Excess, poor extremes and naked POCs
The profile preserves structural references: tails that ended an auction, extremes that did not, and prior POCs the market may revisit.
01A finished profile is a document
By now you can read a session while it is still alive: chapter 3 classified its open, chapter 4 placed its value against yesterday's. This chapter reads sessions after they close. A finished profile is not a picture to admire; it is a document, the minutes of one day's negotiation, and as with any minutes the useful part is rarely the middle. The middle only says that business was done. The edges say how the meeting ended, and whether it truly ended at all.
Sit in a real auction house for one afternoon and you will see both endings. Lot 14 closes because a dealer in the back row raises his paddle with conviction and buries every other bid: the price found its owner, that auction is over, ended on PRICE. Lot 15 is different: bids are still creeping upward in small steps when the house closes at six, the auctioneer stops mid-climb, and everyone in the room knows the lot resumes tomorrow. Stopped on TIME. Futures auctions halt in exactly these two ways, and the profile records which one happened at each extreme.
Four signatures matter, and this chapter walks them in order: excess, the tail that ends an auction; poor highs and lows, the flat extremes that only pause one; single prints mid-profile, the skid marks of urgency; and the naked POC, an old fair price the market has not yet come back for.
02Excess: the auction that ended
Excess is the paddle from the back row, printed in letters. The auction advertises down, one period stretches to 5,612, and buyers arrive with enough size to end the argument on the spot. Because only that one period ever traded down there, the bottom of the profile tapers into a tail of single letters: one letter at 5,612, one at 5,616, one at 5,620, before the rows fatten. The working convention: two or more single-TPO rows at an extreme is excess; one lonely row is just the last tick of the day.
Read what the tail actually certifies. Price went LOOKING for business down there, and the other side answered so hard that no later period ever needed to return. That is an auction ended on price, and it is why traders treat a tail as support: the market has already run the experiment for you. At 5,612, real buyers with real size exist, or at least existed. So the classic use is responsive, not predictive: when price rotates back down toward a fresh tail, you buy in front of it with a stop beyond it, on the logic that whoever ended the last trip is still in the neighborhood. The longer the tail, the louder that answer was.
One geometric catch before you trade it: a tail is only proven by the periods that came AFTER it. Singles at the bottom of B period mean ten later periods all refused to go back down; that is evidence. Singles at the bottom of the FINAL period mean nothing yet, because the session simply ran out of clock before anyone could disagree. A thin close looks identical to excess in the picture and is its opposite in meaning: unfinished, untested, waiting for tomorrow to rule on it. Date every tail before you lean on it.
03Poor highs and poor lows: the auction that ran out of clock
Now the other ending. A poor high is a top that never tapers: the highest row prints two, three, four TPOs wide, a flat shelf where a point should be. Mechanically it means several separate periods pushed to the same tick, and each push died of exhaustion instead of being slapped back by size. Nobody with conviction ever arrived to end the auction; the buyers simply kept fainting at the same altitude until the clock moved on. The convention mirrors the tail: two or more TPOs on the extreme row, with no single-print taper beyond it, is a poor high. Flip everything for a poor low.
Two sessions can reach the very same high and file two different endings under it. The figure runs both from one open, so the top is the only variable: one tapers to a point the auction argued out and never went back to, the other stops flat where the bell cut the argument short. Same price, opposite debt.
A poor extreme is an unfinished-auction reference, not a scheduled revisit. Repair means price later trades through the flat shelf and may form excess beyond it. Track whether your own market revisits poor structure more often or sooner than finished excess; context, distance and the active timeframe determine whether the reference matters today.
04Single prints in the middle: footprints of urgency
Excess lives at the edges; its cousin lives in the middle. When one period travels a stretch of prices so fast that no other period ever overlaps it, the profile keeps a column of lonely letters mid-structure: single prints. They are the footprint of urgency. Someone crossed the spread again and again without waiting for rotation, and the prices they crossed have still heard only ONE opinion. On the first retest, the edge of the singles tends to act as support or resistance: the trader who made them defends the base of his own move, and responsive traders lean on him.
How the first retest resolves is the tell. Touch the edge of the singles, hold, and go: the urgent player is still present, the move was real, carry on. But a FAST refill, later periods calmly trading back through the whole thin stretch, retracts the claim. The urgency was emotional or forced, nobody defends those prices, and the fattening profile is telling you rotation, not trend. Read singles as written in pencil until the first retest either inks them in or erases them.
05Naked POCs: prior acceptance references
Chapter 2 named the POC the session's fairest price, the row where buyer and seller agreed most often. Sessions end, but that agreement is not deleted; it becomes a landmark. A naked POC is a prior session's POC that price has never touched since, also called an open or virgin POC. The market has a durable habit of coming back to old fair prices, for a plain reason: they are the best-advertised meeting points on the chart. Resting orders wait there, systems reference them, and everyone who did business at that price remembers it.
Naked is a word defined by an absence, and that is what the figure spends five sessions showing: three POCs get crossed off as price trades back through them, and the one nobody returns to keeps running to the right edge.
So keep a list, and keep it honest. Each entry needs three fields: the price, the date it was left behind, and the distance from here. Cross an entry off the moment a single trade touches it; a naked POC is either virgin or it is nothing. Age and distance both matter, because the pull is real but it decays. A POC left two sessions ago, 15 points below, is a strong same-week candidate; one left two months ago, 180 points away, is trivia until the larger auction travels back into its neighborhood. And notice what this is: not mysticism, a measurable tendency. Over years of sessions you can count exactly how often a naked POC at a given distance gets touched within a given horizon.
Feel the pull before you memorize any numbers. In the lab below, the left panel hangs two naked POCs beneath a drifting price; tap one and watch the walk back to finish old business. The right panel is the same idea in its morning costume, the opening gap, with fill odds that drain away as you drag the gap wider.
06One afternoon, two magnets
Now assemble one afternoon out of everything above. It is 13:30 on ES and price sits at 5,644. Overhead at 5,662 is this morning's poor high: three TPOs flat on the extreme row, built by three pushes that all died there. Below at 5,628 is yesterday's POC, still naked. The arithmetic first: the naked POC is 5,644 - 5,628 = 16 points down, the poor high 5,662 - 5,644 = 18 points up. Two magnets, one price between them. The beginner's move is to pick the closer one. The trader's move is to ask what KIND of draw each one is.
They are not symmetric. The naked POC is a draw TO a price: old fair business, resting interest, and the measured odds say a one-day-old, 16-point entry on the list fills more often than not. But it is a destination, not a doorway. Expect responsive trade there, price touching 5,628 and being met, rather than slicing through just because the magnet 'worked'. The poor high is a different kind of debt: its repair needs buyers to reload, and every hour they fail to, the shorts up there sit more comfortably. Repair tends to come while the up auction is still warm, and by mid-afternoon, with price drifting away from the shelf, the warmth is leaving it.
So the working read into the close: lean on the closer, better-measured draw, a rotation down to 5,628, and treat it as a target to trade INTO, not a level to chase through. The poor high does not disappear; it moves onto tomorrow's list, next to whatever naked POC today leaves behind. And notice the discipline this whole chapter has been teaching: not one of these decisions predicted anything. Each one only read what the document said was finished, and what it said was still owed.
07When nothing is owed
Step back one more level. A market that repairs its poor high, fills its naked POC and leaves excess at both ends has, in a sense, no unfinished business left; stack three or four such sessions on top of each other, value overlapping value, and you are looking at a market with nowhere it owes a visit. Markets like that stop traveling and start waiting. Chapter 6 is about the waiting, balance, how to draw its bracket, and the one skill this chapter cannot hand you: telling the real departure from the fake one when the market finally leaves.