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March 4, 2025·9 min read

How to Use the Trading Awareness Breadth Heatmap

The breadth heatmap shows years of daily market data graded green-to-red across dozens of metrics. Here's a practical guide to reading it, spotting regimes, and making it part of your daily routine.

The Trading Awareness breadth heatmap is the centrepiece of the dashboard. It packs years of daily market history into a single scrollable table — every row is a trading day, every column is a different breadth metric, and the colour (green through amber to red) tells you at a glance whether conditions were bullish, neutral, or bearish on each dimension.

Anatomy of the heatmap: columns

• Primary breadth (4%+ moves): "Up 4%" and "Down 4%" are the core StockBee counts. The "Ratio" column (Up ÷ Down) is a compact summary. Green = buyers dominate; red = sellers dominate.
• Burst momentum (20%/5d): Stocks up or down more than 20% in five days. This catches explosive institutional-buying events that often signal a trend change.
• Extended moves (25%/21d, 50%/21d, 13%/34d, 25%/63d): Longer-window surge/plunge counts for spotting sustained expansion or distribution phases.
• Moving average breadth (%>50dma, %>200dma): What fraction of stocks trade above their 50-day or 200-day SMA.
• New highs / new lows: Daily counts of 52-week extremes.

Reading the colour grading

Each cell is coloured on a relative scale calibrated to the historical distribution of that metric. The Market Tone pill at the top summarises the overall regime: Risk-On, Neutral, or Risk-Off.

A practical reading rule: look across a row, not just at one cell. A day where Up 4%, %>50dma and the New Highs count are all green together is qualitatively different from one where only the Up 4% count is green.

Spotting regimes

Scroll back through the heatmap and you'll notice clear regimes — multi-week or multi-month periods where most columns stay green or red. The Column Trend chart (click any column header) lets you chart any individual metric over 1y/2y/3y/5y with an S&P 500 overlay, making regimes even clearer.

A practical daily pre-market routine

1. Check the Market Tone pill first. It gives an instant regime read without scanning every column.
2. Glance at yesterday's row. Was it a net green day or a net red day?
3. Check the 5-day rolling trend. Open the Column Trend for the Ratio column. Is the 5-day average rising, flat, or rolling over?
4. Look at %>50dma. Above 60% = healthy; below 40% = fish in a smaller pond of genuine leaders.
5. Cross-reference with sector leaders. Jump to the Leaders tab and confirm which sectors are flagged in the top four.

Tips for getting the most from the heatmap

• Use the history window toggle. Switch between 1y, 2y, 3y and 5y to get different amounts of context.
• Click column headers to chart any metric. The Column Trend panel opens inline and lets you plot any breadth column with MA overlays and an S&P comparison.
• Export for your own analysis. The download button exports the full breadth history as a CSV.