Online Stockmarket Trading Update

The Bourse is customisable in many ways and you can set up your screens to have whatever colour, fonts and layout that you want. Let s go over the main items to keep in mind.

Modify Colours

Once you understand how to modify colours for one screen you can apply the same procedure for everywhere else in The Bourse.

Let s modify the colours of a chart to start off with.

1. Open a new chart and load a stock code.
2. Once the chart is loaded then select Candlestick from the bar type drop down.
3. With the mouse right click on the chart and select Color/Grid Preferences



4. The first item to remember is that the left and right buttons on your mouse are used to select the colours from the Colour grid.

Background colour: right-click
Foreground colour: left-click

5. As an example, change the background colour of the chart. Do this by right-clicking on the colour grid and selecting the colour you want.



6. The background colour of the chart will be changed once you click on the OK button.



You can also select the type of grid lines that you want on your chart or simply switch them off.

7. Once you have made some changes, you can save the changes as a Colour Preference Scheme. This is done by clicking on the Save as button. Note: you do not have to do this for the colour changes to take place. However, doing so will keep the default colour scheme that came with your installation of the Bourse as original.
8. To save a colour scheme, click on the Save as button and the following window will be displayed allowing you to enter in a scheme name. Give it a name and click OK.



9. If you save a colour you can simply select it by using the Preference schemes drop down selection box.

Change colour of multi-part chart tools

As an example of a chart tool that is made up of multiple colours, let s look at changing the colour of the OHLC bars on a chart.

The default colour scheme that installs with Bourse has OHLC bars as green for bullish days and red for bearish days. The term bullish is this case refers to days that have a higher close than the previous close and visa versa for bearish.

One thing that you take into account with colours is the representation of what a certain colour means to you. For example, green means profit and red means loss. However, when going short on the market you want to see lots of red on the chart. Maybe you can remove this emotional association by selecting different colours.

For the purpose of selecting an example, let s use two differing colours for the higher and lower closing price days.

1. Right-click on the chart and select the Colour/Grid Preferences item.
2. To find an item quickly in the elements box click the mouse pointer anywhere in the box.



3. Now type the first letter of the element that you are trying to find. In this case OHLC, so type in an O .
4. The first item in the list, that s starts with an O, happens to be OHLC, the chart element that we are looking for.



5. The two arrows above show the two colours for the bullish day and the bearish day, when you first do this these colours will be green and red, respectively. Click on the top colour box, this is the colour for the bullish bar colour, then left click your mouse pointer on the colour that you want for the bullish day.
6. Do the same now for the bearish day. However, first click on the bottom (lower) colour box.
7. Finally click on the OK button to make your changes permanent.

Change colour of multiple indicators of the same type

On many occasions you want multiple copies of the same indicator on the chart (eg. a multiple moving average, or multiple Bollinger bands etc.)

The Bourse allows you to do this and to allocate a different colour to each. Let s do an example of how you can have 4 different colours for 4 moving averages on a chart.

1. Once again right-click on the chart to select the Colour/Grid Preferences menu item.
2. Find the Moving Average element (remember – click in the element name box and press the m key on your keyboard. You will have to press it twice.)



3. The 8 boxes at the bottom indicate the 8 different colours that you can have for moving average lines on the chart.In our example we will have 4 moving averages and we want the same colour to be used every time that we apply our 4 moving averages. Each colour box above represents the colour of a moving average; therefore, you should make the first 4 colours different, then the next four colours the same as the first 4. Confused?

   The colour in boxes 1 and 5 should be the same, just like the colours in boxes 2 and 6, 3 and 7 and finally 4 and 8. So your colour boxes should look like this



4. Now when you apply your 4 moving averages they will always appear in the same colour sequence.

Changing Font

Changing font is very simple and is the same on nearly every screen in The Bourse.

1. Right-click on any screen and select the Font menu item. This will display the Font dialogue box.



2. This is a standard MS-Windows font toolbox and selection of font style is quite simple.

Modify Screen Layout


The modify layout function in The Bourse is quite comprehensive. Each screen type has a different layout feature set that can be modified.

1. To modify the layout of a screen, simply use the right-click function on the screen and select Modify Layout from the menu. Depending on the screen you are viewing, the following will be displayed.
2. The layout dialog box will allow you to add, remove or change the order of columns on the watch list, market depth, options, warrants and futures screen, and also trade history. In fact, any screen that uses a grid layout will use the following.



3. Some key items to note about the above. Let s assume that you are making this change for a watch list. The Default Template check box, which is circled above, allows you to save this layout for all watch lists. That is, it will become the default template that is used for all watch lists viewed from this moment on. Place a tick in this box if you wish for this to happen. However, if not ticked, then the changes you make will only affect the current one.
4. To change the order of the columns, simply click on the column name, under the Selected items section and then click on the up and down buttons below the list.

By Jeff Cartridge
Education Manager

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