Market Heatmap

What a market heatmap shows

A heatmap is a single picture that carries three pieces of information at once: identity (each tile is a single stock, sector, or cryptocurrency), size (the area of the tile is proportional to market capitalization), and performance (the colour shows percentage change over the chosen period — green for up, red for down, with intensity scaled to the size of the move).

The effect is that in roughly one glance you can tell whether the biggest parts of the market are leading, whether the move is broad-based or concentrated in a handful of names, and which sectors are diverging from the rest.

Reading the S&P 500 heatmap

The S&P 500 heatmap above groups the 500 constituents by GICS sector — Technology, Financials, Health Care, Consumer Discretionary, Communication Services, Industrials, Consumer Staples, Energy, Real Estate, Utilities, Materials. Inside each sector, larger companies take up more space. That means the S&P 500 heatmap is often dominated visually by the handful of mega-cap tech names, which on most days tells you most of what you need to know about index performance.

Common patterns to look for

• Uniform colour. Nearly everything green or nearly everything red suggests a macro-driven day — rates, CPI, a central-bank decision.
• One sector against the rest. Energy green while the rest of the market sells off often means oil has spiked; Financials red while everything else rallies often means yields are falling.
• A few mega-caps doing all the work. The index can be up on the day while most stocks are down, if the largest names are strong enough.
• Earnings clusters. During earnings season you will often see one or two tiles with extreme moves inside an otherwise quiet sector.

The crypto heatmap

The crypto heatmap uses the same grammar. Tile area is proportional to market capitalization, so Bitcoin typically dominates visually; colour shows percentage change. Because crypto trades continuously, the chosen lookback period — 24 hours by default — matters: a tile that looks green over 24 hours may be red over seven days.

One useful habit is to compare Bitcoin's tile against the rest. When BTC is green and altcoins are mixed or red, capital is rotating into the largest coin. When altcoins are uniformly green on a day that Bitcoin is flat, risk appetite is moving down the cap curve.

What a heatmap does not tell you

A heatmap shows percentage change over one window. It does not show absolute price, volume, fundamentals, or where the instrument is relative to longer-term trend. A single-day 8% gain on a micro-cap looks identical in colour to a 0.8% gain on a mega-cap if the legend is scaled that way — always check the scale. For context beyond today's colour, pair any interesting tile with the Advanced Charts page.

How to use this page

Start with the S&P 500 heatmap to see which US sectors are leading on the current session. Switch the lookback period (most TradingView heatmaps let you toggle 1D, 1W, 1M, 3M, YTD) to see how colour shifts across timeframes — that usually surfaces rotations that are invisible from a single-day view. Then check the crypto heatmap if you follow digital assets. Click any tile to jump straight to that instrument's chart.

Last reviewed on April 24, 2026. Heatmaps describe price history and are not investment advice. See our Disclaimer.