How to Read a Squeeze Heatmap (The Pulse Walkthrough)

The Pulse was built around one goal: know the squeeze state of the whole board in five seconds. Everything on the screen serves that — the layout, the score, the five colors, even the way a slightly-stale cell dims itself. This walkthrough explains each element so that the first time you open the dashboard, nothing is mysterious.

The layout: symbols × timeframes

Each row is a symbol — stocks like AAPL and NVDA next to CME futures like ES, NQ and GC, on the same board. Each column is a timeframe: 3-minute, 5-minute, 15-minute, hourly, 4-hour, daily and weekly, plus a final Composite column that rolls the row up into a single number. One cell = one question answered: "what does this symbol look like on this timeframe, right now?"

The score: −100 to +100

Every cell contains a signed score from −100 (maximally bearish) to +100 (maximally bullish). It is not a prediction and not a probability — it is a weighted blend of four indicator readings computed on that timeframe's closed bars:

• Momentum (30% default) — the TTM Squeeze momentum histogram's sign and slope;
• SuperTrend (25%) — ATR-band trend direction and flip recency;
• EMA alignment (20%) — how cleanly the 8/21/50/200 stack is ordered;
• TTM Squeeze (25%) — compression state, acting as an amplifier: because a squeeze has no direction of its own, it doesn't add or subtract points directly — it magnifies whatever directional signal the other three are producing. A market leaning long while coiled scores stronger than the same lean uncoiled.

A +8 and a +72 are therefore very different animals: the first is a faint lean, the second is momentum, trend structure and compression all pulling the same way. Magnitude matters more than sign.

The five colors

Scores are bucketed into five symmetric classes, so the color alone carries the read:

The ±20 and ±60 thresholds are the defaults, and they're user-adjustable via sliders — raising the green threshold to ±70, say, makes the board stricter about what earns a strong color, on both the bull and bear side symmetrically. Gray is not a failure state; on most days most of the board should be gray. The board's job is to make the exceptions impossible to miss.

Reading across a row

The single most useful habit: read rows, not cells. Patterns to recognize (the multi-timeframe guide covers the why):

• A wall of one color — every timeframe green or every one red. Full confluence; the trend is established across horizons. These rows are rare and worth immediate attention.
• Colored on the right, gray on the left — daily/weekly directional, intraday neutral. A trending market taking an intraday breather; swing traders' favorite starting point.
• Colored on the left, gray or opposite on the right — intraday excitement without higher-timeframe backing. Scalp context at best; countertrend risk at worst.
• Colors flipping left to right — timeframes in open disagreement. Transition or chop; the honest read is "unclear."

Squeeze-dot mode

If you drag the weight sliders so the squeeze component is isolated at 100%, the board changes behavior: cells stop showing signed scores and show compression dots instead. This is deliberate honesty in the UI — a squeeze has no direction, so a "+62 from squeeze alone" would be a fabricated number. In dot mode the board becomes a pure compression map: where is energy building, at what depth, on which timeframes — with direction intentionally left blank. Traders who want the raw Squeeze-Pro-style view of the whole board use exactly this.

Fresh, queued and closed cells

A scanner is only as honest as its data currency, so every cell tracks its own freshness against the market clock:

• Fresh — the latest closed bar for that symbol × timeframe is in the score. Normal rendering. (Scores update on closed bars only; an in-progress bar can flicker in and out of conditions before it settles, so The Pulse never scores one.)
• Queued — a new bar has closed but the fetch cycle hasn't ingested it yet; the cell dims to half opacity until it catches up, usually within minutes. A dimmed cell is the board telling you "this number is one bar behind" instead of letting you find out later.
• Closed — the market isn't trading (evening for stocks, weekend, holiday). The cell shows the last completed bar at full opacity; the tooltip notes the market is closed. Futures rows keep updating nearly around the clock — the futures guide explains their 23-hour session.

The header also carries a staleness indicator for the whole board — green when the last data refresh is recent, amber if it ages past the normal cycle.

Data coverage

History depth varies by timeframe: daily runs back roughly 5 years, weekly about 2 years, the 15-minute through 4-hour columns about 2 years, and the 3-minute / 5-minute columns are recent-only. The live heatmap is always current for every symbol — freshness is per-cell, as described above — while the deeper tools that draw on stored history (the Score Chart, Performance tracker and Optimizer) reach only as far back as that history goes.

Newly added symbols may show limited history for a day or two while we backfill them, so a fresh row can look shallow on the deeper views before its full record fills in.

Free vs Pro, honestly

The free tier shows three symbols — ES, AAPL and NVDA — across all seven timeframes with default weights, no card required. That's a complete, functioning confluence board, and for learning to read squeezes it's genuinely enough. Pro adds the full symbol board, the weight sliders (and squeeze-dot mode that comes with them), historical replay, the signal performance tracker and the weight optimizer.

One closing caution, because a color-coded board can feel more authoritative than it is: the heatmap summarizes indicator evidence from past bars. It doesn't know about earnings tonight, CPI at 8:30, or your risk tolerance. It compresses an hour of chart-flipping into five seconds — the judgment part is still yours.

For informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Trading involves substantial risk of loss.