How to read a card: chart, labels and the freeze

Opening the feed, a person sees identical rectangles, and the first urge is to look only at the coin name and the kind. That loses nine tenths of the meaning. A card answers four questions at once: where price is relative to the obstacle, how mobile the coin is at all, how much money is in it, and when all this was noticed. This lesson teaches reading it in seconds.

Top line: coin, timeframe, side

On the left the ticker, next to it a copy button and a badge with the number of exchanges where the coin trades. Then the timeframe — a wall has none, because density lives in the order book, not on the chart. Then the side: “Long” or “Short” for level kinds, “Impulse up” or “Impulse down” for a spike. On the right, the age of the card: how long since it was born. Age always grows, even after the card has faded: it tells you how fresh the situation is.

Mini-chart: 160 bars and real levels

The chart shows the last one hundred and sixty bars of the timeframe the card belongs to. The purple dashed line marks the level of the situation; thin lines are the other levels of the window — the same ones the “Liquidity” indicator draws on the big chart, not invented for the picture. The last candle is outlined in white so the eye finds the edge at once. There are no arrows, targets or stops on the card: this is a map of a situation, not a ready-made trade.

Why the chart does not change: the freeze

Since 5 September the picture freezes at the moment the card is born and is no longer extended. The reason is simple: the point of a card is to show the moment the situation formed. If the chart kept living, an hour later you would see the consequences instead of the approach, and there would be no way to tell what the algorithm actually noticed. The label “chart 12:30 (2h)” means: the last bar of the picture closed at 12:30 and two hours have passed since. Only price and the distance to the level stay live.

The labels under the chart, in order

• “Chart” — the time of the last bar of the picture and how long ago that was. The time zone is the one chosen in the site header.
• “To level” — how many percent of movement is left from the current price to the level of the situation.
• “24h volume” — daily turnover of the coin across all our exchanges: a measure of how much money is in the instrument.
• “24h change” — price change over the day, green or red.
• “1h NATR” — the usual range of an hourly bar in percent: how mobile the coin is. A level on a coin with 0.3% and with 8% NATR are completely different stories.
• “Level” — the price of the level itself; “kind” — where it came from: a liquidity swing or a window extreme.
• “Touches” — how many times price tested the level, counting the bar it formed on.
• At the bottom, the exchange and its price — and for a wall, the order size in dollars.

The feed lives for a week

A card stays on the page for seven days from the moment the situation ended. This was done at traders' request: the spikes tab used to empty out within a couple of hours, and someone returning in the evening could not see what happened during the day. Now the feed is a weekly chronicle of the market, and you can page through it with “Show more”. The page does not show how a situation ended: outcomes are computed internally to tune the algorithm, but nothing can be promised from them.