5. Drawing Tools

The drawing toolbar lets you annotate the active pane with lines, rays, channels, shapes, text, Fibonacci levels, pitchforks, Gann grids, measurements, and trade-planning tools. Pick a tool from its toolbar category, click the chart to place its anchors, then use the cursor to select, reshape, restyle, template, or delete it.

Each tool needs a fixed number of anchors — the points you click to define its geometry (shown in the toolset table below). One-point tools place immediately on the first click; multi-point tools build up anchor by anchor and show a live preview between clicks. Anchors that would collapse a tool to a single point — or place two anchors on the same bar where the tool needs distinct bars (channels, pitchforks, Gann squares, Fibonacci time tools) — are rejected, so you keep clicking until a valid anchor lands without losing the anchors already placed.

The toolset

Toolbar categories

The toolbar groups tools into flyout categories so the expanded toolset stays manageable. Click a category button to reveal its tools; the Select cursor sits outside the categories as its own button.

The Fixed Gann square renders and persists like any other drawing but is currently omitted from the toolbar picker; existing fixed squares (and ones created through the AI assistant) keep working.

Styling drawings

The drawing settings button opens a per-tool settings dialog for the active tool or selected drawing. The dialog only shows the tabs and fields that apply to that tool.

• Style — line, border, background, label, stats, Fibonacci, level-set (per-member color/opacity/width/style), position, or other tool-specific visual controls.
• Text — text content, color, size, weight, placement, and orientation for tools that render user-entered text.
• Coordinates — exact anchor price/time values. For long and short position tools this tab is labeled Inputs.
• Visibility — show or hide drawings by bar-duration ranges: minutes, hours, days, and weeks.

Use Ok to keep changes, Cancel or close to discard them. The dialog can be dragged by its header so you can move it away from the chart area while adjusting a drawing.

Templates

The settings dialog includes a Template control. Templates are saved per drawing type, so a trend-line template appears only for trend lines, a rectangle template only for rectangles, and so on.

Templates store the applicable Style settings. For tools with a Text tab, templates also store text styling and text content. Coordinates and visibility ranges are not part of templates.

Editing drawings

Use the cursor tool to select a drawing. Once selected:

• Drag the drawing body to move the whole drawing.
• Drag an anchor handle to reshape it. For example, dragging either end of a trend line changes its angle and length.
• Nudge the selected drawing with the arrow keys (↑ ↓ ← →).
• Delete the selected drawing with Delete or Backspace, or the toolbar delete button.
• Clear removes all drawings on the active pane.

Anchor handles are available for anchor-based drawings — trend lines, rays, extended lines, trend angles, info lines, horizontal/vertical/horizontal-ray/cross lines, channels, regression trend, anchored VWAP, zigzags, rectangles, Fibonacci tools, pitchforks, Gann tools, date/price ranges, anchored volume profiles, long/short positions, and text. Dragging a handle reshapes the drawing (and, for multi-anchor tools, recomputes the levels, channel, or grid). Pencil and highlighter strokes move as whole freehand strokes rather than exposing every sampled stroke point.

Lines, rays, and channels

The Lines & rays category extends the basic trend line with projected and measurement variants:

• Ray projects from the first anchor through the second and onward to the chart edge in that direction only; the half-line behind the first anchor is not drawn. It defaults to extending right.
• Extended line projects a straight line through both anchors to both chart edges.
• Trend angle is a two-point segment that reads out its slope as an angle measured from the rendered screen geometry (positive rising left-to-right, negative falling), normalized to ±90°.
• Info line is an always-on measurement segment: it continuously shows price change, percent change, bar count, elapsed time, and screen angle.
• Horizontal ray is a horizontal price line that projects only to the right from its anchor bar; it can show a price-axis label.
• Cross line draws a full-width horizontal line and a full-height vertical line crossing at a single bar/price.

The Channels category bounds price action between two lines:

• Parallel channel (three points): the first two anchors define a sloped base line; the third sets the parallel offset that fixes the channel width. The base spans the pane, the band between the two lines can be filled, and an optional median line runs midway between them.
• Flat top/bottom (three points): the first two anchors define a sloped base between two bars; the third anchor sets a flat horizontal boundary at its price, spanning the base's time extent. Dragging the flat handle edits its price only — its bar is ignored.
• Disjoint channel (four points): two independently angled boundary lines (anchors 1–2 and 3–4). The fill is bounded to the time span where the two lines overlap.

See Computed tools for Regression trend and Anchored VWAP, which also live near the channel tools but derive their values from bar data.

Fibonacci tools

Beyond the classic retracement, the Fibonacci category covers projection, channel, time, fan, arc, wedge, circle, and spiral variants. Each ships with a default ratio (or sequence) set you can edit in its Level set editor.

Extra Fibonacci controls in the Style tab:

• Reverse flips the level order for the extension, channel, speed-arcs, and wedge tools.
• Direction sets the Fib spiral winding to counter-clockwise (default) or clockwise.
• Levels and Labels toggles show or hide the ratio lines and their price/value labels.

Pitchfork tools

Pitchforks draw a median line and parallel tines from three pivots. The variants differ in where the median originates:

• Pitchfork (Andrews) — the median starts at the first pivot and runs through the midpoint of pivots 2 and 3.
• Schiff pitchfork — the median origin is moved to the first pivot's time at the mid-price of pivots 1 and 2.
• Modified Schiff pitchfork — the median origin is the full midpoint of pivots 1 and 2.
• Inside pitchfork — like Andrews, but with tine spacing scaled to the inner pivot distance.
• Pitchfan — fan rays projected at ratios from the three-pivot structure rather than parallel tines.

Tines are drawn at the ratio set (default 0.25 and 1, mirrored on each side of the median); the Pitchfan uses 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1. The band between lines can be filled, and each ratio is editable in the Level set.

Gann tools

Gann tools relate price and time geometrically:

• Gann fan (two points) projects angle rays from a pivot at price-by-time ratios — 1/8, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1, 4/1, 8/1 — with an optional translucent background and per-angle labels.
• Gann box (two points) draws a rectangle over a price/time range with a ratio grid (0, 0.25, 0.382, 0.5, 0.618, 0.75, 1) on both axes, optional diagonals (the box "angles") with their own color, a fill, and independently toggleable edge labels (left, right, top, bottom).
• Gann square (two points) adds a 1×1 diagonal and an optional set of concentric arcs to the box grid.
• Fixed Gann square (one point) places a constant-size square — default 90 bars × 90 price, each clamped to 1–100,000 — at a chosen point instead of dragging out a range.

Gann box and square keep Price levels and Time levels as separate editable sets so you can tune each axis independently.

Level sets and per-level styling

Every Fibonacci, Gann, and pitchfork tool exposes a Level set editor in its Style tab. Each member row offers:

• A visibility checkbox — only checked members render.
• An editable value — the ratio, angle ratio, grid ratio, or Fibonacci-sequence step.
• A line settings popover — per-member color, opacity, width, and line style, each falling back to the drawing's shared Line style when left unset.
• Add to append a member and a per-row trash button to remove one.

Gann box and square split this into separate Price levels and Time levels editors with their own edge-label toggles; the Gann fan edits each fixed angle's line directly (its ratio set is not add/remove). Per-member style overrides are saved with the drawing and with templates.

Fibonacci levels

The Fibonacci retracement tool plots the standard ratio levels between your two anchor points: 0, 0.236, 0.382, 0.5, 0.618, 0.786, and 1.

Snapping (magnet)

A magnet toggle snaps drawing anchor points to nearby bar values (open/high/low/close), which makes it easy to place lines precisely on price. Magnet applies when creating drawings and when readjusting anchor handles. Moving an entire drawing keeps its shape and offset instead of re-snapping every point.

Tool-specific notes

• Horizontal line, horizontal ray, and cross line can show a price label on the price axis.
• Horizontal, vertical, trend, rectangle, and Fibonacci text leaves space in the line so labels do not overlap the stroke.
• Info line always renders its stats; trend angle always renders its angle readout.
• Parallel channel has an optional median line; flat top/bottom's third handle edits price only; disjoint channel fills only where its two lines overlap in time.
• Fib wedge can hide its construction trend lines; Fib spiral has a winding-direction control; the extension, channel, speed-arcs, and wedge tools have a Reverse toggle.
• Gann fan, Gann box, and Gann square support a translucent background; the box and square add toggleable diagonals ("angles") with their own color and per-edge labels, and the square adds optional arcs.
• Date and price range has separate border, background, label, and label-background controls, including opacity.
• Long and short positions show concise TradingView-style stats labels and expose only the stats that are rendered on the chart.
• Visibility supports minutes, hours, days, and weeks only; unsupported units such as ticks, seconds, months, and ranges are omitted.

Computed tools

Two tools derive their rendered values from the underlying Bar data rather than only from your anchor points:

• Regression trend fits a least-squares linear regression line to a configurable per-bar price source (close, open, high, low, hl2, hlc3, or ohlc4, defaulting to close) over the bars in the anchored range. It can show upper and lower deviation bands at separately configurable standard-deviation multiples (each clamped to 0.1–10.0, defaulting to 2.0) and an optional Pearson's R correlation readout. With fewer than two bars in range it falls back to a plain segment between the anchors.
• Anchored VWAP computes the cumulative volume-weighted average price from the anchor bar forward using a configurable per-bar price source (defaulting to HLC3). Bars with zero cumulative volume leave a gap in the line, and changing only the color or width keeps the computed series unchanged.

Next steps

To study how price arrived at the present, replay it.

Next: Bar Replay