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, Table

• 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.
• Table lists the firing pairs, ranked and sortable.
• 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 and the chart follows it; click to lock it.
• 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.

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 above the chart.
• Press Now (or pan back to the live edge) to return. The board reloads the newest bars in one read and picks the live feed back up.
• While you are detached, browser-side alert chimes and match transitions pause; server-side alerts keep running.