Poor High/poor Low

What is a Poor High/poor Low?

A poor high or poor low is a Market Profile judgment on the quality of a session extreme. A secure extreme shows excess: a tail of single prints where one side aggressively rejected price. A poor extreme is the opposite: the high or low is flat, with two or more TPOs of the TPO profile sitting at the same extreme price. The common reading at a poor high is that late buyers simply ran out rather than sellers forcefully taking over; a poor low mirrors that with exhausted sellers.

Poor extremes are filed under unfinished business: because the auction stalled instead of completing with rejection, the framework expects the market to revisit and repair poor highs and lows more often than tailed ones. That is a tendency the profile community trades around, not a promise; some poor extremes are never repaired.

How traders use it

• As revisit references: unrepaired poor highs and lows stay marked on the chart, much like naked POCs, and act as candidate draws when price rotates back toward them.
• As a caution flag: a poor low forming beneath a long entry warns that the low may be revisited, which argues for structure-based stops rather than stops resting just under the flat extreme.
• As part of extreme-quality reading: comparing tails against poor extremes across recent sessions to judge which range boundaries are secure and which invite retests.