Charts

Fast Charts

I love the TradingView charts, and they aren’t going anywhere. But when you’re working through a scan you aren’t studying one chart. You’re flipping through thirty of them, and every second of loading adds up. Fast Charts are built for that job.

The big one: they show what Zen knows. Because the engine is ours, I can draw Zen’s own data the way it should look: the option call and put walls right on the price chart, Relative Strength against SPY, ZenTrend, and the Trade Signals markers on the bar where they fired. The same engine draws the chart previews on your scans and the chart that lands on your phone with an alert, so what you see in one place is what you see everywhere. And they’re easy on your computer: open six chart windows across two monitors and nothing slows down.

The right panel shows two charts for the selected stock: intraday on top, daily below. Use the tabs above them to choose the chart style.

Tab	What you get
Fast Charts	Charts drawn by ZenBot. They appear at once as you move down a list, and carry ZenBot’s own overlays: trade signals, option levels, ZenTrend, split markers.
TradingView	The full interactive TradingView chart, with its own indicator library and drawing tools. Slower to switch stocks.

I use Fast Charts to go through the scan and TradingView for the two or three names I actually want to trade. Open in TradingView switches the current stock. Set which chart opens by default with Default chart style in Chart Settings (the gear above the charts).

Move around a Fast Chart

• Scroll back: drag the chart or hold Shift while turning the mouse wheel.
• Zoom: the mouse wheel, or the + and − buttons.
• Now on the time axis brings you back to the latest bar after scrolling back.
• Countdown: on a live intraday chart, the price axis counts down to the bar’s close.
• Timeframes from 1 minute to weekly.
• Earnings: an E marks the bar where the company reported, green for a beat, red for a miss, on daily, 4-hour and weekly charts.
• The next report: an amber tag at the bottom right counts down to it, like E in 6d · Oct 29 AMC (AMC = after the close, BMO = before the open). On a daily or weekly chart, drag some room open after the last bar and the amber E lands on the report’s day with a dashed line. Dates come from the earnings calendar and can move.

Above each Fast Chart

Control	What it does
The symbol	Click it to look up and load another stock.
1m 5m 15m 1h 4h 1D 1W	The chart’s timeframe.
ETH	Shows or hides premarket and after-hours bars on intraday charts.
Candle style	Candles, Heikin-Ashi or Line.
‹ ›	Step back and forward in time. Hold Shift to move a full screen. You can also drag the chart. Now returns to the latest bar.
Zoom + / −	Fewer or more bars on screen.
Calls / Puts %	The balance of options positioning. Click for the options detail. See Options Flow.
Indicators	Switch ZenBot’s overlays on and off, set the size of the lower panes, and open All indicators.
Explain Chart	Asks Zen to explain this chart: trend, key levels and volume, with the numbers. See Ask Zen.
Alerts	The bell. On a stock that has alerts it shows their count and opens them; on any other stock it starts a new alert. Your price alerts also draw on the chart as lines you can drag. See Stock alerts.

When the chart column is narrow the bar gives up room a step at a time: the Indicators and Calls words first, then the zoom buttons, then the Calls chip, and the Explain Chart and Alerts words last.

Typing a timeframe

Put the pointer over a Fast Chart and type 5m, 15m, 1h, 4h, 1D or 1W, then Enter. Only that chart changes. You can give the top and bottom charts different timeframes. It works the same in a chart window: the chart under the pointer changes.

Chart indicators

Two I use every day: Relative Strength compares the stock with SPY in its own pane. Is it stronger than the market, or just riding it? Anchored VWAP starts from Earnings, Prior Earn, Quarter, Jan 1 or 52W in one click. Volume bars split estimated buying (green) and selling (red). That’s worked out from each candle’s shape, not exchange data, but it helps big climax bars stand out.

Indicators → All indicators opens the full list. Search for one by name and add it.

• On the price chart: moving averages (SMA or EMA, any length, as many as you want), session VWAP, anchored VWAP (from earnings, prior earnings, the quarter, 1 January or the 52-week high or low), key highs and lows, prior day high / low / close, pivot points, Bollinger, Keltner, ATR bands, SuperTrend, Ichimoku, Parabolic SAR, Volume Profile, buy / sell volume.
• In their own pane: RSI, Stochastic, MACD, ADX / DMI, OBV, TTM Squeeze.
• ZenBot’s own: Trade Signals, ZenTrend, option target levels and others, listed in the Indicators menu.

Want to start over? Defaults puts everything back as it was.

Stock splits

Fast Charts adjust past prices for stock splits, so a 10-for-1 split doesn’t appear as a 90% drop. A small S marks the day of the split; hover it for the ratio. Scans adjust too: from a split stock’s first trade after the split, its numbers are in post-split terms, so it stays on the built-in scans like any other stock.

Live vs. delayed

On Turbo, charts update live. On the free plan they are 15 minutes behind and say so in the corner. The free plan also opens charts for up to 150 different stocks a day; after that, charts you already opened that day still work. The count starts again at midnight Eastern.

Pop-Out Windows

If you run a few monitors, pop a scan into one window and its charts into another. Any scan or chart can have its own window.

• Pop out a scan: the two-squares button on the scan heading, or right-click a scan and choose Open in new window.
• Pop out a chart: the two-squares button above the charts, or right-click a stock and choose Open chart in new window. The new window follows whatever stock you click. From inside a chart window the same menu item opens another window, the same size as the one you are in.

The line above the charts about linking your charting app with the ZenBot Windows App has an ×; close it and it stays closed on your account.

Linking windows by color

Each window has a colored dot. Click it, and under Link this window choose a color: Blue, Purple, Teal, Green, Yellow, Orange or Red. Windows that share a color follow each other: click a stock in one and the others load it. Choose Not linked for a window that should keep its own stock.

Use blue for a long scan and its chart, red for a short scan and its chart. The two sets follow their own stocks.

The free plan allows three pop-out windows open at a time, scan windows and chart windows together. Turbo has no limit.

Chart Windows

Put up to eight charts in one window, each with its own stock and timeframe. All eight are available on every plan.

On the window’s bar	What it does
Layout ▾	How many charts, from one to eight, and how they’re arranged: side by side, stacked, a grid and more.
Ticker	Every chart shows one stock, for example one stock on four timeframes. Turning it on brings every chart to the one you were last on.
Timeframe	The reverse: every chart on one timeframe, for example four stocks on the 5-minute.
Saved layouts ▾ and Save	Name the window’s setup and keep it. See below.
TradingView / Fast Charts	Flips every chart in the window to interactive TradingView charts, same layout, so you can zoom, scroll back and draw. Fast Charts flips back.
Ask Zen	Opens Zen over the right side of the window. Every chart in the window has its own Explain Chart button and the right-click Ask Zen items; a read is answered in this window, and anything about scans is handed to the main window. See Ask Zen.

• Resize: drag the line between two charts. Double-click it to even them out.
• Crosshair: move across one chart and the crosshair follows on all of them, so you can line up the same moment on the 5-minute and the hourly. The date and prices show on the chart under your pointer.
• Small charts stay tidy: when a chart gets narrow its bar drops the extras and keeps the stock, timeframe and Indicators.

Saved layouts

Set up the window, open Saved layouts, name it something like “Morning wall”, and click Save. Changes save as you go, and the name appears on the window’s bar. You can keep up to 20 layouts in your account and use them on any computer you sign in on. The trash icon removes one.

The first chart window you open comes back the way you left it, with the stock you opened it for.

Technical indicators

Here’s what the readings mean when you see them on a chart or in a filter.

Relative strength vs SPY

How the stock has done against the market over a window. A stock that is up 1% while SPY is down 0.5% is strong. Strength that holds when the market dips is one of the better signs of real buying.

Relative volume (RVOL)

Today’s volume against what is normal for this time of day. Above 2 means unusual interest. The “High RVOL in the last N bars” filters look for a single bar that traded several times its recent average, on whichever timeframe you choose.

Laguerre RSI (LRSI)

A smoother, faster cousin of RSI, on a scale of 0 to 1.

Above 0.80	Stretched.
Below 0.20	Washed out.
Rising	Momentum building.

Stochastic and Slow Stochastic

The standard Stochastic filters, plus a Slow Stochastic with 34 / 10 / 3 settings and an exponential signal line: above or below a value, and above or below its own signal.

Bollinger bands

Filters for the band width (a squeeze), and for price closing above the upper band or below the lower band on any timeframe.

VWAP

The volume-weighted average price for the day. Above it, buyers have had the better of the session; below it, sellers. The anchored VWAP filters do the same from a chosen starting point, such as the last earnings report.

Moving averages

The 50, 100 and 200 SMA and the 8, 21 and 50 EMA, on any timeframe. See Filters for near, above, below, bounced and rejected.

ADX and ATR

ADX measures trend strength in either direction. Under 20 usually means chop; over 40, a strong trend. ATR is the average size of a bar, handy when you think about stops and position size.

Heikin-Ashi

Heikin-Ashi candles average price to smooth out noise. Scans such as Turning Up use the flip from red to green on the 15-minute chart. You can also view any Fast Chart in Heikin-Ashi from the candle style menu.

Every chart indicator

Fast Charts draw two kinds of indicator. ZenBot indicators are the studies the scanner itself runs, in calibrated colors you don’t have to set up; the Indicators menu on the chart bar switches each on with one click, and All indicators… opens the full dialog. Your indicators are the classics, with their own lengths, colors and line styles, added from the same dialog’s search box. Everything here draws on the browser-drawn Fast Chart; the TradingView chart has its own studies.

ZenBot indicators

Indicator	What it shows
Price Targets	Option strike levels on the price pane: the call and put walls where the most options are open, which often act as magnets or lids. Free accounts see a few; Turbo sees them all. The opacity slider fades them back.
ZenTrend	A fast and a slow trend line in a pane under the price. The fast line crossing the slow one is a cycle turn; the curl of the fast line is what the Trade Signals read.
Key Bars	Bars with a range above the average that closed strong on heavy volume, recolored so the bars that mattered stand out.
Trade Signals	Experimental buy and sell marks from ZenTrend curls agreeing with relative strength. Examples to study, not orders. See Trade Signals.
Laguerre RSI	A fast-turning RSI on a 0 to 1 scale in its own pane: above 0.8 stretched, below 0.2 washed out.
Relative Strength	The move against what SPY alone would explain, in ATRs, as a histogram. Green bars above zero mean the stock is doing better than the market that day.
Anchored VWAP	The volume-weighted price from a chosen anchor: this window, the last earnings, the quarter, January 1 or the 52-week high or low. Pick the anchors on the row itself.
Higher Timeframe Zones (beta)	Price areas where hourly wicks clustered over the last year, and wider daily zones, on any timeframe. Its own opacity slider.
SPY shadow	SPY’s bars faded behind the chart on their own scale. A stock climbing out of its shadow is leading the market.
Buy/Sell Volume	Each volume bar split into estimated buying (green) and selling (red).

Your indicators

Group	Indicators
Averages and VWAP	EMA, SMA and VWMA with any length, each on the chart’s own timeframe or a higher one (a daily average on a 5-minute chart); the session VWAP; earnings markers on the bars.
Bands	Bollinger Bands, Keltner Channels and ATR bands, with their lengths and multipliers.
Trend	SuperTrend, the Ichimoku cloud and Parabolic SAR.
Levels	Volume Profile for the visible range with its point of control, Key Highs & Lows (10-day, 20-day, 3-month, 52-week), the prior day’s high, low and close, and classic pivot points.
Oscillators	RSI, Stochastic, MACD, ADX, OBV and the TTM Squeeze, each in its own pane. The pane size chips on the Indicators menu set how tall the panes are.

Every line takes a color, width and style from the small editor on its row, and a set you like can be saved as a layout and applied to every chart.

SPY shadow, zones and the premarket price

SPY shadow

In the chart’s Indicators menu, SPY shadow draws SPY’s bars faded behind the chart, on their own scale. A stock climbing out of its shadow is leading the market; one sinking into it is lagging. It is in the ZenBot Indicators section of All indicators too.

Higher Timeframe Zones

Higher Timeframe Zones (beta) marks price areas where hourly wicks have clustered over the last year, and wider daily zones, on any timeframe. In All indicators both it and Price Targets have an opacity slider, so you can fade them back behind the candles.

The premarket price

With extended hours off, the chart still shows the price the stock trades at now, so a price alert set from the chart before the open still has something to go on. Before the open it sits in a yellow PREMARKET box on its dashed line, after the close in an AFTER HOURS box, with a matching yellow chip on the price axis.

Your alerts on the chart

A price alert on the stock draws as a dashed line at its level with a tag at the left edge, amber while it can fire and gray once it has fired, is paused or has expired. Drag the line to move the alert, click the tag to open it. The details are under Stock alerts.

Small things

• Double-click the price axis to reset the chart’s view: live edge, default zoom, auto-fit scale.
• The Indicators menu is two columns of one-line rows. Hover the question mark on a row for what it does; the pane size chips sit on the All indicators row.