Education · Stage 8 · 04
The usual mistakes
Three of these come straight from the playbook this site is built on, written down by somebody who made them. That is rarer than it sounds: almost nobody publishes their own errors, which is why every list of mistakes online is a list of other people's.
Mak · 4 min read · Stage 8, article 4 of 4
1 · Fitting the profile to the outcome
The first and the worst, because it does not feel like a mistake at all.
A profile always covers a period, and the period is a setting. Price does something unexpected; you drag the start of the profile back a few days; now the POC lands right where price turned. The chart agrees with you, and it agrees because you asked it to.
Adjusting the period after the fact does not produce insight. It produces false confidence, which is worse than no confidence because you will size up on it.
The defence is the same as the reference list in the confluence article and the drawing rule in the supply and demand one: fix the periods in advance — today's session, yesterday's, the current week — and leave them alone. If a fixed-range profile is genuinely needed, decide its two ends from structure before you look at what price did after.
2 · Reading the profile without the context
Not every session produces a readable profile. On a quiet day, or in a choppy stretch with little participation, the shape is noise with a bulge in it — and the tool will draw it with exactly the same confidence as a meaningful one.
Before trusting a shape, check what produced it: how much volume was there compared with a normal day, and what kind of session it was. The stage on the day exists precisely so that this question has an answer.
3 · Treating every thin area as a breakout zone
A low volume node says price moved through there quickly last time. It does not promise that price will go there, and it does not promise acceleration when it arrives.
In fast conditions, thin areas are often skipped entirely rather than travelled through. The playbook's own advice on this is the right order of operations: structure first, volume second. The profile refines a read you already had; it is a poor place to start one.
4 · Trusting the point of control to the tick
From the first article of this stage: on many platforms the profile is reconstructed from bars rather than built from individual trades. The shape is reliable. The single price with the very highest volume is an estimate.
Which means any decision that depends on the POC being exactly there — a stop two ticks under it, an entry precisely at it — is depending on a number your platform approximated. Reading the structure is safe. Reading the tick is not.
5 · Keeping levels after they have been used up
The previous article's rule, restated because it is the one people abandon first: each time price trades through an area, some of what was resting there is consumed.
A chart carrying every POC of the last three weeks looks thorough and is the opposite. Most of those levels describe agreements the market has already left, and the ones that still matter are lost among them.
That is stage 8
Volume by price rather than by time; the four components; the shapes a session leaves; how thick and thin areas behave; and five ways to fool yourself with all of it.
Notice that the profile answered the same question as the map stage — where — with better evidence, and still answered nothing about what happens there. Every stage of this path has ended on that sentence, and the next one is finally about putting the two halves together.