# TPO (/platform/charts/order-flow/tpo)



**Time Price Opportunity** (TPO) builds a session profile from candles: how much *time* price spent at each level, shown as letters or blocks. Where a volume profile answers "how much traded here", a TPO answers "how long was it accepted here".

![](/images/charts/order-flow/tpo.png)

TPO uses ordinary OHLCV, so it runs on **every market**: including forex and commodities. Coloring the profile by volume, trades, or delta is extra and needs [footprint data](/platform/charts/data); on candles-only markets those options fall back to time coloring.

Like the footprint, TPO exists as a **chart type** (switch the chart style to **TPO**) with the full feature set including session merging, and as an **overlay** (**Time Price Opportunity** in **Indicators → Orderflow**) that draws the same profiles over the candles.

## Sessions [#sessions]

| Setting                      | Options                                                                                                               | Default  |
| ---------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------- |
| **Session**                  | Day, Week, Month                                                                                                      | Day      |
| **Trading hours** (Day only) | Full day, Regular hours (RTH), Extended hours (ETH), Pre-market, Market, Post-market, London, New York, Asian, Custom | Full day |
| **Block interval**           | 5m, 15m, 30m, 1h, 4h                                                                                                  | 30m      |
| **Row size**                 | Auto, or Manual with **Ticks per row**                                                                                | Auto     |

Each **block interval** is one letter/block period: with 30m blocks, `A` is the first half hour of the session, `B` the second, and so on through `A–Z`, then `a–z`, then `0–9`.

**Regular hours** and **Extended hours** follow the venue's real trading calendar (holidays and DST included) where the data provides one. The named windows (Pre-market, Market, Post-market, London, New York, Asian) are fixed UTC approximations, and **Custom** takes a start and end in UTC `HHMM` (an end at or before the start wraps past midnight, for overnight sessions). Weeks anchor on Monday, months on the 1st, and trading-hours filtering applies to day sessions only.

With Trading hours on **Full day**, the profile follows whatever the chart itself shows. An RTH chart produces RTH profiles. Picking an explicit window overrides the chart.

## Display [#display]

* **Show blocks** and **Show letters** toggle independently: letters-only is the classic market-profile reading, blocks-only reads like a heat profile.
* **Color row by** selects what the color encodes: **Time** (position within the session, the default), **Volume**, **Trades count**, or **Delta**: the latter three from footprint data.
* **Theme** picks the color ramp per mode (e.g. Simple, Thermal, Spectrum for time/volume/trades; Classic, Neon, Arctic for delta), with a **Custom** option exposing the individual colors.
* **Outside VA opacity (%)** dims cells outside the value area (default 45), making the value area pop without hiding the tails.

Hovering a block shows its letter, the row's price interval, the block's time window, and, when metric coloring is on, the row's volume, trades, or delta value.

## Structure [#structure]

* **Value area %** (default 70) draws VAH and VAL lines; **VA fill** adds a soft band between them. Optional **POC / VAH / VAL labels** print the prices at the session's left edge.
* **Point of control** marks the row with the most TPOs. **Extend POC until reached** projects each session's POC rightward until price trades through it. An untested (*naked*) POC runs to the newest bar.
* **Initial balance** brackets the price range of the session's opening period (**IB minutes**, default 60), the reference range day-type traders build on.
* **Single prints** shade mid-profile price runs that only ever printed one TPO, fast moves that price may revisit. Runs touching a session extreme are tails, not singles, and are excluded.
* **Poor high / low** caps a session extreme where two or more TPOs printed at the extreme row, an "unfinished" extreme that often gets repaired later.

## Volume profile ladder [#volume-profile-ladder]

An optional per-session **volume profile** draws beside the letters (position **Left** or **Right**), built from the chart's bars. It carries its own **Rows**, **Width (%)**, **Volume POC**, **Value area (%)**, and price labels, so you can read time-based and volume-based structure side by side and spot where they disagree.

![](/images/charts/order-flow/tpo-vp.png)

## Markers [#markers]

* **Open / close markers**: small arrows at the session's first and last traded price.
* **Midpoint**: the middle of the session's range.

## Working with sessions [#working-with-sessions]

Right-click a profile (chart type only) for session operations:

* **Expand TPO** re-paints each block in its own real time column above the candles that produced it, the classic split-profile view for reading how the session developed. **Collapse TPO** packs it back.

![](/images/charts/order-flow/tpo-expand.png)

* **Merge to previous / following TPO** folds adjacent sessions into one profile with structure recomputed over the whole span. Merge a quiet overnight session into its day, or build a multi-day composite. Merges chain, and **Unmerge TPO / Unmerge all TPOs** takes them apart again.

![](/images/charts/order-flow/tpo-merge.png)

* **TPO Settings** jumps straight to the TPO tab.

The forming session updates live, so its POC, value area, and initial balance are *developing* values until the session completes.

## Overlay [#overlay]

**Time Price Opportunity** in **Indicators → Orderflow** draws the same profiles on top of candles instead of replacing them, with the same session, display, structure, ladder, and marker options. The right-click session operations (expand, merge) are exclusive to the chart type. Because it needs only candles, the overlay is available on every symbol. It's one of the Orderflow-group indicators that never hide on candles-only markets, alongside VWAP and the [Visible Range Volume Profile](/platform/charts/order-flow/volume-profiles#visible-range-volume-profile).