How To Setup Market Profile in Think or Swim

The market profile can be a useful tool in identifying where value is, in a given instrument. Lots of software make volume profile accessible but costs considerable subscription fees. Think or Swim is a free way to access market profile charts, but is buried under the disguise of monkey bar charts. The monkey bar is the point of control, and the playground is the value area.

Setting Up Monkey Bars (Market Profile)

To start setting up market profile, navigate to chart settings and go to the appearance tab. At the top change the chart mode to Monkey Bar from Standard. Apply this setting and then change the charts time frame to a 30 minute profile chart. This is the standard for market profile periods.

Navigating back into the settings and appearance tab, you can change things like the colors of the profile numbers as well as the monkey bar and playground, color of the volume profile as well as the point of control and value area, open and closing prints.

Perhaps the most important part is being able to change the row height, which will impact how much detail your profile shows. Ticksize will be the smallest increment for the particular instrument that you are looking at. In the /ES S&P500 index futures, this value is .25 or one tick, which is a quarter of a point. Given the current volatility of this recording (May 24th 2022) setting a custom size of 2.5 points seems to be a good row height.

Think or Swim Drawbacks

Some notes are that the profile will automatically include all of the overnight session data. It starts as soon as the prior day closes. To eliminate the overnight session, we have to turn of overnight data off. There is no way to separate the two and have an overnight profile as well as a regular trading hours session profile.

Volume Profile & Candles

To just use the volume profile, load a blank chart of the /ES futures and clear the drawing set as well as the studies. From here we want to load a singular study, VolumeProfile. This study will load a master volume profile to the entire chart by default and have it located on the expansion area.

To separate this into daily profiles, change the time per profile to day. To get the profile to show for each day, toggle to on expansion area to no, from the default yes. In the very bottom settings you can change the visibility of the show value area low and high lines by turning off show plot. Finally at the very bottom, go into globals and here are the master controls for the colors of your volume profile.

Save Your Setups!

Something not mentioned in the video but that is useful would be to save the chart settings to a chart style that way you can quickly toggle between different looks and feels, without having to rebuild the charts each time.