Volume Profile in ATAS: Settings and Integration

Which Volume Profile to use in ATAS

So, which Volume Profile in ATAS should you actually use for convenient analysis? There are two options, and only one of them fits our needs.

• TPO Profile (in the indicator list) — for period-based profiles: day, week, custom period, and so on. Not our choice here, because we want to draw a profile directly over any chart segment.
• Volume Profile drawing tool (on the left in the menu, or via a hotkey) — this is our choice: it lets you select any stretch of the chart and build a profile over it.

Setting up the profile: what to turn on

Let's look at the Volume Profile drawing tool in more detail. Do a simple thing: click it on the left in the menu, then click on the chart to stretch it out and build a profile. To get into its settings, select the profile and right-click it.

The tool has a lot of settings — we won't cover them all, just the ones you actually need. Make sure these are set:

1. Mode — Profile
2. Profile type — Volume
3. Profile group → Maximum levels controls the POC
4. Profile group → Value areas controls the VAH and VAL levels (you can adjust the line style and extension)
5. Filter group — visualizing large volumes: helps you tell critically important balance areas apart from average or minor ones

Additional tools: Anchored VWAP and Dynamic POC

Alongside the volume profile, there are two more useful drawing tools worth knowing.

• Anchored VWAP — the volume-weighted average price, a kind of "moving average on steroids." It gives you an extra level within a trend: price tends to gravitate toward it on pullbacks.
• Dynamic POC — shows how the POC level moved over the period you're building the profile for. The profile itself shows the final picture as of when the drawing ends, but the market still remembers past POC levels for a while — it's useful to know where they sat.

⚠️ Important: Don't get fooled into treating price moving above the POC as a full trend reversal. POC is just one level, and it loses out against the whole balance range.

Profile + Footprint: the first combination

And here's the moment we went through this whole module for: two tools on one screen.

Find the most recent clearly recognizable directional move on the chart — up or down — and build a Volume Profile over it. Now switch to Footprint on the top bar: what's in front of you is a fully set-up workspace for real market analysis and finding entry patterns.

The profile shows you a zone price often returns to. But on its own it doesn't tell you when to enter: price can reach a level or a volume area and cut straight through it.

That's where Footprint at the entry into the zone answers the question of what's happening right now, during the test of an important zone or level (remember absorption and imbalance from lesson 2.1?):

• price arrives at the POC, and the cluster shows absorption — the zone is holding, the bell has rung;
• price arrives, and the cluster shows volume slipping through to one side — the zone is broken, don't enter.

💡 Tip: Don't enter until the bell has rung.

That's the first bridge between the two tools — and the first piece of a real trading system.

Coming up: You've got two tools in hand now, and you've already brought them together on one example. But one example isn't a system yet: it's still unclear what order to look at things in, which timeframe to start from, what counts as a signal versus noise. Next comes practice — module three, where Footprint and Volume Profile come together into a single decision-making sequence. And we train it on history, in Market Replay, with no risk to your capital. That's where we'll pick up next.