POC

What it is

POC stands for Point of Control — the single price level inside a volume profile window where the most volume traded. If you look at a session's volume profile as a horizontal histogram, the POC is the price corresponding to the longest bar. It is the visual peak of the profile.

POC is a derived statistic, not a raw data point. To find it, you build the profile (aggregate per-tick volume by price level over the window), then scan all the buckets and pick the one with the highest total. The window can be a single session, a multi-day swing, the overnight session, an event-based range — any time slice you want to profile.

A profile has exactly one POC by definition (ties are broken by convention — usually the price closest to the session midpoint wins). When the window updates with new ticks, the POC can shift in real time: as volume accumulates at higher or lower prices, the peak moves.

Why it matters

The POC is treated by many traders as the fairest price of the window — the price where the most participants agreed to transact. That gives it gravitational properties: price tends to return to the POC during the session, and prior-session POCs often act as support, resistance, or magnet levels in later sessions.

Three common operational uses:

• Mean-reversion target — if price has rotated away from the POC, a return to the POC is a frequent intra-session target.
• Support / resistance — the POC of yesterday's session often acts as a defended level when price approaches it today.
• Naked POC — a POC from a prior session that has not been revisited becomes a tracked level for future sessions. Markets have a tendency to fill these eventually.

The POC is also a structural diagnostic. A POC near the high of the session's range suggests acceptance up high (likely continuation); a POC near the low suggests acceptance down low (likely continuation in the other direction); a POC in the middle suggests balance.

How it appears on Sierra Chart

Sierra Chart's volume profile studies compute and display the POC natively as a horizontal line at the peak-volume price, color-configurable and extensible to the right edge of the chart. The platform also supports tracking developing POC — the POC of the in-progress session as it forms tick by tick — alongside the final POC of completed sessions.

For ACSIL developers, profile data is computed on top of VAP arrays, so a custom study can derive its own POC by walking the per-price volume cells and picking the maximum.

Common patterns / pitfalls

• POC shifts during the session — a developing POC is not the final POC. Don't anchor decisions to a developing POC as if it were stable.
• Composite profiles can have multi-modal shapes — a long-window profile (e.g., a week) can have two near-equal peaks, in which case the POC is technically the higher of the two but the secondary peak matters operationally.
• Bucket size matters — a finer profile resolution can split what would otherwise be a single POC into two adjacent buckets. Use the same bucket size when comparing profiles across sessions.
• POC vs VWAP — they are different statistics. VWAP is the volume-weighted average price (a mean); POC is the modal price (a mode). They can be far apart in trending sessions.

Related SCS studies

SCS does not currently ship a dedicated POC tracker — Sierra Chart's built-in volume profile study handles the rendering. The Single Print and Gap study identifies the structural opposites of the POC (low-volume, untested levels) inside the same profile-aware analytical frame.