6.2 Main Window ¶

The default display is daily open/high/low/close candlesticks with volume below. Ctrl-W selects a weekly display, or Ctrl-M monthly. Ctrl-D goes back to daily.

The scroll bars move the visible portion. Arrow keys Up, Down, etc move by a step, or control-arrows and Page-Up/Page-Down move by a page. Mouse Button-1 drags the graph within the window. Ctrl-C centres it vertically in the window, if you lose track when paging around.

Z and Shift-Z zoom in and out vertically. W and Shift-W zoom in and out horizontally (‘W’ stands for “wider”). The initial vertical scaling is based on apparent price volatility, so active stocks take the full window (or more), and sedate stocks are shown fairly flat.

During trading, the current day’s open/high/low/last so far is shown in yellow (to emphasise it’s a latest quote). This is always in OHLC style, even on a candlestick chart. The figure drawn looks like

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  +--
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  +-----
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  +--
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--+
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The left line is the open as usual. The long line on the right is the last trade, and the surrounding shorter lines are the current bid and offer. The last trade might be equal to the bid or offer, overlapping it, or they might surround the last, as shown here. In any case this figure gives the current day visually.