Reading the previous session's value area edges

One place to look and one routine: price comes back to the previous session's VAH or VAL. OrderVane does not tell you what to do there. It turns the first touch into a measurement you can set next to the second.

Everything on this page is in OrderVane Pro. Setting names are shown in English because that is how they appear in Quantower.

The question at the edge

The value area is where the previous regular session did most of its trading — 70% of its volume by default. Its two edges, VAH above and VAL below, are where that session stopped agreeing on price.

When price comes back to an edge, one of two things follows. Either it trades through and starts doing business on the other side, or it fails to and goes back toward the previous session's value. This routine does not tell you which. It puts what happened at the edge in front of you in the same form every time, so the second visit is judged against the first one and not against your memory of it.

Before the open

Session levels are on by default in Pro. Check these once for each instrument.

1. Use bars of 10 minutes or shorter. The absorption mark further down is not calculated on longer bars. Five-minute bars are a good start, with at least two days loaded so the previous session is on the chart.
2. Check the session hours. Open the quick panel — the lower of the two buttons on the left edge of the chart — and find the SESSION VA column (Touch band and Absorption verdicts are on there by default). Session hours says manual or auto, and Session open and Session close show the hours in the exchange's own time zone. The default, 08:00–13:30, is the regular session for CL and many US futures. Set your own hours for anything else. In the settings window the same hours are Session levels: session hours (blank = auto), written as 08:00-13:30.
3. Look at the profile once. The previous session's profile is drawn on the left of the session it belongs to. If it covers most of a day, the hours are wrong — Session levels explains why that happens and how to fix it.
4. Leave Band ticks at 3. The band around each line is what "at the level" means: a touch is price entering it. The absorption mark always measures a 3-tick band, so the drawn band should match it.

The first touch

The first touch is the first time price enters the band after the previous session has ended. If you only trade regular hours, start counting at the open — what matters is counting the same way every day.

While price is in the band, the evidence is already on the chart:

• Footprint cells inside the bars at the band's prices — how much traded at each price and on which side. Zoom in until the cells appear.
• Big trade markers (●) — whether large prints arrived in the band, and on which side.
• Absorption bars (▬) — horizontal bars where size traded into one price without moving it. See Absorption.
• How far price got past the line — whether it only reaches into the band or gets through it.

When the touch is over, measure it once:

1. Click the range profile button — the upper of the two buttons on the left edge of the chart.
2. Drag a box over the touch: from the first bar that entered the band to the last bar before price left it, and from the lowest low to the highest high of those bars. To make the edges snap to the bars as you draw, turn on Range profile magnet (snap to bars) in Settings — it is off by default.
3. Read the top of the box. Vol is everything that traded inside the box. Delta is aggressive buying minus aggressive selling, followed by its share of the volume.

Those numbers, together with how far price got past the line, are your yardstick for the next touch.

The absorption mark

About 15 minutes after a touch has ended, OrderVane may draw an absorption mark on the level: a short bar for as long as the touch lasted, and a badge.

It is drawn when the touch traded unusually heavily compared with the hours before it, and price still did not get more than 3 ticks past the line.

• The badge sits on the side the touch came from, and its arrow points that way: absorption ▲ above the line when price came down into the level, absorption ▼ below it when price came up into it.
• A bolder badge marks a heavier touch.

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.

Because it is drawn after the fact, it is not something to wait for at the level. It is part of the record the next touch is compared with.

The second touch

When price comes back to the same edge, measure it the same way and set the two side by side:

What the comparison means is your judgement. The point of the routine is that the second touch is read against a measurement, not against an impression of the first.

What this routine does not do

• It does not say which way price goes from the edge. Nothing on this page does.
• The absorption mark describes a touch that has already happened. It appears after the fact, not as price arrives.
• The absorption marks are not a track record. A mark is drawn only when price did not push through, so every mark sits on a touch the level held and a touch that broke through gets none. Looking back, the marks will always look like a clean record — that is the definition at work, not evidence.
• Session levels describe the previous session's value. Days back in the panel adds older sessions, drawn faded and without a band.
• A touch measured on 5-minute bars and one measured on 1-minute bars are different measurements. Compare touches on the same timeframe.

Related

• Session levels — how the previous session is chosen and drawn
• Range profile — boxes, sources and the shared scale
• Absorption — the absorption bars, a different measurement from the mark on the level
• How to read a footprint bar
• All docs