Q: Is this right for me?
It is for traders who want to know what kind of market they are in before they act. The context, not a prediction. If you already trade around value, auctions and volume, it will fit the way you think. It is not for you if you are after buy/sell arrows or a bot that trades on its own. There are none here, and there never will be. The engine hands you the read. The call stays yours.
Q: How is this different from a normal Volume Profile?
A volume profile shows you where volume traded: the high and low volume nodes, the value area, the point of control. It draws the map and stops there. The Auction Engine reads that same map and asks the next question: did the market accept those areas, reject them, defend them, or move away from them? That is the part a profile cannot tell you. Put simply: the profile gives you the location, the Auction Engine gives you the context and behaviour around it, named as one of 17 states, marked on the exact bar it changed, and handed to the rest of your Flow.42 Suite. The profile is the input. The read is the point.
Q: Is the Auction Engine a buy/sell signal?
No. There are no arrows and no entries. It reads the session's volume auction and tells you what kind of market you are in: balanced, accepting value higher or lower, imbalanced, rotating back to value, or an auction that just failed. You still decide what to do with that. It will not call the next tick. It tells you the context that tick is happening in.
Q: What is the State line telling me?
The State is the engine's one-line read of the auction right now, picked from 17 named states. The text colour carries the direction: green leans bullish, red bearish, gold says be careful, grey is neutral. One thing worth remembering: a failed auction flips. A failed upper auction is bearish, a failed lower one is bullish. When the tape runs against the state, the whole panel switches to the warning colour and the State line says so.
Q: What does the Confidence number mean?
Confidence (0 to 100) is how cleanly the engine sees the current state, not a probability that price goes your way. A high number means the auction structure is unambiguous. A low one means the read is shaky, and you should treat it that way. With Tape Agreement on, the panel shows two numbers side by side: Structure, which is this confidence, and Tape, which is how much the live order flow agrees with the state.
Q: What is Tape Agreement?
The state describes the auction structure. Tape Agreement checks whether the live tape actually trades that way. It scores the recent bars from 0 to 100 and reports aligned, neutral or conflict. A conflict has to persist for a few bars before it is shown, so a single bar cannot flip it. On conflict the hint in the panel becomes a warning and an amber marker goes on the chart. You can also tell the engine to report a neutral bias to the Suite while state and tape disagree, so no signal gets dimmed on a read the tape does not support.
Q: What are the rotation states?
Four of the 17 states describe the turn back toward value. Rejection of Lower Prices and Rejection of Higher Prices mark the early stage: the market tested prices beyond an edge of value and rejected them. Return to Value from Below and Return to Value from Above mark the proven rotation: price has come back through prior value and the far side of value is the target. They are on by default. Switch them off and the engine falls back to the previous state machine without them, which also changes how the Suite dims its signals.
Q: What is the difference between developing and prior values?
The developing values (dVPOC, dVA) belong to today's session as it builds, live and still moving. The prior values (pVPOC, pVA) are last session's finished profile, and they are the reference price gets measured against. The profile is built from Tick Replay. When the panel says "Prior: enable Tick Replay", switch Tick Replay on in the chart's Data Series. When it says "Prior: load more history", it has no prior session yet. Scroll back to feed it more bars.
Q: What are the State Change Markers?
A dashed vertical line with a short label, dropped on the chart at the exact bar where the auction changed character: IMB UP, FAIL DOWN, LVA, REJ LOW, RTV UP, and so on. They only print on a real change into a meaningful state, never on every bar. Read them left to right and you get the story of the session: where it drove, where it failed, where it turned back, where value shifted.
Q: When does the AI run, and will it slow my chart down?
Only when you click AI Analyst. Never on a render, never per bar. The call runs on a background task, so your chart keeps going untouched while it works. If it fails, it fails quietly in its own window and cannot take your chart down with it.
