The range and the shading

The range of the open session

While a session is open, Tempo shows its high and low so far — not the whole day's, that session's.

The gauge, which saves you the work

Next to the range sits a small bar with a mark. The mark tells you where price is right now inside that range: hard left, at the low; hard right, at the high; in the middle, in the middle.

It looks like very little and it is not. The alternative is reading three six-digit numbers — high, low and price — and doing the subtraction in your head every time you look. The gauge gives you the answer before you have read a single number.

If the range is flat — a session that has not moved yet — the mark sits in the centre rather than somewhere arbitrary.

The shading over the candles

As well as the bar at the top, Tempo tints the chart background with the colour of the session each candle belongs to. That way the bar above and the price below tell the same story, and you do not have to keep looking up and down to know which session something happened in.

Each candle on the clock of its own date. A candle from last week is shaded with the offset your broker had last week and with that day's summer time. That is why the shading does not shift by an hour when you scroll back past a clock change (see Time).

Adjust the strength with InpSombraPct, from 5 to 60 %. The default is 22 %, which you notice without it hiding the candles.

Fill or edges only. With InpSombraModo set to Edges only, instead of tinting the candles Tempo draws two thin lines per session: where it starts and where it ends. For anyone who wants the limits without anything changing the colour of their chart.

A detail you may notice: the shading does not weigh the same with every palette, even at the same percentage. Very saturated colours — the neons of Neon, the amber of Amber — show more than muted ones at the same transparency. Tempo compensates for that, so 22 % on Amber and 22 % on Graphite look about as heavy on screen. If you set a very vivid colour of your own, the compensation applies to it too.

If you have switched on a custom session, it is shaded as well, in its own colour.

Switch it off with InpVerSombreado.

Why the shading seems to stop short of the edge

If you look at the right edge of the chart, you will see a strip with no shading. That is not a fault: it is the margin MetaTrader leaves to the right of the last candle. There are no candles there to shade.

You can remove it in the terminal itself (right-click > Properties > Show > Chart shift), and then the shading runs right to the end.