Heatmap is a color-coded display of activity of pending orders. For each price level that has pending orders, Heatmap displays a horizontal bar colored according to the color-gradient scheme selected on the toolbar. Colors on the right-hand end of the gradient correspond to price slices with the highest liquidity, and those on the left-hand end, to the lowest.
You can customize the display of Heatmap in the Heatmap Settings menu. To navigate to this menu, right-click on Heatmap and select Heatmap Settings. You can customize the following:
1. Color scheme. You can choose any of the three pre-defined color schemes. This control is also available by default on the toolbar. If you wish to remove it from the toolbar, de-activate the Display on toolbar checkbox. Legacy color schemes will become available when the Include legacy colormaps checkbox is activated.
2. Lower and upper cutoffs. Lower and upper cutoffs limit the trade sizes that will be displayed in the extreme colors of the gradient. Trades with sizes less than the lower cutoff will be displayed in the leftmost color on the gradient; trades with sizes greater than the upper cutoff will be displayed in the rightmost color of the gradient.
You can set either cutoff as:
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Percentage: Drag the sliders to set the cutoffs. The values define the top and the bottom trades in terms of trade size.
Example: The lower cutoff is set to 5% and the upper is set to 95% on the grayscale color scheme. This means that trades that have the bottom five percent of trade sizes will be displayed in black, and the top five will be displayed in white. Those in between will be displayed using colors corresponding to the gradient.
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Exact size: Activate the designated checkbox and specify the cutoff value. In the case of the exact size, the values define the maximum number of contracts for the lower cutoff and the minimum number of contracts for the upper cutoff.
Example: The lower cutoff is set to 5 and the upper is set to 500 on the grayscale color scheme. This means that trades of five contracts and under will all be displayed in black and those with over 500 will be displayed in white. Those in between will be displayed using colors corresponding to the gradient.
By default, the lower percentage cutoff slider is also available on the toolbar above the chart. To remove it from the toolbar, deactivate the Display lower cut-off slider on the toolbar checkbox.
3. Vertical smoothing. Vertical smoothing allows you to display Heatmap using more or fewer gradient shades. The former can be especially useful when zooming out too far on the chart. The following smoothing options are available:
- Auto. The default option that automatically determines the optimal vertical smoothing for your Heatmap, taking into account the current zoom.
- Manual. This option allows you to set a value from 0 to 20 to manually define the smoothing effect.
- None. This option de-activates smoothing, regardless of the current zoom.
4. Marked depth settings. To customize market depth settings, click Advanced market depth settings. In the menu that pops up you can configure the following:
- Manual Market Depth. This area allows you to reduce the number of visible price levels on Heatmap. To reduce the price range, activate the Override number of market depth price levels checkbox and specify the desired number of price levels.
- Extended Market Depth. This area is only relevant for data streams that do not support the full depth (i.e., all price levels). When some price levels are not available, Bookmap still shows them: in this case, the last available trade sizes are shown for these levels. Use the options in the Extended Market Depth area to reset the data for such price levels: either at the end of the trading day or at a specified frequency.
In addition to the above settings, you can configure the settings for Volume bars and Volume dots. Please refer to the corresponding pages for more information.