The breadth heatmap shows years of daily market data graded green-to-red across dozens of metrics. Here's a practical guide to reading it, spotting regimes, and making it part of your daily routine.
The WideRadar breadth heatmap is the centrepiece of the dashboard. It packs years of daily market history into a single scrollable table — every row is a trading day, every column is a different breadth metric, and the colour (green through amber to red) tells you at a glance whether conditions were bullish, neutral, or bearish on each dimension.
It looks like a lot of data at first. This guide explains how to read it efficiently and how to build a practical daily routine around it.
Anatomy of the heatmap: columns
The columns fall into a few logical groups:
Primary breadth (4%+ moves): "Up 4%" and "Down 4%" are the core StockBee counts — the number of stocks that moved at least 4% in a single day. The "Ratio" column (Up ÷ Down) is a compact summary. Green = buyers dominate; red = sellers dominate.
Burst momentum (20%/5d): Stocks up or down more than 20% in five days. This catches the explosive institutional-buying (or selling) events that often signal a trend change.
Extended moves (25%/21d, 50%/21d, 13%/34d, 25%/63d): Longer-window surge/plunge counts for spotting sustained expansion or distribution phases.
Moving average breadth (%>50dma, %>200dma): What fraction of stocks trade above their 50-day or 200-day SMA. These are slower-moving regime indicators: >60% above the 50dma is healthy; <40% is caution territory.
New highs / new lows: Daily counts of 52-week extremes — useful for spotting leadership expansion at market tops and bottoms.
VIX and S&P 500: Context columns showing the fear gauge and the index itself alongside the breadth data.
Reading the colour grading
Each cell is coloured on a relative scale — the greens and reds are calibrated to the historical distribution of that metric, so "green" for the 4%+ up count means the day was strong relative to history, not just positive in absolute terms.
The Market Tone pill at the top summarises the overall regime: Risk-On (broadly bullish), Neutral, or Risk-Off (broadly bearish). It's derived from a composite read of the breadth columns — when most columns are green, the tone is Risk-On; when most are red, it's Risk-Off.
A practical reading rule: look across a row, not just at one cell. A day where Up 4%, %>50dma and the New Highs count are all green together is a qualitatively different day from one where only the Up 4% count is green while everything else is amber.
Spotting regimes
Scroll back through the heatmap and you'll notice clear regimes — multi-week or multi-month periods where the majority of columns stay green or stay red. These are the environments where momentum strategies work best (all-green regimes) or where defence matters most (all-red regimes).
The Column Trend chart (click any column header) lets you chart any individual metric over 1y/2y/3y/5y with an S&P 500 overlay. This makes the regimes even clearer and helps you see how far current conditions deviate from the historical norm.
A practical daily pre-market routine
Here's a straightforward way to use the heatmap each morning:
Check the Market Tone pill first. It gives an instant regime read without needing to scan every column.
Glance at yesterday's row. Was it a net green day (broadly bullish) or a net red day? How does that compare to the prior week?
Check the 5-day rolling trend. Open the Column Trend for the Ratio column or Up 4% count. Is the 5-day average rising, flat, or rolling over? This is the clearest early warning of a regime shift.
Look at %>50dma. If this is above 60%, the average stock is in a healthy uptrend and you should be looking for entries. If it's below 40%, the average stock is broken and you should be fishing in a smaller pond of genuine leaders.
Cross-reference with sector leaders. Jump to the Leaders tab and confirm which sectors are flagged in the top four. Your stock selection should stay concentrated there.
The whole scan takes five minutes once you know what you're looking for. The goal isn't to read every cell — it's to answer one question every morning: is the environment asking me to buy, wait, or defend?
Tips for getting the most from the heatmap
Use the history window toggle. Switch between 1y, 2y, 3y and 5y to get different amounts of context. A 5y view shows you how current conditions compare to the COVID crash, the 2022 bear market, and the 2023-24 bull run.
Click column headers to chart any metric. The Column Trend panel opens inline and lets you plot any breadth column with MA overlays and an S&P comparison.
Export for your own analysis. The download button exports the full breadth history as a CSV — useful if you want to build your own models or back-test entry rules against historical breadth data.