Data Chart — Controls & Indicators

The Data Chart is SOAP2's historical OHLC/candlestick chart for a symbol — bars, volume, RSI/Momentum, and a set of overlays. This guide covers everything added on top of the original chart: switching symbols from the chart itself, Heikin-Ashi candles, manual control of the price (Y) axis, keyboard shortcuts, and the ALMA/JMA/Cycle/Pivots indicator tabs in the settings panel.

Related:

Opening the Data Chart

Select a symbol in the top-left watchlist dropdown, then use the top toolstrip's Historical Chart menu item (or the Alt+D shortcut) — one chart window per symbol; reselecting a symbol that already has a chart open brings its existing window to the front instead of opening a duplicate.
From an open OA window, Alt+D opens/raises the Data Chart for that OA's own symbol.

Switching symbols

The symbol box on the chart's own toolstrip (top-left, where a plain read-only label used to be) is now a dropdown mirroring your Watchlist. Picking a different symbol from it jumps to that symbol's own chart window (opening one if it doesn't exist yet, or bringing the existing one to the front) — it does not repurpose the window you're looking at, since each Data Chart window is tied to one symbol. The dropdown refreshes from the Watchlist every time you open it, so newly-added symbols show up without needing to reopen the chart.

The settings panel

Click the Show/Hide Settings toolstrip button (over the chart) to reveal a small panel with bar size, history size, RTH/OHLC/Heikin-Ashi toggles, the MM in Y-Rng checkbox, and a four-tab ALMA / JMA / Cycle / Pivots indicator control — everything described below lives in this panel.

Heikin-Ashi

Check Heikin-Ashi in the settings panel to replace the candles/OHLC bars with Heikin-Ashi smoothed open/high/low/close — the standard trend-smoothing candle transform, useful for reading trend direction through noisy price action. Unchecked by default.

Works with either candle style (the separate OHLC checkbox still picks candlesticks vs. bars) — Heikin-Ashi is an independent data transform, not a third render style.
Only the candles/bars themselves change. ALMA, JMA, Murrey Math, the projection cone, and the bars grid on the left all continue to use real prices — so if you're comparing an overlay against the candles, remember the candles are now smoothed and the overlay isn't.
The hover trackline (see below) switches its Open/High/Low/Close labels to "HA Open" / "HA High" / etc. while this is on, as a reminder you're looking at synthetic values there too.

Hover crosshair and trackline

Moving the mouse over the chart shows a crosshair cursor and a tracking line (vertical + horizontal) that follows the nearest bar, with a floating label and a matching Date/Open/High/Low/Close readout in the info box below the chart. The label includes the bar's time (not just the date) for any intraday bar size — 1-minute up through 1-hour.

Keyboard shortcuts

While a Data Chart window has focus, F1 opens Help and F12 opens the Keyboard Shortcuts window — same as everywhere else in SOAP2. See the full Keyboard shortcuts reference for shortcuts available from the main window and from OA (including Alt+D, which opens a Data Chart from either).

Y-axis zoom and pan

The price axis is mirrored on both the left and right edges of the chart — that left-hand copy is also an interactive control surface, separate from the usual mouse-wheel bar-count zoom over the candles themselves:

Mouse wheel while hovering directly over the left-edge price labels — zooms the Y range in/out, keeping the price under the cursor fixed on screen.
Click-drag on the left-edge price labels — pans the Y range; the price under the cursor follows the mouse as you drag.
Double-click on the left-edge price labels — resets back to automatic scaling.

A manual Y range is remembered as you zoom/pan the chart horizontally (bar count) or change indicator settings, but resets to automatic the next time you load a different symbol or dataset into the same chart window.

Keeping Murrey Math out of the Y-range

Murrey Math S/R levels are computed from a long trailing lookback and can sit well outside the currently visible bars' own high/low — by default that still widens the Y-axis to fit them, which can squash the candles/ALMA line into a small band of the chart. Uncheck MM in Y-Rng in the settings panel to keep the Murrey Math lines drawn (clipped at whatever the axis edge is) without letting them drive the auto-scale. Checked is the default, matching the chart's original behavior.

The ALMA tab

Show ALMA — toggles the Arnaud Legoux Moving Average overlay on the price panel (window=9, offset=0.85, sigma=6, the commonly-used defaults). Checked by default.

The JMA tab

Show JMA — a second, independently-toggleable moving-average overlay on the price panel: a reverse-engineered approximation of the Jurik Moving Average (the real Jurik Research formula has never been published). Unchecked by default so it doesn't suddenly appear over ALMA for existing charts.

Length — the averaging period (default 7). Lower = faster/noisier.
Phase — -100 to 100 (default 0). Negative trades responsiveness for smoothness; positive reduces lag at the cost of some overshoot.

The Cycle tab

Show Cycle — replaces the Momentum sub-panel (not RSI) with a dominant-cycle oscillator panel: Sine and LeadSine (both bounded -1 to 1), plus a Dominant Cycle (bars) line on its own right-hand scale. Unchecked by default; switch it back off to get Momentum back.

Min / Max — the candidate cycle-period range to search, in bars (default 8-48, Ehlers' own daily-swing default). Min can't exceed Max and vice versa — moving one past the other drags the other field along with it. This same range is also what the Pivots tab searches, below.
A LeadSine/Sine crossover anticipates a cycle turn — roughly 1/8 to 1/4 of the current dominant cycle's length, in advance.
The Dominant Cycle line only draws while the reading is judged stable (the period estimate has settled down, not still hopping around) — gaps in that line mean the market isn't showing a clean, tradeable cycle right now (often a strong trend), not missing data.

The Pivots tab

Show Pivots — marks bars the cycle detector identifies as a turning point: a red down-triangle just above a bar for a high, a green up-triangle just below a bar for a low. Unchecked by default. Builds on the same cycle detection as the Cycle tab (reusing its Min/Max period range) but works independently of whether the Cycle sub-panel is actually shown.

There is no separate window/lookback setting to tune here — an earlier version exposed one ("Confirm"), but it turned out to have essentially no effect on which bar gets picked, so it was removed. See the developer overview if you're curious why.
Each marker is placed at the identified bar's own real high/low (not a smoothed value) even when Heikin-Ashi is on.

Limitations

Cycle and Pivots both need real warm-up. Both start drawing fairly early (once Min+Max+a few bars have loaded), but don't trust the Dominant Cycle / Sine / LeadSine readings, or act on a pivot marker, for real decisions until the chart has several hundred bars loaded — the underlying estimate keeps converging well past its first appearance.
The default 8-48 bar cycle range is tuned for daily-ish swing cycles on equity-like closes. It hasn't been validated at options-relevant timeframes (1-min/5-min bars, IV/vega series) — treat Min/Max as something to tune against what you're actually looking at, not a known-correct setting.
Pivot markers are validated on synthetic data only so far (see the developer overview) — treat them as a visual aid, not a signal to act on directly, until checked against real data for your symbols/timeframes.
JMA is, like ALMA, a smoothing overlay only — neither one is a signal or a recommendation by itself.
X-axis label placement (which bars get a date/time label) follows ChartDirector's own internal layout heuristics — it won't always look perfectly evenly spaced, and that's expected rather than a bug to report.

Go back to the main help page: SOAP2 Help Guide

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