Chart reference · Drawing Tools

Gann Tools

Seven tools that treat price and time as if they were the same kind of quantity, and draw a coloured lattice, a set of slopes, a ladder of squared numbers or a tiling of literal squares from the clicks you give them.

What

What this page is

These used to have a rail button of their own. They do not any more: they live under the third button, the one labelled Fibonacci and Angle Tools, below a heading of their own. Open it and you get two headings — Fibonacci at the top with ten tools, then Gann with these seven. The pairing is not arbitrary. A Fibonacci tool takes a swing and cuts it at fixed ratios; a Gann tool takes a box and does the same thing with a different set of numbers, and both of them draw every level in its own colour.

Five of the seven are the classic set and are what most of this page is about: Gann Box, Gann Square Fixed, Gann Square and Gann Fan are each placed with two clicks that are opposite corners of a box, and Gann Square of Nine takes one click and ignores the box idea entirely.

The other two are the squaring tools, Gann Squares and Gann Square Range, and they are a different construction. The four box tools take a rectangle you dragged and divide it. A squaring tool builds a literal SQUARE — so much price against exactly as much time — and then tiles it across the chart. Where that square gets its size is the only thing separating the two: Gann Squares uses a fixed number of units, the classic 90 or 144, so its square is the same on every symbol; Gann Square Range measures the span between two clicks and squares that. Both are described in the reading section below rather than at the length the five above get.

Nothing here needs a third click, which is what makes this family quicker to place than the pitchforks on the button above.

Gann Box subdivides the box on both axes at 0, 0.25, 0.382, 0.5, 0.618, 0.75 and 1, shades the band opening at each division on both axes, and prints the ratio on all four edges of the frame. Gann Square does the same with plain quarters — 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1 — and then adds the construction that makes it a square rather than a grid: quarter-ellipse arcs sweeping out from the bottom-left corner, a small fan of rays from that same corner, and both diagonals. Gann Square Fixed is the ruled version: eighths on both axes drawn as a dashed hairline grid, both diagonals, and sixteen quarter arcs — eight in from the top-left corner and eight from the bottom-right — which is what gives its interior the lens pattern.

Gann Fan is the different one. Instead of a grid it draws nine slopes from the first click, labelled 1/8, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1, 4/1 and 8/1, and runs each of them on past the box to the edge of the pane. The box only sets the angles: a 1/8 ray divides the box’s width by eight and lands on the second anchor’s price level, a 2/1 ray divides its height by two and lands on the second anchor’s time. The 1/1 line goes exactly through your second click and is drawn heavier than the rest.

Gann Square of Nine is not a shape at all. One click on a price, and the tool draws a ladder of horizontal support and resistance levels around it, worked out from the square root of the price rather than from anything on the screen. It also opens a panel showing the numbered spiral the method is named after, with the cell your price falls in picked out.

The tradition these come from holds that a market moving at a steady rate of so much price per so much time is in balance, and that departures from those rates mark turning points. Whether you accept that or not, the grid is a fast way of putting a consistent geometry over a chart.

Why

Why it helps you

If you trade

Days to weeks · you care about timing and the crowd.

The 1/1 line on the fan is the one to watch. Price above it is running faster than the pace you set, price below it slower, and crossings of it are what practitioners of this method trade.
The lattice intersections on the Gann Box are places where a horizontal level and a vertical time division meet, which is a tighter definition of “an area to watch” than either alone.
Gann Square is usually the better first choice of the two grids. Quarters are where most of the reaction happens anyway, and five levels leaves the candles readable in a way seven plus a fan of arcs does not.
The Square of Nine is the one tool here you can use without drawing anything. Click the current price and you have twenty levels — ten above, ten below — in a second, and they do not move when you pan or zoom because they are prices, not geometry.
Anchor a box to something real — a swing low to a swing high, or a range low to a range high. Anchored to nothing in particular, the grid measures nothing in particular.

If you invest

Months to years · you care about quality and price paid.

On a long weekly or monthly chart the fan gives a rough sense of whether an advance has been accelerating or decelerating, which price alone does not show.
A box grid is a quick way to divide a multi-year range into quarters and see where the stock has actually spent its time.
Treat all of this as a lens rather than a signal. Nothing here reads the fundamentals, and none of it should outrank an earnings series.
If you find the grid attractive but the ratios arbitrary, use Gann Square and read it as nothing more than quarters of a range.

When · Where

When to use it, and where to find it

When a stock has made a clean, well-defined swing you can anchor a box to.
When you want a consistent geometric frame to compare two different stocks or two different periods with.
When you are already working in this tradition and want the standard slopes without drawing nine lines by hand.
When you want levels off a single price and have no swing to measure — that is the Square of Nine, and it is the only tool here that asks for nothing but one click.
Not on a chart with no obvious range or swing to anchor to. The box tools will draw, but the box will mean nothing.

How to

Try it — a short walkthrough

1
Anchor a box to a real swing
Open the third rail button, scroll past the Fibonacci heading to Gann, and choose Gann Square. Click a significant low, then the significant high that followed it. The grid, the arcs and the corner fan all fill the box between them.
2
Switch the magnet on first
These tools are entirely defined by their clicks, so an anchor a few pixels off moves every line in the grid. The magnet button below Undo pulls each click onto the nearest open, high, low or close.
3
Read the quarter lines
Look at where price turned inside the box. If it has repeatedly stalled at the half or the three-quarter line, the divisions are describing something about this stock. If it has ignored them, they are not.
4
Add the fan for the rate of the move
Choose Gann Fan and click the same two points. The 1/1 ray lands on your second click; everything steeper is a faster pace and everything shallower a slower one. Each ray carries its own colour and its own label, and the wedge between two neighbouring rays is tinted in the colour of the lower one.
5
Get levels from one click with the Square of Nine
Choose Gann Square of Nine and click once at the price you care about. Ten resistance levels above and up to ten support levels below are drawn as horizontal lines, and the wheel panel opens beside the chart with your price’s cell highlighted. Expect the price you clicked to sit between two levels rather than on one — that is the tool working, and the next section says why.
6
Make an object one colour, or tune its shading
A fresh Gann Box, Square or Fan arrives multi-coloured. Picking a colour from the property bar stamps that one colour down the whole ladder, exactly as it does on a Fibonacci tool, so the swatch means “make this object one colour”. For the shading, double-click the object and use the Background row in the Style tab to recolour it, drop the transparency until the candles read through it, or switch the fill off and keep the lines alone.
7
Retune without redrawing
Select the object with the cursor and drag either handle. The whole grid, fan or square recomputes as you move, so you can widen the box a few bars and watch the geometry follow.

In detail

Every part, up close

The Chart page — the Gann tools are the second heading behind the third rail button. Each part with a close-up of the real screen; the numbers match the dots on the picture.

Third button down

The third button opens one flyout with two headings. Fibonacci is the first, with ten tools; Gann below it holds the seven this page is about.

The box you define

Two clicks on the candles set the box, and that box is what tells every grid line and every slope how much price one unit of time is worth. The Square of Nine is the exception — it needs one click and reads only the price.

Where a level lands

The Square of Nine draws horizontal prices rather than geometry, so the scale on the right is where you read what it has actually given you.

Detail

Reading the numbers

Gann Box — 2 clicks. A box between the two anchors, divided on both axes at 0, 0.25, 0.382, 0.5, 0.618, 0.75 and 1. Every division is drawn in its own colour on both axes, the band opening at each one is tinted on both axes as well, and the ratio is printed on all four edges of the frame in that division’s colour. There are no diagonals — the frame, the fourteen lines and the captions are the whole object.
Gann Square Fixed — 2 clicks. The box divided into eighths on both axes — 0, 0.125, 0.25, 0.375, 0.5, 0.625, 0.75, 0.875 and 1 — drawn as a dashed hairline grid, with both diagonals solid and sixteen quarter arcs, eight sweeping in from the top-left corner and eight from the bottom-right, each passing through the corner of its own eighth cell. Alternate horizontal bands are shaded so the ladder can be counted, and the ratios are printed to three decimal places just inside the left edge. This is the one Gann tool that is drawn entirely in the object’s own colour.
Gann Square — 2 clicks. The same box at plain quarters — 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1 — in ladder colours on both axes, plus four concentric quarter-ellipse arcs struck from the bottom-left corner, the rings between them tinted, six rays from that same corner out to the quarter crossings on the top and right edges, and both diagonals. The readable version of the box, and the one whose shape a reader recognises from a Gann chart.
Gann Fan — 2 clicks. Nine rays from the first anchor labelled 1/8, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1, 4/1 and 8/1, each in its own colour, each extended past the box to the edge of the pane, with the eight wedges between them tinted. The shallow half divides the box’s width — 1/8 lands an eighth of the way across at the second anchor’s price — and the steep half divides its height, so 8/1 lands an eighth of the way up at the second anchor’s time. 1/1 goes through the second anchor and is drawn heaviest.
Gann Squares — 1 click. A square of a fixed number of units — 144 by default, with 90 and 360 the other classic choices — laid on the chart at your click and tiled outward in both time and price. Box type decides what is drawn inside each square: Crossed, the default, is the box with the cardinal cross through its centre; Traditional adds the corner diagonals; Empty is the outline alone; Full draws the cross, the diagonals and the corner-to-midpoint angles together. Boxes across and Boxes up tile it either side of the anchor, one meaning the anchor square alone and twenty meaning a forty-one by forty-one lattice — which is over sixteen hundred boxes, and the dialog says so. Because the size is a count of units rather than a price, a Price factor and a Time factor turn it into something the chart can draw; both are automatic by default and the derived numbers are printed on the object.
Gann Square Range — 2 clicks. The same square and the same tiling, sized from the range between your two clicks instead of from a stored number. Squaring style decides which of the two differences you dragged drives the other axis: Price drives time squares the price range across, Time drives price squares the bar count up, Price and time uses each range exactly as drawn, and Inverse crosses them over — so the same drag gives four different squares. It adds two controls the other one has no second anchor for: Harmonics, which subdivides the square, and Mirror, which reflects it back across the range. The time unit matters here in a way it does not elsewhere — squaring thirty-seven bars and squaring the fifty-two calendar days those bars span are different constructions, so the caption prints which unit it used.
Gann Square of Nine — 1 click. Horizontal price levels either side of the price you clicked, ten steps out in each direction. The maths is the owner’s own: take the square root of the price and round it to a whole number, call that the base; the tenth resistance is that base plus five, squared, and the first is the base plus a half, squared. Supports are the same subtraction. A support rung is simply not drawn once the subtraction has taken the root to zero or below, because squaring a negative root would fold the ladder back on itself and draw supports that rise.
That rounding is worth stating twice, because it looks like a fault the first time you see it. THE PRICE YOU CLICKED IS USUALLY NOT ONE OF THE DRAWN LEVELS. A price of 2588.77 has a square root of 50.88, which rounds to 51, so the ladder hangs off a base square of 2601 — above the price that produced it — and your click sits somewhere between the first support and the first resistance. That is deliberate: the whole point is to snap onto the wheel’s own lattice rather than to measure from an arbitrary number.
The half-step is a quarter turn of the wheel, and that is why these are Gann levels rather than arbitrary squares. Walk the spiral and the values landing back on the same diagonal are 1, 9, 25, 49, 81 — the odd squares, whose roots are 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 — so one full turn adds exactly 2.0 to the square root, a half turn adds 1.0, and a quarter turn adds 0.5. Squaring the base root plus or minus a half therefore reads the price off the wheel ninety degrees at a time.
The wheel panel is the picture of that. Numbers spiral outward from 1 in the middle, turning clockwise as you see it on the screen, on a square grid with an odd number of cells a side — odd, because only an odd-sided square has an exact middle for the 1 to sit in, which is also why the corners are always odd squares. The grid is sized to hold your price and the cell nearest it is picked out, along with the two arms of the marked diagonal: the odd squares 9, 25, 49, 81 running down-left of centre, and 5, 17, 37, 65 running up-right. Zero, ninety, a hundred and eighty and two hundred and seventy degrees are marked at the right, top, left and bottom edges.
The colours are not decoration and they are not the app’s palette. The ladder each tool draws with is transcribed from the desktop engine this app descends from, so a Gann Box here comes out in the same colours as a Gann Box there. On the box tools the two ends of the ladder are grey on purpose: 0 and 1 are the frame of the box rather than levels inside it, so they read as edges rather than as measurements.
The fills are all faint by design — around a tenth of full opacity, lighter still while you are still placing the object. That is not a taste, it is the threshold at which the drawing system claims a fill as the object’s background and hands it to the Background controls in the Style tab. Everything painted below that line answers to your background colour, transparency and visibility switch; every line stays above it and answers to the line controls instead.
Six of the seven carry that Background row: Gann Box, Gann Square, Gann Square Fixed, Gann Fan and both squaring tools. The Square of Nine does not, because it draws horizontal lines and fills nothing, so there would be nothing for the controls to act on.
The shading also makes the box tools easier to handle. A filled box can be picked up anywhere inside it rather than only along one of its lines.

Honest limits

What it does not do

These tools treat one unit of time as comparable to one unit of price, which has no physical justification. The geometry is only as meaningful as the box you anchored it to. The Square of Nine escapes that objection and buys a different one: it is arithmetic on a price and knows nothing about the chart at all.
The ratios are fixed. There is no Levels tab on any of the seven, so the seven box divisions, the quarters, the eighths, the nine fan slopes and the ten rungs of the Square of Nine cannot be edited or pruned. Pick the tool whose set you want, or hide the object. The two squaring tools are the partial exception: their ratios are fixed too, but their size, tiling, harmonics and factors are all editable in the Gann tab of the settings dialog.
The squaring tools measure a price against a number of bars, and those have no common unit. On an index around 2,588 an unscaled square is thousands of points and thousands of bars — far off-screen on both axes — so a wrong factor does not draw a slightly wrong object, it draws nothing you can see. That is why the factors default to automatic and why the derived numbers are printed on the object rather than hidden in the dialog. If a squaring tool appears to have drawn nothing, the factor is the first thing to look at.
Because a slope is drawn in screen space, zooming the chart or switching the price axis to logarithmic changes what a fan or a square looks like even though nothing about the data moved. That is what a paper grid does when you change the scale of its squares. The Square of Nine is immune, being prices rather than angles.
The arcs are ellipse quadrants, never circles. Time and price have unrelated scales so a box is essentially never square in pixels, and a true circular arc would leave the box on one axis long before it reached the grid line it is supposed to touch on the other.
The Square of Nine can lose the lower half of its ladder on a low-priced stock, and this is arithmetic rather than a bug. At a base root of 4 — a price near 16 — the ninth support step has already taken the root to minus a half, so those rungs are dropped instead of being drawn in the wrong place.
Setting the object colour on a Gann Box, Square or Fan is a one-way trip in the sense that it replaces the whole ladder with your single colour. There is no “put the ladder back” button; delete the object and place a fresh one to get the multi-coloured default again.
Nothing here is computed from the market. Unlike Regression Trend, which fits itself to the closes, these draw exactly the shape your clicks describe — or, for the Square of Nine, exactly the arithmetic your one click implies.
All seven tools can be drawn on the Chart page, so nothing in this section is greyed out. If the engine ever could not draw a tool, its row would be disabled with a tooltip saying so.

FAQ

Questions people ask

Why is the section called Gann rather than Angle Tools?

Because the tools were renamed to match the reference set they were rebuilt against. Three of them shipped for a long time as Angle Box, Angle Square and Angle Fan — a deliberate choice at the time, on the grounds that a name should describe what a tool draws rather than who devised it. That was reversed: the owner supplied the reference group these five now match, it names them Gann Box, Gann Square Fixed, Gann Square and Gann Fan, and a tool whose name nobody can look up is worse than a tool named after a person. If you remember the old names, the mapping is exactly one to one — Angle Box is Gann Box, Angle Square is Gann Square, Angle Fan is Gann Fan. Nothing was removed in the rename.

Where did the Angle Tools button on the rail go?

It was folded into the Fibonacci button. The Gann tools now share the third rail button with the ten Fibonacci tools, under their own heading. The two families were put together because they do the same job with different numbers: both cut a swing at fixed ratios and draw every level in its own colour.

Where has Gann Square Top / Bottom gone?

It was removed on 31 August 2026. It was a third squaring tool, placed with one click, whose square was sized by squaring the price of the anchor itself. On the rail it was drawn as a crossed square, and so was Gann Square Range beside it — at the size the rail draws icons the two buttons were indistinguishable, and the only real difference between the tools was how the FIRST size got picked. Since you can drag a square to any size after placing it, the owner's call was to keep one. Use Gann Square Range: click the low and then the high you would have squared, and drag the handles from there. Objects you had already placed with the old tool are not drawn any more.

What is the difference between Gann Squares and Gann Square Range?

Only where the square gets its size. Gann Squares uses a number you choose — 90, 144 or 360 — so the square is the same on every chart and one click places it. Gann Square Range measures the span between two clicks, so the square belongs to the swing you dragged. Everything after that is identical: the same box types, the same tiling, the same overlays and the same price and time factors. Range also has Harmonics and Mirror, which need a range to act on and so cannot appear on the other.

What is the difference between Gann Square and Gann Square Fixed?

The grid and the arcs. Gann Square divides the box into quarters, strikes its arcs and its corner fan from the bottom-left corner, and draws every line in its own colour. Gann Square Fixed divides into eighths as a dashed hairline grid, draws its sixteen arcs from the top-left and bottom-right corners instead, and is drawn entirely in the object’s single colour. The first is the readable one and the second is the ruled one.

Why does my Gann Box have no diagonals?

Because it is not supposed to. An earlier build drew both corner-to-corner lines on it; the reference has none, and neither does the engine this was rebuilt from — the box is a frame, fourteen coloured divisions and their captions. Diagonals belong to the two squares, which both draw them.

Why are the fan labels 1/8 and 8/1 with a slash?

Because that is the notation the original writes, and it says what the ray is: one unit of one axis against eight of the other. An earlier build printed them as 1x8 and 8x1, and it also got the geometry wrong — it took an eighth of the box’s height where the original takes an eighth of its width. Same nine names, an entirely different fan. The current one divides the width for the shallow half and the height for the steep half, which is why 1/8 lands on the second anchor’s price level rather than somewhere inside the box.

Can I change the fan angles?

No. The nine slopes are fixed at the classic set. What you control is the box the two clicks define, which is what decides how steep each of them looks on your screen.

Why is the price I clicked not one of the Square of Nine’s levels?

Because the ladder is built from the nearest whole square root, not from your price. 2588.77 has a root of 50.88, which rounds to 51, so every level is measured from a base square of 2601. Your click will normally sit between the first support and the first resistance. Squaring the raw root instead would make every level an arbitrary offset from an arbitrary number, and none of them would land on the wheel — which is the entire point of the method.

The shading is too heavy on my chart. Can I turn it off?

Yes, on the four tools that have it. Double-click the object and clear the Background checkbox in the Style tab, or drag the transparency slider until the candles read through it. The lines stay either way. The Square of Nine has no shading to turn off.

I picked a colour and the whole object went one colour. Is that right?

Yes, and it is the same behaviour a Fibonacci tool has. These tools paint every line from a fixed multi-colour ladder, so an object colour that only reached the frame would be a control that did almost nothing. Picking a colour therefore stamps it down the whole ladder and means “make this object one colour”, while a fresh object still arrives multi-coloured. Gann Square Fixed is the exception: it was never multi-coloured, so its swatch has always simply set the colour of everything.