xStation 5: Market Analysis

Sentiment, Top Movers, Heatmaps and Stock Screener

From this lesson you will learn:

• How to find out the sentiment of traders from all around the world
• Why the stocks screener is one of the most powerful tools on xStation5
• How to determine a trend with our heatmaps

Under the Market Analysis tab, you can find Market Sentiment, Top Movers, Stocks Screener and Heatmaps. Tabs in this feature are designed to give you more insights before trading.
 

Market Sentiment

Let’s start with Market Sentiment, which shows you by how XTB traders all over the world are positioned in different markets, and tells you what percentage of clients have long or short open positions on specific instruments. You can apply filters to view different instruments based on their asset class, or find a specific market via the search bar.

If at any point you wish to trade a market, simply click on the ‘Trade’ icon and a new deal ticket window will open.
 

Top movers

The Top Movers function displays the markets that have gained or lost most in value within a chosen period. Unlike the Market Sentiment, this function shows the actual gain or loss a specific instrument has noted in a period chosen by you, with the top gainers on the right hand side and the top losers on the left hand side. You can apply filters to show a certain market class and also change the  period to see top movers for today, this week or the month.

If we look at weekly movement, you can see that the US Dollar vs Mexican Peso market has noted the highest loss, losing almost 5% in value. On the other hand, the Euro vs New Zealand Dollar market has noted the highest gain, gaining 4.87% during the month. It’s also one of the ways to determine the direction of a trend.
 

Stock Screener

The Stocks screener tab enables you to filter thousands of stock CFD markets to a smaller list based on specific requirements dictated by you, such as market capitalisation, earnings per share, Price to Earnings ratio, dividend yield, return on equity, and BETA. There are also many more filters available, which are visible by clicking on the ‘show more filters’ button. Once you select which filters are important to you, you simply narrow or expand the scales of each filter to the levels you want and the stocks list automatically reduces to only those that meet your requirements. You can also narrow the selections further by country or industry. That’s a very powerful tool that helps you to find a company that suits your trading needs. For example, imagine that you want to buy an equity CFD on a stock that pays out a dividend, has generated solid growth in its value and belongs to the IT sector. In theory, that should take quite a long time. In practice, with xStation 5, it will take only a moment.

Heatmaps

Finally, Heatmaps shows you which markets are the top risers and fallers across multiple time periods in a much more visual way than top movers. The stronger the market, the more green it is, whilst the weakest markets are coloured in red. You can select forex, equities and the relevant time period via the drop downs and the Heatmap will automatically generate based on these filters.

The way information is presented changes depending on whether you are viewing forex or equities. For forex, the core currency is listed in the centre of the map, and the markets it has risen against the most are listed on the left hand side coloured in red, whilst the markets it’s weaker than listed to its right hand side in green. So for example, looking at the USD currency, you can see over the last week it’s stronger against these currencies to its left, but lost value against these currencies to its right. How could you use that in your trading? Imagine that it’s the third consecutive day of USD losses against the JPY. You take a quick look at the chart to see how the move on USDJPY could develop in upcoming days. The change in USDJPY value you’ve noticed showed that the downward trend could be intact and if it’s confirmed by what’s going on the chart, you could use this to take a position.

For equities, stocks are grouped together by industry, with the block sizes based on market capitalisation. So that’s why you will see Apple has a large block compared to Hewlett Packard. Like before, the stocks that are strongest are coloured in green with the weakest in red, according to the timeframe. If you click on the relevant stock, a pop up emerges showing that stock’s performance compared to the rest of its sector. To trade any market when in the Heatmaps tab, simply double click on the instrument and a new order window will appear.  

Remember that market analysis is based on probability and according to one of the three main principles of technical analysis, there is a bigger probability that a market trend will continue rather than reverse. This means that the Top Movers tool can be used as one of your trend identification rules, helping you to be able to make more informed trading decisions quickly and efficiently.