VAH, VAL and POC extended to the right, across today, each labelled with its price. These are the lines you watch price approach.
• A touch band around each line — a few ticks either side (Session levels: band ticks, 3 by default).
• An absorption mark when a touch is met with unusual effort and price barely penetrates the band.

Why there is a band

Price rarely stops at an exact number. If "at the level" means the price to the tick, then almost nothing is ever at the level, and a tool built on that definition reports nothing useful.

The band is what "at the level" means in practice. It is also what the absorption mark measures against — the question is not did price touch the line, it is did price get into this band and fail to come out the other side. The mark always uses a 3-tick band, the default; if you change Session levels: band ticks, only the drawn band changes.

The absorption mark

When a touch is met with unusual effort and price barely penetrates the band, OrderVane draws a short bar over the level for as long as the touch lasted, with an absorption label on the side the touch came from and an arrow pointing that way.

It is an observation, not a forecast. It says: a lot of size traded at this level and price did not move through it. That is a description of what already happened. It is not a probability, not a signal, and not a recommendation — what you do with it is your decision.

Note what the arrow marks: the side the touch came from — absorption ▲ above the line when price came down into the level, absorption ▼ below it when price came up into it. The mark is drawn only when price did not push through, so every mark you see sits on a touch the level held — a touch that broke through gets no mark. Looking back, the marks will always look like a clean record; that is the definition at work, not evidence that absorption makes a level hold. Effort and result are two different measurements, and the mark exists precisely because they disagreed.

Choosing the session

By default OrderVane uses a manual session window of 08:00–13:30 in the exchange's own time zone (Session levels: session hours), which is the regular-hours session for many US futures. Leave the field blank to let OrderVane pick the session from the chart's session template instead.

Worth checking on your instrument. Many symbols expose only one combined session — overnight plus regular hours — in the platform, and automatic detection can only choose from what is there. If the profile you get covers far more hours than you expected, type the hours you want rather than relying on detection.

That caveat is not a limitation we hid in a footnote; it is the single most common reason a session profile looks wrong, and it is fixed by typing two times into one field.

Session levels: sessions back (1 by default) controls how many previous sessions are drawn. Extra sessions are drawn faded and without the touch band — the band marks the level being measured, and measuring against several days at once is not what it is for.

One object, drawn and measured

The profile that gets drawn and the levels that get measured are the same object. What you see and what the absorption mark judges can never drift apart.

That sounds obvious and is not. A tool that draws a profile from one calculation and judges touches from another will eventually show you a line in one place while measuring a level somewhere else — and you would have no way to notice.

If you change the value area percentage or the session hours, the profile rebuilds. You can also force a rebuild from the quick menu when the platform has filled in more history since it was first built.

Honest limits

• Session levels are Pro. They sit in the same tier as the footprint cells.
• Automatic session detection can only pick from what the platform exposes. If your symbol has one combined session, that is what detection will find. Type the hours instead.
• The absorption mark needs the touch to complete. It describes a touch that has happened, so it appears after the fact, not as price arrives.
• It is a description, not a signal. The mark says effort met a level and price did not move through. OrderVane does not place orders and does not tell you which way to go.

Related

• Absorption — the same observation made anywhere on the tape, not just at a level
• Volume shelf — levels built from a rolling window rather than a session
• Naked POC — the bar-scoped cousin of a session POC
• How to read a footprint bar — where value area and POC come from
• All docs