Overview
Point of Control and Value Area are two of the most-used reference levels in order flow — this video covers how each is calculated and all the display settings for them.
What's covered
- Show Point of Control (POC) — highlights the highest-volume price within each candle, so you can see at a glance where the bulk of that candle's trading took place.
- Style the POC highlight — fill, border color, border width, and text color are adjustable separately; the video recommends a thin, single-color border rather than a filled highlight, so the POC doesn't dominate the chart.
- Tick-based POC vs. raw POC — by default, the POC is calculated at your chart's current tick size; "use raw POC" instead finds the highest-volume 1-tick level and shows that, which can shift the highlighted price when you zoom into a coarser tick size.
- Naked POCs — a POC that price hasn't returned to and traded through yet is drawn as an extended, untested level; once price finally trades back through it, the line disappears. The video's own usage note: more useful on higher timeframes (daily and up) than on 15-minute or lower.
- Value Area — the price range that holds a set percentage of the candle's or period's volume, so you can see where trading concentrated rather than just the single busiest price. 68% is the common default, and what most traders the presenter talks to settle on.
- Value Area opacity — called out as an underused setting: dropping the opacity outside the value area to near zero fades everything else back and makes the value area itself much easier to read at a glance.