Well yesterday was a special case where no price on the S&P futures found 'acceptance' --- it was an 'elongated' trend-day (skinny profile). NQ did form a value level near 1903.00. In this case, I am more inclined to play for the 15-min EMA. Not blindly -- only in combination with a risk-controlled technical strategy.
Re your 15-min 20-EMA comment -- Yes, this is just a guideline and the real trick is reading the pattern and applying short-term trading strategies around it. You must avoid fighting trend days in pursuit of this tendency. But NQ tends to have large retracements and I am very often sitting there saying "wow, we are 18 points away from yesterdays
POC -- no way it touches it today" -- and then it does. For example, Tuesdays
POC (to use for Wednesday) was 1892.00 on NQ. We had a strong push up on Wednesday during period 'A' (opening 30 minutes) and put in a typical morning reversal during period 'B' -- NQ then formed what looked like a large A-B-C down for a play back up. I went long here, it pushed up and I got my stop up to breakeven but then stopped out when that China news came out. What happened next, it proceeded directly to the previous days
POC before going vertical back up. Turns out there was an even larger scale A-B-C down. The useful point here was to stay flexible to the idea that the odds are it will go touch yesterdays
POC --- not necessarily to always trade/scalp with that as the objective. As I reviewed my trades that day, I realized that once it touched the
POC --- the downside pivot had been met as an objective for the day and that could give you confidence that the market may have just put in a large corrective A-B-C down rather than thinking to 'go with' the downside momentum. Again, this is context for how to put oscillator momentum into perspective and using 'right-brain' thinking to synthesize the various buy and sell pressures into a trade.
I was just curious how others are practically using the information generated in Market Profile for context. I have read Daltons books and they opened my eyes big-time with how to think about trade location ("Markets In Profile" is just excellent).