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I'm trying to understand the following table in terms of colouring. I realise this is specific to a particular product but a lot of other products seem to use red, blue, black as a color code scheme as well so hopefully it translates.

Dealing Rates Table

My first impression is that red means negative, blue means positive and black means no change. But what is it comparing? For instance in the table above:

GBP/CHF the net change column is a blue +1 so i might assume that this net change column means the buy price is +1 over the high.

However this rule breaks quickly when comparing to any other row say GBP/JPY.

So im not sure of the relationships between the data what Im looking at and how it is subsequently expressed in colour.

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1 Answer

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Blue simply means a higher price than the previous price, red means a lower price than the previous price and black is the same price as the previous price.

So for EUR/USD the sell price is lower than the previous sell price, whilst the buy price is the same as the previous buy price. For GBP/USD both the sell and buy prices are higher than the previous sell and buy prices.

The colours basically give you an indication of whether the bid and offer prices are going up, down or staying static when compared to the previous bid and offer prices.

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OK so the color is relative to the data point / field within a row and suggests nothing about the relationship between fields in a row. If the value is simply a comparison between the previous value and the current then what "value" is the information? If the value goes up by a cent then down by a cent and down by a cent then up by a cent then it's effectively gone nowhere and yet would be displayed in blue? Is this where refresh rate of the table comes into play? – rism Aug 17 '12 at 9:15
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@rism, it is just a quick indication of the current direction of the market at a point in time relative to previous activity. – Victor Aug 18 '12 at 6:25
@rism Your screenshot suggests that the changes are calculated on a per-tick basis, resulting in every price movement updating the color and net change. This is the most commonly used interval for this way of display (afaik), but can also be used for larger time frames and non time based intervals (hours, days, volume etc). – Waldfee Jan 3 at 10:19

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