TPO chart

One letter, one period, one price

TPO stands for Time Price Opportunity. Every 30 minutes the market gets a new letter: A for 09:15 to 09:45, B for 09:45 to 10:15, then C, D and on through the day.

During each period, every price the market touches gets that period's letter. If NIFTY trades between 24,071 and 24,139 in the first half hour, every 5-point row in that range gets an A.

Drawn period by period, side by side, this is a split profile. It reads like a slow-motion replay of where the auction went.

Collapse the letters into a profile

Now push every letter to the left, row by row. The columns collapse into a single shape: the collapsed profile.

The width of each row is the number of periods that traded there. A row with five letters had the market's attention for two and a half hours. A row with one letter saw a single half hour.

Most TPO charts show this collapsed shape beside the price bars, one profile per session.

Shapes worth knowing

A few shapes come up again and again.

A D-shape is fat in the middle and thin at both ends: a balanced session where both sides traded comfortably around one area. A P-shape has its fat part high and a thin tail below, often short covering or buying that ran out of urgency. A b-shape is the reverse: the fat part low, often long liquidation.

A long, thin profile with letters strung out in one direction is a trend day: the auction never found agreement, so it kept moving.

Single prints and tails

Single prints are rows with only one letter. They mark prices the market went through quickly and did not revisit within the session.

When single prints sit at the session's extreme they form a tail. On 18 June, B ran up to 24,153.9 and was pushed straight back, leaving single prints from 24,140 up: a selling tail. E dipped to 24,032.7 and buyers took it back, leaving single prints at the bottom: a buying tail.

Single prints inside a profile often get filled later. Tails at the extremes are where the auction was rejected.

TPO charts in AXL Charts

AXL Charts draws the TPO profile beside the chart for NIFTY, BANKNIFTY and NSE stocks, live and on recorded days. It marks the value area, the POC, single prints and the initial balance.

The letters follow your chart's timeframe: a 30-minute chart gets 30-minute letters, a 5-minute chart gets 5-minute letters. Row height can follow the chart or be set by ATR, so the profile keeps its shape as you zoom.