Charts
Updated 7 October 2026, 5 min readThe chart is where most of your time in eTrader goes, so it is worth ten minutes to learn what it can do. This guide covers the chart itself, the indicator list, the drawing tools, and the layouts on the bigger screens. Orders on the chart have their own guide.
Chart types and timeframes
The chart type picker sits in the chart toolbar next to the timeframes. There are six: candles, hollow candles, Heikin Ashi, bars, line and area. A seventh, Tick, plots every price change instead of bars, which is the one to use when you want to see the market move inside a single minute.
The timeframe list starts with Tick, then runs M1, M5, M15, M30, H1, H4, D1, W1 and MN. Change it and the chart reloads at the new size, keeping your indicators and drawings. History is deep: years of daily and hourly bars, and about two months of minute bars. Scroll left and the chart keeps fetching until it reaches the end.
Pinch or scroll to zoom, drag to pan. The chart snaps back to the live price on its own. If you want to drag it anywhere and keep it there, switch on Free move in the toolbar. Switch it off and the chart returns to following the price.
Reading the chart
The OHLC readout at the top left shows the open, high, low and close of the bar under your cursor. The ask line is drawn above the bid so you can see the spread on the chart, and the market depth panel, where the Broker publishes it, lists the order book levels next to the price and moves with it.
The colours are yours to change. Chart colours below lists every one.
Chart colours
Open the chart type menu and choose Chart Colours at the bottom. Settings opens, and the chart changes as you pick:
| Section | Colours |
|---|---|
| Candle Colors | Bullish Fill, Bearish Fill, Bullish Wick, Bearish Wick, Bullish Outline, Bearish Outline |
| Heikin-Ashi | Up, Down |
| Bars (OHLC) | Up, Down |
| Line & Area | Line Color, Area Color |
| Chart | Background, Grid, the Show Grid switch, Bid Line, Ask Line |
Bid Line and Ask Line follow the light or dark theme until you pick a colour. An arrow then appears next to the label. Press it to return that line to the theme colour.
Press Save to keep your colours for the next sign-in in this browser. Reset to Defaults brings back the standard colours, with the theme's background and grid.
The same window has the Show Ask Line, Show Drawing Tools and Show OHLC Info switches.
Indicators
Press Indicators in the toolbar and search or scroll the list. The browser terminal ships these:
- Overlays on the price: Moving Average, a second moving average (EMA by default), Bollinger Bands, Parabolic SAR.
- In their own pane: RSI, MACD, Stochastic Oscillator, CCI, ATR, Momentum (ROC), Williams %R and Volume.
Each one has its own settings sheet: periods, deviations, multipliers, the price it reads (close, open, high, low or a median), and the colour and thickness of every line. The defaults are the common ones. Change them and the chart redraws at once. Indicators are kept by the device you add them on, like drawings, so the RSI you added in the browser is not on your phone until you add it there.
A pane indicator gets its own strip under the price. Drag the divider between panes to give it more or less room, and remove an indicator from the small menu on its label.
Your own indicators
An indicator you write in eTrader Code runs on this chart too. Open Indicators, press Upload Indicator under Custom and pick the .eti file. It sits in the list beside the built-in ones, with its inputs as settings. Your bots run from the Bots window instead, in the cloud, and keep working after you close the terminal. The Tide guide explains how to write both.
Drawing tools
Press Drawing Tools, or the pencil on the phone, and pick a tool:
| Group | Tools |
|---|---|
| Lines | Trend Line, Horizontal Line, Vertical Line, Parallel Channel |
| Shapes | Rectangle, Ellipse / Circle |
| Fibonacci | Retracement, Extension |
| Annotations | Text Label, Arrow |
Click or tap once to start a line and once more to finish it. Every drawing has a style sheet: colour, thickness, solid or dashed. A horizontal line asks what the level is, and that label is drawn beside it. Select a drawing to move it, drag its handles to reshape it, and delete it from its menu. Remove All clears the instrument's drawings in one go.
Drawings are saved per instrument on the device you drew them on. Draw a level on gold in one browser and it is there the next time you open gold in that browser.
Price alerts
The alert tool in the toolbar places an alert at the price you drag to. The direction follows the price: above the market it waits for a rise, below it for a fall. The alert line goes on the chart, draggable like any order line. When the price crosses it, the terminal shows it and your phone gets a push notification if you have the app installed and notifications allowed. Existing alerts are listed in the Alerts tab, where you can edit or remove them.
Layouts and windows
In the web terminal the Chart layout button switches between one, two, three and four charts on screen. Each chart keeps its own instrument, timeframe, indicators and drawings. Any chart can be opened in its own window from the chart menu, as a separate browser tab, so you can put a chart on a second screen.
The phone shows one chart at a time, full screen when you turn the phone sideways.
Detaching, saving and resetting
The chart type, timeframe, indicators and drawings are stored as you change them and kept by that device. Colours are kept once you press Save in Settings. If a chart gets cluttered, Reset to Defaults in Settings restores the colours, Remove All clears the drawings, and each indicator has its own remove.