It might initially sound not very relevant when trying to make a profit from trading, but the aesthetics of a chart are more important than they first seem. The colour of the background, the colour of the bull and bear bars and the colour of the outlines of those bars are actually all part of the process that gets you into the trading zone. Personalizing your chart is a very useful feature and admittedly not something I realized until I started playing around with the chart properties. Personally I now find that I actually prefer the black background of a chart as it's no so harsh on the eyes and reminds me of the chart set-up I used in a past trading platform.
To start, simply open up a chart as below (You can see I was trading Imperial Breeze in the 14:20 at Carlisle):
Right-click on the chart and select "Properties" or alternatively hold CTRL+T:
A box will appear with a whole host of different settings including the colours of the bars, signals, outlines, markers, grid and many more. Scroll down to the bottom of the properties section and select the drop down menu from the "Colour for background" setting in the "Window" section. If you choose a darker background you may also have to adjust the outlines of the bars, price marker and cross-hair accordingly so that they are still visible:
Click "Apply" and you will have a chart something like that below (although it will be to your own personal taste). If you want to save this as your default layout you will have to then right-click and select "Templates" > "Save As". I called mine "Whizzy Template". Then when opening the chart set the new "Whizzy Template" as your default:
Add your indicators and bingo, you have your new more aesthetically pleasing chart (reminiscent of the Bloomberg platform anyone?):
If you really wanted to spice up your chart, you could set everything to transparent! However in the concerns of financial safety this isn't recommended.





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