The Heat Map: One Screen, Whole Market

When you have 55+ instruments to keep an eye on, scrolling lists do not scale. The heat map condenses the whole tracked universe into a single, scannable view where colour does the talking.

What the colours mean

Each tile is one instrument. The colour intensity reflects how much it has moved over the timeframe you have selected:

• Green tiles are pairs that are up over the period.
• Red tiles are pairs that are down.
• The deeper the shade, the bigger the move. The brightest green and brightest red are calibrated to the biggest mover on the screen right now, so the colour scale auto-adjusts to current conditions.
• Grey tiles are pairs with no data yet for the selected timeframe.

This is deliberately a relative scale, not an absolute one. A 0.5% move is dramatic on USDCHF on a quiet day and unremarkable on GBPJPY during London. The colour intensity puts every move in context: the brightest tiles are the noteworthy ones, regardless of what the absolute percentage is.

How to use it

Start with the dominant colour

Glance at the whole grid. Mostly green? Risk appetite is on, the dollar is probably soft, equities are likely lifting. Mostly red? Risk-off, dollar bid, equities under pressure. Mixed? The market is rotating, with money flowing between asset classes rather than in one direction.

This is a five-second read that tells you what kind of market you are trading in today.

Find the brightest tiles

The deepest-coloured tiles are where attention should be. They are the markets producing the most movement. If you want to be in a trade, these are the candidates that are actually doing something.

The platform also surfaces top movers explicitly on the market movers page, but the heat map lets you see the brightest tiles in the context of everything around them. Sometimes the brightest tile is the only one of its colour; sometimes it is just the leader of a wider rotation.

Find the dim tiles deliberately

The quiet pairs matter too. A pair sitting in a dim, near-grey tile after several hours of compression is a candidate for the squeeze score watchlist. Once the colour comes back, the breakout may have begun.

Switch timeframes to see the rotation

Quickly toggle between timeframes (1 hour, 4 hour, 1 day, 1 week) to see how the picture changes:

• A pair that is green on the 1 hour but red on the 1 day is bouncing within a downtrend.
• A pair that is bright green across every timeframe is in a full-stack uptrend.
• A grid that changes character dramatically between 1 day and 1 week tells you the day's action is not representative of the broader move.

This is how you spot the difference between fresh breakouts and end-of-trend exhaustion.

Watchlist mode

Toggle the watchlist filter to limit the heat map to your tracked pairs. This is the right way to use the heat map day-to-day once you have a working watchlist set up. Forty-seven tiles is informative; fifteen tiles is actionable.

What the heat map does not show

It does not show direction of trend, just performance over the selected period. A green tile means the pair closed higher than it opened on that timeframe; it does not mean the trend is bullish. For the trend read, switch over to the trends grid.

It also does not show liquidity or spread. A bright tile on an instrument that trades thinly during certain hours can be misleading if you cannot actually fill orders without slippage.