The shapes: D, P and b

Sessions leave recognisable outlines, and three of them have names taken from the letters they resemble. Each says something specific about where the business ended up — and each has the same catch as the four types of day: the shape is finished when the session is.

Mak · 3 min read · Stage 8, article 2 of 4

Diagram 1. The thin sections are the prices the market visited and left. The fat section is where it stayed — which is the whole of what a profile records.

D — balance

The most common outline, and the one that matches the balance state from the previous stage. The bulk of the volume sits in the middle, the extremes are thin, and the point of control is somewhere near the centre.

What it describes: the session found a price both sides accepted and rotated around it. Both extremes were tried and neither held enough business to stay there.

P — top heavy

Thin at the bottom, fat at the top. Read from the bottom upwards, it is the record of a session that moved away from lower prices quickly and then stopped and did its business higher up.

The thin lower section is important: it is an area price travelled through without trading much, and the previous stage explained what that means — almost nobody was there.

b — bottom heavy

The mirror image. Thin at the top, fat at the bottom: prices up there were visited and rejected, and the session settled lower.

What these do not say

You will very often see these outlines presented with a direction attached — P as bullish, b as bearish. That is a step further than the shape supports, and it is worth being precise about why.

The shape records where trade was facilitated. Whether that continues tomorrow is a different question, and the profile has no opinion about it.

A top-heavy session can be a market that has moved up and is being accepted at the new level. It can equally be a market that ran up, ran out of buyers, and spent the afternoon distributing to the last ones. Both draw a P. Separating them needs what happened inside that fat area, which is order flow — the entire previous stage, and the article on combining the two later in this path.

And the catch you already know

A P and a b look almost identical at midday, because at midday neither exists yet. Both are a market that has been to one extreme and come back, and the shape is decided by where the rest of the session does its business.

This is exactly the trap from the four types of day, one stage earlier, and it deserves the same discipline: naming the shape early is a hypothesis with something that would disprove it, or it is nothing. Written down at eleven o'clock, «I think this is becoming top-heavy, and price accepting back below the middle would tell me it is not» is a usable thought. «It's a P» is not.