Unfinished auctions and poor highs

How an auction finishes

An auction moves price to find the other side. A rally keeps lifting offers until it reaches a price where nobody else will buy. That price is rejected, and the market turns.

On a footprint, a finished extreme shows it: at the very last price only one side traded. At the low in the picture, sellers hit the bid and nobody lifted the offer there. The search for sellers was over.

Unfinished: both sides still trading

When the top row of a bar shows trading at both the bid and the ask, the auction never found that rejected price. Buyers and sellers were still doing business at the high when the bar ended.

The move ran out of time, not out of willing traders. Highs and lows like this are often revisited: the market tends to go back and finish the job.

Poor: no tail

A healthy extreme thins out. The last few prices trade very little, because price was rejected quickly and left. That thin edge is a tail.

A poor high or low trades heavily right up to the edge. AXL Charts calls an extreme poor when its total volume is at least 35% of the bar's busiest price. It is the same idea as a poor high in Market Profile, read from the volume inside a bar instead of TPO letters.

Similar, but not the same

Both say an auction stopped without being rejected, and both are often revisited. They measure different things.

Unfinished reads who traded at the last price: were both sides still there? Poor reads how much traded there, whichever side. A high can be unfinished, poor, both or neither.

Poor uses only total volume, which needs no guess about who was the aggressor, so it is the firmer of the two. Unfinished depends on the buy and sell split, which NSE data does not label and AXL Charts infers.

Using them

Neither is a promise that price will come back. They matter most where they line up with something else: a poor high at the day's high, an unfinished low just under yesterday's value area, or one at the initial balance.

An unfinished or poor extreme in the middle of a quiet session matters less than one at the edge of the day.

Unfinished and poor extremes in AXL Charts

Switch on Auction Structure in the Indicators menu to mark unfinished extremes and poor highs and lows on every bar. It starts off, so the chart stays clean until you want it. Each can be carried to the right until price comes back, has its own colour and line, and can raise an alert. The 35% threshold for a poor extreme is yours to change.