J. Peter Steidlmayer

Markets and Market Logic (1986): the market is an auction that exists for one purpose only — to facilitate trade by searching for the price where activity is maximised.


Period	b. 1938
Where	Chicago Board of Trade (member from 1963, later on the board)
Lens	Volumetric — auction theory
Key work	Market Profile (with the CBOT, 1984–85); Markets and Market Logic (1986)

Who he is

Son of a Californian farmer who bought land when "price and value diverged", Steidlmayer brought that distinction to the Chicago pits, where he traded for decades as an independent. In the 1980s, as a CBOT board member, he developed and published with the exchange the Market Profile: not an indicator but a way of organising data—price on the vertical and time as TPO letters. Volume, when available through the Liquidity Data Bank or later tools, is a separate measure and does not coincide with the TPO count.

Contribution

Auction Market Theory — the market as a continuous two-way auction: it searches for the price that facilitates trade, and moves when it stops finding it. Balance and imbalance become the fundamental states to recognise.
The Market Profile — the profile built from TPOs: POC and Value Area depend on the stated metric (TPO count in the classic profile; volume in modern volumetric profiles), together with tails, Initial Balance and range development.
Price ≠ value — price is the auction's advertising; value is where activity concentrates: trading the difference between the two is the entire programme of the volumetric school.
The operational legacy — from his work descend the modern Volume Profile, the intraday reading of value area and POC and, downstream, order-flow tools like the CVD.

What today's students learn from him

To always ask what state the market is in: balance (trade the return to value) or imbalance (follow the search for new value)?
That time is data, not just an axis: how long the market dwells at a price says how accepted that price is.
The vocabulary of every volumetric desk — POC, VA, tails, rotations — was born here: learning it at the source keeps it from becoming empty jargon.

Study path

Start here — Steidlmayer tradition, a 19-step path whose editorial status is declared on each entry. Prerequisites: Order book, Trading volume.

#	Entry
1	Steidlmayer tradition introduction
2	Auction Market Theory
3	Equilibrium and imbalance
4	Operational POC and Value Area
5	Initial Balance
6	CBOT types: Normal, Normal Variation, Trend and Neutral
7	Market-generated information
8	Market Logic principles
9	TPO — time-price opportunity
10	Initiating vs responsive
11	Range extension
12	Distribution process
13	Dominant concern
14	Minus development
15	Liquidity Data Bank (LDB)
16	Control price
17	CTI2 — commercial activity
18	Trading strategy — Market Logic
19	Soybean 1991 case study

Sources

J. Peter Steidlmayer and Kevin Koy, Markets and Market Logic, 1986.
Chicago Board of Trade, Market Profile Home Study Guide.
James F. Dalton, Eric T. Jones and Robert B. Dalton, Mind Over Markets,