Reading The Heatmap

Color And Direction

• Diverging signals (like imbalance) paint two directions from a neutral center — one color for bid/up pressure, another for ask/down.
• Sequential signals (like spread, volume, or volatility) run light-to-dark for low-to-high.
• The color scale is the signal's visualization mode; it is separate from the threshold an alert uses.

What To Compare

• Direction: whether pressure leans bid-side or ask-side.
• Persistence: whether pressure holds across several cells or flashes once.
• Context: whether price confirms, rejects, or ignores the pressure.
• Extremes: whether the value is unusual relative to the recent distribution.

Clusters Over Cells

A single cell is a data point. The stronger read is usually a cluster — pressure spreading across time on one symbol, or across several symbols at once. Use the map to find the cluster, then the inspector to judge it.

Three Ways To Read The Board: Map, Grid, Screen

• Map is the heatmap — each market's score painted over time, so you see how pressure built or faded.
• Grid is the current candle as a treemap: every scanned market is a tile, sized by how strongly it is scoring right now and colored by its score. The markets with the most conviction are the biggest tiles — a strong long and a strong short of the same strength are the same size, and the color tells you which way. Use it to see what is hot across the whole board at a single glance.
• Screen lists every market matching now and the ones that just left, with each one's match history and any columns you add — each column a signal you can also draw under the chart
• All three read the same score and show the same markets, so switching never changes what is being measured — only how you look at it. Hover a tile or row and the chart follows it; click to lock the chart on that market (it wears a lock icon), and click it again to release. With a market locked, ↑ and ↓ step to the next one in the order the view lists them.
• Your chosen view is yours: switching to a different Trade Desk keeps the face you are on (Grid stays Grid), so you can monitor board after board through the same lens.

The Score Column

• Every market's score reads as a number down the right-hand edge of the board, in the same column the chart and the regime band use above it — so one strip tells you where the whole desk stands. The column sits on the chart's own black and the board ends where the chart's candles end, so scroll back in time and no number ever prints over a colored cell. On a phone every row shows its number there too.
• At rest each row shows its latest bar. Put the crosshair on any bar — on the board, the regime band, or the chart — and the whole column jumps to that moment, so you can scrub back through a move and watch the scores that went with it.
• The number is the same one the cell's color encodes, so a bright cell and a big number are never two different readings. A row reads — when its score cannot be computed at that bar.

Choosing Your Colors

• Every row that paints cells carries its own palette — each metric row under the chart, each regime row, and each group of the board.
• Click a metric or regime row's name, or the swatch on a board group's header, and pick: Flow (the default), Neon (electric lime against hot pink, the sharpest up/down split, and still clear with red-green color blindness), Deuteran for red-green color blindness, Ice, Violet, or your own two colors.
• Regime rows start in Neon on every desk, so the read stands apart from the board under it. Board groups and chart rows start in Flow. Pick any row's colors and that row keeps them.
• Colors are per Trade Desk, so a desk you set up to read one way keeps reading that way, and a different desk is untouched.
• Giving stacked rows different colors is the point: two rows measuring different things stop looking like one instrument, and a board grouped by scope tells crypto from equities before you read a label.
• Your fills, stops and targets always keep their own colors, whatever the market rows are wearing — so a trade never disappears into the market.

Looking Back In Time

• Drag the chart or the board to pan back. The board loads history as you go and keeps only the stretch around what you are looking at, so a long look back never slows the desk down.
• Once you are more than a screen away from the live edge the board detaches: it stops moving with each tick so the past holds still under you, and a Now chip appears on the chart — near its top right on a desktop, in the bottom-right corner where the time and price axes meet on a phone, so it never covers the market’s name.
• Press Now to jump straight back to the newest bar. Or just pan forward: once now is within half a screen the board reloads the newest bars and picks the live feed back up, and the view stays where you panned it.
• While you are detached, browser-side alert chimes and match transitions pause; server-side alerts keep running.
• When the desk updates itself to a new version in the background, it comes back on the window you had panned to. Reloading the page yourself opens it on now.