A Complete Guide to Volume Price Analysis
by Anna Coulling
Quick Summary
A comprehensive guide to Volume Price Analysis (VPA), the methodology used by legendary traders like Charles Dow, Jesse Livermore, and Richard Wyckoff, combining volume and price as the only two leading indicators needed to forecast market direction, identify accumulation/distribution, and distinguish valid price moves from fake ones across all markets and timeframes.
Detailed Summary
Anna Coulling, a trader with over 16 years of experience, presents a comprehensive guide to Volume Price Analysis (VPA), a methodology she credits as the cornerstone of her trading success and the approach used by iconic traders including Charles Dow, Jesse Livermore, and Richard Wyckoff, who built fortunes using nothing more than ticker tape, pencil, and paper.
The book opens with a strong thesis: there are only two leading indicators in trading -- price and volume. In isolation, each reveals little; combined, they become what Coulling describes as an "explosive combination" that reveals the market's DNA. The fundamental analytical framework seeks one of two conditions: confirmation (where volume and price agree in direction and magnitude) or anomaly (where volume and price diverge, signaling potential trend changes).
Chapter 1, "There's Nothing New in Trading," establishes the historical lineage of VPA, demonstrating that the core concepts have remained unchanged for over a century despite dramatic changes in market structure, technology, and participant composition. Chapters 2 and 3 examine volume and price independently as foundational components.
Chapter 4, "Volume Price Analysis -- First Principles," introduces the basic building blocks: reading volume bars in the context of price range and close location to determine whether buying or selling pressure dominated each period. Chapter 5, "Building the Picture," explains accumulation (the quiet, prolonged buying by institutional investors -- "insiders" -- at depressed prices) and distribution (the selling of positions to retail investors -- "outsiders" -- at elevated prices), culminating in buying or selling climaxes that mark the end of campaigns and the beginning of new trends.
Chapter 6, "The Next Level," examines three powerful candle types in the VPA context, along with stopping volume (where institutional buying halts a decline) and topping out volume (where institutional selling caps a rally). Chapter 7 integrates VPA with support and resistance analysis, revealing how volume at key price levels provides crucial information about the validity of breakouts and breakdowns that traditional technical analysis misses.
Chapter 8, "Dynamic Trends and Trend Lines," challenges traditional trend analysis as inherently lagging and introduces dynamic trend lines that, when coupled with VPA, get traders into trends at the start rather than the end. Chapter 9, "Volume at Price (VAP)," introduces a distinct concept from VPA: the visual display of volume density at specific price levels on the chart, creating a horizontal histogram that instantly reveals areas of high-volume consolidation. Breakouts from these regions, confirmed by VPA, signal high-probability new trends.
Chapter 10 provides extensive worked examples across multiple markets (stocks, forex, futures, commodities) and chart types (tick-based, time-based), with detailed annotations showing VPA analysis in real-time. Chapter 11, "Putting It All Together," integrates all elements and introduces powerful congestion patterns that have worked consistently throughout Coulling's trading career. Chapter 12, "The Next Generation," discusses emerging developments in VPA methodology.
Throughout the book, Coulling emphasizes that VPA eliminates emotional trading by providing objective, logic-based signals. She positions VPA as the "only way to reveal the secrets of the market" by exposing the activities of institutional investors, enabling retail traders to follow the "smart money" rather than trading against it.
