OFS ValueFlow
A volume profile that reads itself. It does not stop at POC and Value Area — it tells you in plain words whether price is being accepted or rejected, and shows the evidence behind that verdict. Honest about data quality, deterministic on completed bars, never repainting.
| Current version | 1.3.0 · 2026-09-03 |
| Compatibility | ATAS 8.0.14+ and ATAS X 8.0.14+ |
| Requirements | Windows 10/11, .NET 10, ATAS or ATAS X |
| Updates | All future updates included |
| Delivery | ATAS catalog (automatic) + download in your account |
Almost ready for your charts
OFS ValueFlow is built and measured — it is just not in the shop yet, so there is no price and no Add to cart to look for on this page.
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Description
OFS ValueFlow turns executed volume into a structured map of the trading session and tells you, in plain words, what the auction is currently doing. It is a decision-support tool: it does not generate signals and does not predict price.
== WHY THIS, WHEN YOUR PLATFORM ALREADY DRAWS A PROFILE ==
It does, and it draws it well. This is not a replacement for that drawing — it is the reading of it. A standard profile hands you POC, Value Area and a shape, and leaves the interpretation entirely to you. Five things here are different:
1. IT STATES A VERDICT, AND SHOWS ITS EVIDENCE. Not just "price is above value", but whether that excursion is being accepted or rejected — with the proof on the panel: how many completed closes outside value, how much new volume actually traded out there, how far developing value has shifted. You can disagree with the verdict, because you can see what produced it. Acceptance and rejection are inferences, not exchange facts, and the indicator never hides that.
2. IT IS HONEST ABOUT ITS INPUT DATA. Volume-at-price is not equally reliable on every feed. The panel always states the quality: DQ4 EXACT means true volume-at-price; DQ2 ESTIMATE and DQ1 TICK PROXY mean the feed could not deliver it and the profile is drawn visibly muted, so an estimate can never be mistaken for exact data. Switch on Exact Data Only and it draws nothing at all rather than show you a guess. A profile that looks identical whether or not the data behind it is real is the more dangerous tool.
3. DISTANCES ARE COMPARABLE ACROSS INSTRUMENTS. Everything distance-sensitive is expressed in value-area units, not ticks or points. "The nearest node is 0.5 VU away" means the same thing on NQ, ES, BTC and EUR/USD, so one set of settings survives a change of instrument instead of needing a retune.
4. IT IS DETERMINISTIC AND THE RULES ARE WRITTEN DOWN. The row grid freezes when the profile starts, so developing levels never shift because the grid changed. The Value Area expands from the POC one row at a time with tie-breaks resolved against the profile VWAP. Identical data and settings always produce an identical result — and the forming bar is a preview that never moves a level.
5. IT GETS OUT OF THE WAY OF YOUR OTHER TOOLS. The profile can sit on the left or the right with an offset that frees a strip at the chart edge — for a DOM, or anything else you want beside it — and with one switch no line, label or zone enters that strip. Every level respects the length you set; nothing stretches across the whole chart uninvited.
And because every published value is also a numeric series, other modules can read the state without parsing text.
WHAT IT ANSWERS
Five questions, continuously:
1. Where has volume concentrated? — POC, Value Area, profile shape.
2. Where is value moving? — value migration up, down, balanced or mixed.
3. Is price being accepted or rejected outside value? — with the evidence that led to the verdict.
4. Where is the nearest meaningful volume node? — HVN and LVN with distance measured in value-area units.
5. Is there a low-volume path toward it? — corridor detection with its own state machine.
HOW IT WORKS
The profile is built from exact volume-at-price when your data feed provides it. Row size is either a fixed number of ticks, a target row count or adaptive to range, and the row grid freezes when the profile starts so developing levels never shift because the grid changed. The Value Area expands from the POC one row at a time, adding the heavier side, with deterministic tie-breaks resolved against the profile VWAP. Identical data and settings always produce an identical result.
Decisions are made on completed bars. The bar that is still forming is drawn as a lighter preview so you can see current activity, but it never moves a level — what you saw a minute ago still holds. This is switchable (Calculation Mode), and the preview can be turned off entirely.
HOW TO READ THE PANEL
The panel reads top to bottom in the order a trader needs it:
• Profile — which profile is being reported, the data quality and the volume unit. DQ4 EXACT means true volume-at-price; DQ2 ESTIMATE (uniform) and DQ1 TICK PROXY mean the feed could not deliver it, and the profile is drawn visibly muted so it is never mistaken for exact data. When the panel reports the previous session, a composite, the manual range or the impulse leg, the rows that belong to the session only are marked (session).
• Shape — balanced, thin, double distribution and so on; frozen at session close.
• Value migration — where the developing value area is moving, confirmed with hysteresis so it does not flicker.
• Value area — the current VAL–VAH range and the share of volume actually inside it.
• Relationship — how today's profile sits against the previous session: higher, lower, overlapping, separated.
• Location — where price is right now relative to value.
• Interaction — testing, provisional or confirmed acceptance, provisional or confirmed rejection, with the evidence: how many closes, how much new volume outside value, how far value shifted.
• Nearest HVN/LVN — distance to the closest meaningful node, in value-area units, so it is comparable across instruments.
• Corridor — whether a low-volume path is closed, being tested, open, contested or filled.
• Context and reason codes — a one-line verdict and the machine-readable codes behind it.
WHAT IS DRAWN
Session histogram (left or right side, with an optional offset so you can keep a strip free for the DOM or another indicator), POC / VAH / VAL lines with fully positionable labels, HVN and LVN zones with sharp edges, previous-session levels, an optional multi-session composite, a manual range profile, an impulse profile of the current or completed structural leg, and untested historical levels that keep tracking until price returns to them. Lines never run through their own labels, and every line respects the length you set — they never stretch across the whole chart uninvited.
WHEN IT HELPS
Before a trade, to see whether price is inside accepted value or working outside it; to find the nearest node where reaction is likely; to judge whether the session is trending or rotating; and to compare where limit orders are resting against where volume actually traded. It is deliberately quiet: no arrows, no alerts you did not ask for, and every inference exposes the evidence behind it.
HONESTY
The indicator always states the quality of its input data and never presents an estimate as exact. If you prefer, Exact Data Only mode draws no profile at all when the feed cannot deliver true volume-at-price.
Installation guide
2. Open or fully restart ATAS so the automatically delivered indicator becomes available in the indicator catalogue. Whenever an update is released through ATAS, fully restart the platform; ATAS downloads and loads the new version automatically.
3. Only if the OrderFlowSmith and ATAS e-mails are different, download OFS.ValueFlow.dll from your OrderFlowSmith account and install it manually: %APPDATA%\ATAS\Indicators for classic ATAS or %APPDATA%\ATAS X\Indicators for ATAS X. After every update, download and replace the DLL manually, then fully restart ATAS. If Windows blocked the file, open DLL Properties and select Unblock.
4. Add OFS ValueFlow to a chart.
5. Open indicator settings → 01 · License → paste the license key from your OrderFlowSmith account (it is also sent by e-mail).
6. The panel shows "Licensed to: your e-mail" and the profile starts building.
First settings worth a look: 05 · Session & Time for the session template and time zone, 06 · Profile for row size and Value Area, 12 · Other Profiles for previous, composite, manual and impulse levels, 13 · Histogram for which side the profile sits on, 15 · Panel for the panel and its position. Every setting has a tooltip explaining what it does.
Changelog — version 1.3.0
The whole calculation - profile rows, POC and Value Area, nodes, corridors, value migration, acceptance and rejection, historical levels - now lives in a pure engine with no platform types, exercised by 84 automated tests written from the specification's own test plan (section 21): volume conservation, POC and Value Area rules, tie-breaks, VWAP, determinism, data quality, invariants, and a full behavioural run of the acceptance engine.
What changed in behaviour:
- A confirmed acceptance now HOLDS until price closes back through the boundary or value migrates up to price. Before, a new test started on the same side as soon as the cooldown ended, so the state cycled TESTING - ACCEPTED and the alert repeated every ten bars or so. It now fires once. A confirmed rejection likewise holds until price returns beyond the boundary.
- Nodes and corridors are computed on every bar, in history and live alike. Before, history ran them every fifth bar, so the shape, corridor and node score after a chart reload could differ from what you saw live.
- HVN and LVN zones are the whole hump or trough around the extreme, down to half its prominence. Before, a zone was the single peak row, so the two-row minimum width could almost never be met and node zones rarely appeared. An LVN is only created between two qualified HVN zones, never at the profile edge, and has its own minimum width (Min LVN Width, default 2 rows).
- Corridors also run between the Value Area and the nearest qualified node outside it (section 10.2), not only between two nodes.
- Estimated (DQ2) profiles now conserve the bar's volume exactly, whatever the row size; the panel names the allocation method: DQ2 ESTIMATE (uniform).
- The Value Area tie rule follows the specification to the letter: an exact tie adds both neighbouring rows.
- Previous-session POC / VAH / VAL expire at the end of the next session (they lived one session too long) or on confirmed acceptance.
- The strong-shift shortcut into a migration state applies to UP and DOWN only.
- With Freeze Row Size off, a rebuilt grid also restarts the migration history - snapshots are never compared across grids.
New:
- IMPULSE PROFILE (section 4.2): the volume of one structural leg between confirmed swing points, independent of session boundaries. Choose the current leg (developing) or the completed leg; when a leg completes, its POC and major nodes become historical levels until the end of the session. Settings in 12 - Other Profiles; the panel can report it as Primary Profile.
- Value Area Edges: Row Boundaries (the specification) or Row Prices (the platform's convention) - pick the second when comparing with the built-in profile.
- The panel is honest about profiles: when it reports the previous session, a composite, the manual range or the impulse leg, the rows that belong to the session only are marked (session). Composite, manual and impulse profiles now have their own nodes.
- Nine panel positions instead of three.
- Volume Unit is a list: contracts, shares, base or quote quantity, ticks.
- Forming Bar Preview Color and Label Backdrop Color are settings; both carry their transparency in the color.
- No more soft caps: 0 = unlimited or never for History (sessions), Node Expiry, Display Limit, Max Displayed Nodes, Tracked Levels Cap and Impulse Max Bars; manual range, composite periods, line lengths and histogram width go as far as your chart does.
Faster and cleaner:
- Seven display switches (node zones, displayed nodes, ranking, previous / composite / manual levels, display limit) only redraw; they no longer recalculate the whole history.
- The manual range profile is built on the calculation thread, not while drawing; it is clipped to the loaded history and the panel says so.
- No redraw requests while history loads; the POC / VAH / VAL output series keep their last value outside custom hours; Location and Context read the last completed bar.
Settings that changed shape: Volume Unit is now a list - set it once again. Panel Position keeps your saved corner. The install guide and FAQ name the current settings groups.
1.2.6 - THE UPDATE CARD NOW TELLS YOU WHAT IS NEW.
The centred new-version card - product name, your version and the new one, a Close button - now also shows a short description of what each release brings. Identical in every OFS indicator.
1.2.5 - THE FORMING-BAR PREVIEW NO LONGER BORROWS A NEIGHBOUR'S WIDTH.
When the forming bar traded at prices outside the profile's existing range, its preview strip was anchored to the volume of the nearest edge row and sat at the wrong width. Rows outside the profile now start from the base edge, as they should.
1.2.4 - THE PANEL SITS ABOVE THE CANDLES, THE DELTA LAYER FOLLOWS THE SITE PALETTE, AND TIMES ARE PICKED, NOT TYPED.
The context panel, the notices and the new-version card were drawn in the same layer as the profile - behind the forming candle, which could paint right over them. They live in the top layer now, and the new-version card shows even without a licence.
The delta layer's selling colour was the alarm red; it now uses the OFS palette violet (A855F7), matching every other OFS indicator, so alarm red keeps meaning "error" and nothing else.
Session Start and Session End use the platform's own time picker instead of a typed HH:mm text. Values are still shown in your selected Time Zone and anchored to the exchange clock. If you had custom hours saved, set them once again - the old text values cannot carry over into the new editors.
Smaller fixes: alert timestamps now carry the exact bar the event happened on (they could lag one bar behind); the two maturity settings' descriptions now say plainly that the profile matures once EITHER enough minutes have passed OR enough volume has accumulated - which is what the calculation always did; level labels use the shared OFS typeface setting.
1.2.3 - NEW UPDATE CARD, CENTRED AND WITH DIRECT LINKS.
The card that appears when a newer version is available has been redesigned, identically for every OFS indicator. It now sits exactly in the centre of the chart, shows each product with its current and new version, recommends updating, and carries clearly visible buttons: an Info button that opens the product's page on orderflowsmith.com directly, a Close button at the bottom and the familiar cross in the corner. When several OFS indicators on one chart have updates at once, they all share the single card - one line and one Info button each.
1.2.2 - ALERT SOUND IS A LIST WITH A PLAY BUTTON.
The alert sound used to be a text field with "alert1" typed into it. If you did not already know what the sound files are called, there was no way to find out from inside the indicator, and a typo produced silence rather than an error. It is now the platform's own sound picker: a drop-down of the installed sounds with a small play button beside it, so you can hear a sound before you settle on it. It is the same control ATAS uses in its own indicators.
Because the list comes from the platform rather than from us, it also shows sounds you added yourself - drop a .wav into the platform's Sounds folder and it appears.
A sound you had chosen before is kept.
1.2.0 - TIME ZONE AND SESSIONS, A REBUILT PROFILE GROUP, AND ALERTS.
A new settings group, 05 · Session & Time, decides how times are shown and where the session is cut: Time Zone, Session Template, Session Start / Session End and a Manual Offset with no daylight-saving switching. Times arrive from the platform in UTC and UTC stays the default.
06 · Profile is rebuilt around the decisions that actually change what you see: which profile is primary, how many sessions of history to keep, what a Volume Unit means, minimum and maximum row counts, a freeze on row size so the profile stops re-bucketing itself as it grows, and a minimum profile volume below which a session is not drawn at all. A Data Quality Policy decides what happens when the feed does not deliver what the profile needs - instead of drawing something that looks right and is not.
Alerts are new, and every one of them is OFF by default.
1.1.11 - THE UPDATE CARD'S CLOSE BUTTON IS A REAL BUTTON - a framed, highlighted square instead of a faint cross, comfortably clickable.
1.1.10 - THE PANEL FOOTER NO LONGER SHOWS YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS. It read Licensed to: your@address - expires <date>, so anyone you sent a screenshot to could read who the license belongs to. It now reads v1.1.10 - license OK: version first, then the state of the license and nothing else, the same in every OFS indicator. Who the license belongs to stays in the settings, where only you see it.
1.1.9 - A NEW VERSION NOTICE. Once a day the indicator asks orderflowsmith.com whether a newer version has been released and, if so, shows a small card on the chart with what the new version brings you.
It sends nothing at all - no license key, no product name, not a single parameter - so the request cannot tell anyone what you use, and one request covers every OFS indicator on the chart. The answer is signed with the same key as your license, so nothing else can put text on your chart. It never blocks anything and it stays silent when there is no connection.
There is one card per chart, not one per indicator, and it lists every product that has an update. Close it and it will not come back until the next release. It can be switched off in Settings under 01 License.
1.1.8 - LICENCE GATE ON NOTIFICATIONS. Platform alerts and Telegram messages now require a valid key, exactly like the drawing on the chart does. The gate sits in the place where a notification is actually sent, not at the caller, so it cannot be bypassed by a new call site. Any queued notifications are discarded while the key is missing, so they do not pile up and all fire at once the moment a key is entered.
0.6.14 - everything is drawn exactly once.
- Fixed: the same content was drawn into all three drawing layers the indicator subscribes to. The layers are composited over each other, so every semi-transparent element came out darker than its configured color, and layers refreshed at different moments could leave ghost images while the chart was moved. Everything is now drawn exactly once; live ticks refresh the drawing through a throttled redraw, so the forming-bar preview stays live. Colors may appear slightly lighter than before - they now match what is actually configured; raise the alpha of a color if you preferred the old look.
0.6.13 - drawing no longer drops out while zooming or moving the chart.
- Fixed: the layout was computed from the intersection of the chart area with the current clip rectangle on every frame. During zooms and chart moves the platform sends partial clip rectangles, so the layout collapsed to a narrow strip - the profile jumped and parts of the drawing dropped out. The layout now comes from a stable area assembled from the clips seen, which a partial clip can never shrink; only a resize of the chart resets it. Same fix as in OFS Iceberg Detector 0.3.0.
0.6.12 - the context panel is off by default.
- Changed: the context panel now starts hidden. Adding the indicator to a chart leaves the chart clean, and the panel is one switch away in the context panel settings group.
- Unchanged and worth repeating: every alert is off by default. Nothing in this indicator makes a sound until you ask it to.
0.6.11 — loading is bounded by SESSIONS, never by bars.
- Fixed: every loaded bar was processed, so the same work — volume at price, POC and value area, migration, shape, interaction, corridors and historical levels — ran on 36,000 bars of a 250-tick chart, where a 5-minute chart of the same period has under 2,000. That is why the indicator took so long to appear on a tick chart.
- New: 02 · Profile → History (sessions), default three, meaning today plus two days back. It is deliberately counted in trading sessions and not in bars: the build always starts exactly on a session boundary, so the current session is complete however many bars it contains, and no session is ever loaded in part. A profile built from half a session would be wrong, not merely faster.
0.6.10 — the panel and the profile can now be moved as far as your screen needs. The offset limit was 400 pixels, a number with no reason behind it that ran out on a large or high-resolution chart; it is now effectively unbounded. Applies to the context panel and to the profile offset that frees a strip at the edge for another indicator.
0.6.5
- Changing a setting is now immediate. Every setting used to trigger a full recalculation of the entire chart history, synchronously, on the interface thread — and numeric fields did it on every keystroke, so one change could freeze the platform for seconds. Changes are now collected and calculated once, when you stop adjusting.
- Setting a value it already had now does nothing at all, so loading a chart template no longer recalculates dozens of times over.
- The context panel now uses the shared OFS panel, so it matches every other OFS indicator exactly; label alignment is computed instead of hand-spaced.
- The panel now has one shared size and border everywhere: the same minimum width, the same 1 px accent border and the same separator as every other OFS indicator, so two panels above each other read as one product.
- The panel border is now the same blue and the same thickness in every OFS indicator; state is reported by the text and the badge, never by recolouring the frame.
- Product description rewritten to lead with what this adds over a plain volume profile: a stated verdict with visible evidence, honest data-quality reporting, comparable distances and a frozen row grid.
- Panel width is now measured from the text that is actually drawn, so nothing spills outside the frame any more.
- Machine codes are shown in readable form in the panel (DIRECTIONAL UP, not DIRECTIONAL_UP). The codes themselves are unchanged in alerts and in the output series.
0.6.4
- Every alert is now switched off by default. Turn on only the ones you want.
- Alerts never fire while the chart is loading history or recalculating after a settings change — they report the live market only.
0.6.3
- Level labels now sit on their own backdrop, so nothing shows through them — the POC label used to have its own histogram row running behind the letters
- The panel now shows the running version next to the license line, so you can always tell which build is loaded
- Every one of the 98 settings now applies the moment you change it — no need to remove and re-add the indicator
- Profile can now sit on the left or right side of the chart, with an offset that frees a strip at the edge for the DOM or another indicator
- With Keep Profile Offset Area Clear, no line, label or zone enters that freed strip
- Fixed: on the classic ATAS Platform the panel and the profile were clipped by the price axis; all drawing is now bound to the area the platform actually paints
- Calculation Mode replaces the old preview switch and follows the specification: completed bars plus preview, or completed bars only
- Primary Profile: the context panel can report the current session, the previous session, a composite or a manual range
- Data Quality Policy with an Exact Data Only mode that draws nothing rather than an estimate, plus a switch for the data-quality line in the panel
- Session Template: build the profile from your own hours (for example regular trading hours only), with a chart time offset
- Data-feed interruptions are now reported in the reason codes (VF_DATA_GAP)
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from the volume profile my platform already has?
Should I replace the built-in profile with this one?
Does the indicator repaint?
Does it work on both ATAS and ATAS X?
Where do I enter my license key?
What is DQ4, DQ2 and DQ1 in the panel?
Can I put the profile on the left side of the chart?
Can I build the profile from regular trading hours only?
What are value-area units (VU)?
What does acceptance actually mean here?
Do settings take effect immediately?
Is there a trial?
Does it place orders or send signals?
What is the Impulse Profile?
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