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J. Peter Steidlmayer

J. Peter Steidlmayer (b. 1938): CBOT trader and creator of the Market Profile — the market as a continuous auction searching for value. POC, Value Area and the organised reading of price, time and volume.

On this page

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

Portrait — J. Peter Steidlmayer

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, time as letters, volume as the result — to make visible where the market accepts value and where it rejects it.

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 bell built from TPOs: POC (the most accepted price), Value Area (where ~70% of activity happens), rejection tails, range days and trend days, each with its own physiognomy.
  • 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

  1. To always ask what state the market is in: balance (trade the return to value) or imbalance (follow the search for new value)?
  2. That time is data, not just an axis: how long the market dwells at a price says how accepted that price is.
  3. 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

In preparation — the Steidlmayer tradition path is under construction. Meanwhile, the operational entries already available: market-profile, auction-market-theory, volume-profile.

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