butter extravaganza,” the consumer bought in a frenzy, leaving in its wake a
single-print buying tail.
-Jim Dalton, Mind Over Markets
The value area is essentially the “initial balance” it’s the area where price has spent the most time and done the most volume. Value areas are always bound to change, but as a generality, price tends to prefer to return to the value area unless significant momentum is present in the opposite direction.
The value area is conventionally plotted as the area where roughly 70% of trades took place. This 70% number is taken from the statistical concept of the normal distribution. While financial markets seldom exhibit normal distributions on either side of the mean, a bell curve is a convenient method of organizing the data.