Annotations

What this page is

The sixth button on the rail holds ten tools, and all of them exist to mark the chart with something you wrote rather than something the data said. Seven take a single click, and seven of them open a small text box on the chart, right where the words will sit, the moment you place them. Type into it as you would anywhere else: Enter starts a new line and the box grows, Ctrl+Enter finishes, clicking anywhere else also finishes, and Escape throws the annotation away.

The one-click tools differ in the glyph they draw around the text. Text is bare lettering. Note is a folded-corner sticky note with the body beside it. Comment is a speech bubble with a tail down to the bar. Signpost is a post with a flag plate on top carrying the caption. Flag Mark is a plain flag. Price Label is a small rounded plate that is prefilled with the price you clicked.

Three take two clicks, because they separate the thing being pointed at from where the words sit. Anchored Note, Callout and Price Note all put their first click on the bar and their second wherever the box should go, with a leader line drawn back. Callout adds an arrow head to the leader; Price Note prints the anchored bar's price in front of whatever you typed.

Sticker is the tenth, and it is the one that carries no words. It places a single glyph on the bar you click, chosen from a picker with three tabs — Emojis, Icons and Stickers — holding a hundred and thirty-eight marks between them. The picker opens as soon as you arm the tool, because the glyph is not a label on a sticker, it is the sticker; there is nothing honest to place before you have chosen one. Pick one and the next click on the chart puts it down.

The three tabs are not just a way of splitting a long list. Icons are deliberately monochrome — arrows, a star, a tick, a cross, a warning, a flag, a clock — so the chart paints them in the object’s own colour, which makes the property bar’s swatch and transparency slider live controls on them. Emojis and Stickers carry their own colours, so those two controls do nothing there. If you want a mark that matches your trend line, use the Icons tab.

Every one of these is a real drawing object like any other: anchored to a price and a time, saved to your account per symbol, selectable, lockable, and editable from the property bar and the settings dialog. The words themselves live in the Text tab, which is where you go to change them after the fact.

Why it helps you

When to use it, and where to find it

• At the moment a decision is made, not afterwards. The value of an annotation is that it was written before you knew how it turned out.
• When reviewing a completed trade, to record what you now think you should have seen.
• Before sharing a chart with somebody, so the picture carries its own explanation.
• When a level needs a reason. A horizontal line with a Price Label and three words beside it is a different object from a bare line.

Try it — a short walkthrough

1. 1
   Drop a note on a bar

   Open the sixth rail button and choose Note. Click the candle you want it on; a small box asks for the words. The sticky-note glyph lands on that bar with your text beside it.
2. 2
   Pin an exact price with no typing

   Choose Price Label and click once. The plate appears already carrying the price at the point you clicked, to two decimal places. Edit it later from the Text tab if you want words instead.
3. 3
   Point at something without covering it

   Choose Callout. Click the bar you mean, then click clear space where the box should live. A leader with an arrow head is drawn between the two, and both ends have handles you can drag.
4. 4
   Change the words afterwards

   Double-click the annotation to open its settings dialog and go to the Text tab. The text area there is the content; below it are the colour, size, bold and italic controls.
5. 5
   Make it readable over candles

   In the same tab, tick Background to put a plate of the chart's own background colour behind the letters. It is off by default, so a fresh label sits directly on the candles.

Every part, up close

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

1

Sixth button down

The sixth button on the rail opens the ten tools whose only job is to put words — or one glyph — on a chart.

2

A note on a bar

Whatever you type is anchored to the bar you clicked, so months later the reason is still standing beside the candle that prompted it.

Reading the numbers

• Text — 1 click. Plain lettering at the clicked point. Asks for the words as you place it.
• Note — 1 click. A folded-corner sticky-note glyph with the body text beside it. Asks for the words.
• Anchored Note — 2 clicks. First the bar, then where the box goes, with a plain leader line between them.
• Callout — 2 clicks. The same construction with an arrow head on the leader.
• Comment — 1 click. A speech bubble above the clicked point with a tail running back down to it. Asks for the words.
• Signpost — 1 click. A vertical post from the clicked point with a flag plate on top carrying the caption. Asks for the words.
• Price Label — 1 click. A small rounded plate, prefilled with the price at the point you clicked.
• Price Note — 2 clicks. A leader note whose box prints the anchored bar's price, followed by any text you add.
• Flag Mark — 1 click. A flag on the clicked bar.
• Sticker — 1 click, after choosing a glyph. One mark from a three-tab picker: Emojis (faces, hands, hearts and symbols, weather and nature), Icons (direction, bias, signals, time and money) and Stickers (hand signs, animals, objects, big signals). Search inside a tab by name or by what you would call the thing — typing stop, breakout or chop all find something.
• The nine text tools paint their own words, so the settings dialog does not offer them the position dropdown that other tools get — their text sits at the object’s own anchor and you move the object instead. Sticker is the exception and does get the dropdown, because nudging a glyph off the exact bar it marks is a reasonable thing to want.
• A selected sticker draws a dashed box round its glyph with a square grip on the corner that moves. Drag that to resize it, between 12 and 160 pixels; the Font size field in the settings dialog edits the same number, so the two always agree.
• The Text tab also carries a Background plate switch with its own colour and a Transparent text slider. Both are off or fully opaque by default, and the slider fades only the letters, so the plate keeps its own strength underneath.

What it does not do

• Seven of the nine open their text box at the moment you place them. Finishing it empty still creates the object, with the tool's default word in it — open the Text tab to replace it later. Pressing Escape instead deletes the annotation, on the grounds that you never confirmed it. Flag Mark draws no words at all, and Price Label fills itself in from the price you clicked, so neither asks.
• Nothing here has a rich text editor. The Text tab takes plain lines, with colour, size, bold and italic; there is no per-word formatting.
• Labels are drawn at a fixed size in screen pixels, so zooming out far enough will crowd several annotations into the same space. The object tree is the way to hide the ones you are not reading.
• A sticker is one glyph and cannot be two. There is no way to place a caption and a glyph as a single object — put a Text beside the sticker if you need both. The picker also has no way to add your own image; the three tabs are the whole set.
• These are notes to yourself. They are stored on your account against that symbol and are not shared with anybody unless you send a chart.
• All ten tools can be drawn on the Chart page, so nothing in this flyout is greyed out. If the engine ever could not draw a tool, its row would be disabled with a tooltip saying so.

Questions people ask