HOW TO USE THE SIGNAL DECK

1. Getting started

1. Open the deck in any modern browser, desktop or phone. There is nothing to install and nothing to log in to for the free tier.
2. Look at the FEED label in the top right. LIVE means you are watching the market as it trades. REPLAY means you are watching recorded history, which is how the deck is demonstrated and how you can learn it outside market hours.
3. Pick a WINDOW (see section 3). Start with 30M.
4. Read the big word in the first panel. That is the answer. Everything else on the screen exists to show you why.

2. The header

3. Choosing a timeframe

The timeframe is the candle size on every chart and the window every panel reads. One row of buttons under the proof strip picks it; on a phone the same list is a dropdown; keys 1 to 9 and 0 switch. Every panel, the SO WHAT line, the tape and your alerts re-read for it.

On the intraday timeframes "normal" comes from that contract's own one-minute volatility over the last two days, scaled to the length of the window. On 1W and 1MO it comes from daily bars back to 2024. That is why a 1% Dow move is big on 30M and normal on 1D or 1W.

A 5-minute HEADWIND and a session-long TAILWIND can both be true at once. Flipping between timeframes and seeing them disagree is often the most useful thing the deck tells you. DOW TAPE judges "at highs" against today's range on every timeframe up to 1D, and against the week's or the month's range on 1W and 1MO.

4. Reading a panel

Each panel asks a question in its title and answers it with one word. Under the word sits a coloured for stocks tag (+ HELPS STOCKS, − HURTS STOCKS, = MIXED or = NEUTRAL, ░ NO READ when the panel has no data; the legend above the deck lists them) and one plain sentence. The tag uses signs, not arrows, on purpose: the big glyph beside the state word says which way the move went, the tag says what that does to stocks. So ▲ HEADWIND over − HURTS STOCKS is one story (pressure up, bad for the Dow), not a contradiction. Softer tags (LEANS AGAINST STOCKS, WATCH FOR STOCKS) mean the same direction with less force. Below that, the numbers: each leg's move with a five-block meter and a word (section 5), and the chart. The SO WHAT line under the WINDOW row joins the five panels into one sentence. PLAIN ENGLISH (the button in the WINDOW row, or the p key) hides the explanations once you no longer need them.

Every panel has the same anatomy, top to bottom:

1. A state word with a glyph. ▲ HEADWIND, ▼ TAILWIND, ◆ MIXED, ─ NEUTRAL. The glyph is there so the state reads without colour. Up-pointing means pressure or price rising, down-pointing means falling, the diamond means the legs disagree, the dash means nothing is happening.
2. The for-stocks tag and the sentence (above): the answer for a junior, in colour, a sign and words.
3. A one-line label with the numbers behind the state.
4. The legs. One row per contract: the move over the window, then the five-block meter with its word (section 5), then sometimes a detail such as the current price or yield level. The z score behind the meter is in the rule popover and the API.
5. The chart (section 7).
6. A footer with the age of the last data per leg (CL 0s means the last oil bar is zero seconds old) and the window in use.

5. The move meter (and z, for the curious)

Every leg on the deck shows the size of its move as a five-block meter and a word: ▮▯▯▯▯ tiny, ▮▮▯▯▯ normal, ▮▮▮▯▯ big, ▮▮▮▮▯ very big, ▮▮▮▮▮ shock. "Big" means big for that contract on a window that long: 0.3% is a big move for the Treasury note and nothing for crude. Hover a meter and it shows the statistic underneath, for the curious.

z is the move divided by how much that contract normally moves over a window that long, measured from the last two days of one-minute data. z +1.9 means about twice a normal move. z -0.3 means less than a third of one.

This is what lets one screen compare oil and Treasuries fairly: 0.5% is nothing for crude and a lot for the T-note. All the rules on the deck use z, not raw percentages.

6. The five signals

01  MACRO PRESSURE  oil × yields → Dow

The hero panel. Are oil and yields, together, a tailwind or a headwind for the Dow right now?

The yield leg is shown in basis points, derived from the T-note price move. The percentage next to it is the actual 10-year yield level.

IMPLIED vs ACTUAL. Two bars under the legs. IMPLIED is the Dow move you would expect from oil and yields alone. ACTUAL is what the Dow did. Bars grow left of the centre mark for negative and right for positive. Same direction means the Dow is doing what macro says. Opposite directions means something else is driving, and that is what the alarm in section 8 watches for.

02  RATES · Is borrowing getting more expensive? (the 5% line)

Where is the 10-year yield versus 5.00%, the level the whole market is watching, and how fast is it moving?

• ▲ SPIKING: yields jumping, z at or above +1.5. Equity headwind.
• ▼ EASING: yields falling hard, z at or below -1.5. Equity tailwind.
• ◆ AT THE LINE: within 5 basis points of 5.00%.
• △ ABOVE / ▽ BELOW: drifting either side of 5%, nothing violent.

03  OIL · Is crude moving enough to matter? (oil shock)

Is crude making an outsized move, in the direction that matters for stocks?

• ▲ SHOCK UP: z at or above +1.5, or more than +2% on the window. An inflation impulse.
• ▼ SHOCK DOWN: z at or below -1.5, or below -2%. Relief for yields.
• △ DRIFT UP / ▽ DRIFT DOWN: moving, but normally.
• ─ CALM: quiet.

04  THE DOW ITSELF · What is it doing? (Dow tape)

Where is the Dow inside its own day, and is it trending on this window?

• ▲ BID / ▼ OFFERED: trending up or down on the window (z beyond ±0.75).
• △ AT HIGHS / ▽ AT LOWS: not trending right now, but sitting in the top or bottom 15% of the session range.
• ─ CHOPPY: nothing.

RANGE POS is where the current price sits between the session low and high. 86% of range means near the top. The detail shows the low and high themselves.

05  DO THEY AGREE? · Stocks, bonds and oil together (risk dial)

Do the three legs agree on risk-on or risk-off? Risk-on means Dow up, yields up (money leaving bonds) and oil up (growth). Risk-off is the mirror.

• ▲ RISK ON / ▼ RISK OFF: all three agree. A clean regime.
• △ LEAN ON / ▽ LEAN OFF: two agree, one flat.
• ◆ SPLIT: the legs disagree. No clean regime.
• ─ FLAT: nothing moving.

7. The charts

Every panel carries the price action behind its state, drawn by TradingView's Lightweight Charts™ engine (credited in the deck's footer) inside the deck's own frame. Panel 01 and RISK DIAL stack the Dow, oil and the T-note; the others chart their own instrument. Every chart works the same way.

• Tick by tick. On the live deck every trade moves the forming candle, whatever its size: the last candle's high, low and close move, its volume grows, and the pill, the readout and the legs move with it. The board updates up to four times a second. (The free deck is a snapshot fifteen minutes old, refreshed every half minute.)
• The strip above the plot names the contract, reads the last candle (O H L C, V volume, Δ the change since the window start) and shows the change as a coloured pill. Point at any candle, or tap it on a phone, and the strip reads that candle while the crosshair marks its time on the foot and its price on the right.
• Hollow green candle closed higher than it opened; filled ember candle closed lower. CANDLES / LINE in the legend row swaps to an area line. The faint histogram along the foot is volume.
• The dashed vertical line is the start of the timeframe's window; the dashed horizontal line tagged "anchor" is the price it measures from. The move in the legs is simply last price versus that line. The last price is tagged bright and follows the ticks.
• Zoom and pan. Wheel over a chart to zoom about the pointer, drag to pan, pinch on a phone, drag the price or time axis to stretch it; + - the arrow keys and Home when a chart is focused. A chart holds all the history the deck has for its candle size (section 3) and opens on the legible tail; ALL fits the whole history; double-click returns to following the newest candle.
• What is shaded. The faint green band is the US cash session (08:30 to 15:00 Chicago on days the NYSE is open). Amber bands are release windows, with the print named at the top. Time labels are Chicago time.
• Resize. Drag the grip under a chart; double-click it to reset. The deck remembers each chart's height in this browser.
• The chart desk. Press ⤢ on a chart, or f on the last chart you pointed at, and it opens big with the panel's state, tag and sentence beside it and the timeframe row in reach. DOCK keeps it under the timeframe row; FLOAT lifts it over the deck; Esc or CLOSE shuts it. A docked desk comes back next time.
• Pop out. ↗ opens the chart in its own browser window with its reading under it, for a second monitor, with its own timeframe dropdown.
• Reorder. Drag a panel by its title bar to move it; the deck remembers. RESET LAYOUT in the desk restores the order, the heights and the desk.
• On the T-note chart the price falls when yields rise. A downward drift on that chart is yields going up; the title says so with arrows.

8. The divergence alarm

The hero panel raises an amber banner when the Dow is doing the opposite of what oil and yields imply, by a wide margin, for long enough: opposite signs, a gap of more than 1.5 normal moves, held for 10 minutes.

Before the ten minutes are up the banner is dashed and reads ?? ... (watching) with a counter such as held 4m / 10m. Only a solid, blinking banner is a real alarm. Alarms are a Pro feature.

9. CLOSED, STALE, WARMING

10. Replay controls

When FEED reads REPLAY, a transport row appears under the deck. It drives the one replay everyone is watching, so it is a Pro control: on the free deck the buttons are shown but locked, and because the free board runs fifteen minutes behind, a change there would not be visible for a quarter of an hour anyway.

• RESTART, PLAY, PAUSE do what they say.
• SPEED is a multiple of real time. At 60x one replayed minute passes every second, so the US day session takes about seven minutes; at 300x it takes under two.
• JUMP takes you to two reference mornings: 10 SEP (oil and yields rose, stocks fell: a textbook headwind day) and 11 SEP CPI (a hot inflation print, yet oil dropped five percent and the Dow rallied one percent: the tailwind case the deck was built to explain).

Replay is the best way to learn the deck. Jump to 11 SEP CPI, set the window to SESSION, and watch the hero panel read TAILWIND while the OIL SHOCK panel reads SHOCK DOWN. Then switch to 30M and see how much noisier the short-term picture is.

11. The tape and alerts

Under the panels, the TAPE lists every state change on the window you are viewing, newest first: which signal, what it was, what it became, and when (Chicago time). Feed and market changes appear dimmed. Amber rows are armed alarms.

• NOTIFY asks the browser for permission and then pops a desktop notification on each state change or alarm while the tab is open.
• SOUND beeps on the same events. Press S to toggle it.
• Alerts to your phone (Pro, signed in): choose signals and windows, whether you want state flips, armed alarms or both, and where to send them: a Telegram chat (open Telegram, search for @tradepappy_alerts_bot, press Start, and the bot replies with the chat id to paste into the box), a webhook (a Discord or Slack webhook URL works as-is; the JSON carries a text field) or email. Alerts are only ever sent from the live feed, never from replay, and never while the feed is catching up after a reconnect. They are capped at 20 a minute per subscriber.

States have a little stickiness built in: a leg only drops back to flat once its z-score has fallen well inside the dead band, and SHOCK, SPIKING, BID and OFFERED release the same way. That is deliberate. Without it the tape would flip every minute around the threshold and the alerts would be noise.

Keyboard: 1 to 4 switch windows, space pauses replay, G opens this guide.

12. Review any day

In replay, type a date next to REVIEW A DAY and press LOAD. The deck fetches that trading day from the exchange data archive (with two days of lead-in so the volatility model is warm), caches it, and replays it from 07:00 Chicago. Days you have loaded before appear as buttons and cost nothing to reload. A pull that would cost more than the configured ceiling (one dollar by default) is refused and tells you the estimate. Saturdays and days before 2020 are refused outright.

13. Scheduled events

The deck carries a calendar of US releases in Chicago time: CPI, PPI, payrolls, PCE, GDP, retail sales, the ISM surveys, FOMC decisions and minutes, 10-year Treasury auctions, quarterly expiry, and the weekly jobless claims (Thursdays) and EIA crude report (Wednesdays). CME holidays and early closes are on it too. You will see it in four places:

• The header's TODAY cell lists today's releases with a state glyph each and a countdown to the next, and turns amber while a release window (15 minutes before to 45 minutes after the print) is open.
• The week: click WEEK or press c. This week and next, seven columns each, Monday to Sunday, today outlined; high-impact releases in bright green (■), medium in plain (▪); every time in Chicago time with your own beside it; closures and early closes in amber. Escape or CLOSE shuts it.
• Each release inside a chart's span is drawn as an amber dotted line with its name.
• The MACRO PRESSURE label adds "(CPI window)" or similar while the window is open, because MIXED and SPLIT are normal in the minutes after a print and should not be read as a regime.

The calendar is a plain file we maintain by hand from the official BLS, BEA, Federal Reserve and Treasury schedules. Weekly releases come from rules (every Thursday, every Wednesday) and move or skip around holidays the way the agencies do; dated ones are typed in. Beyond the date we have confirmed (shown at the foot of the week view), monthly releases are placed by rule and marked ~ provisional until the agency publishes its schedule, so the calendar never goes blank but a ~ date should not be traded on. If a date is wrong, tell us.

14. Free and Pro

To subscribe, press SUBSCRIBE at the bottom of the deck. You are taken to a secure Stripe checkout page, pay by card, and land back on the deck with Pro switched on in that browser for 30 days at a time. Your card details never touch TradePappy. To manage or cancel, use the MANAGE SUBSCRIPTION link at the bottom of the deck, which opens your Stripe customer portal.

Pro follows your email address. On another device, sign in with the same email from the ACCOUNT box (section 15). Never subscribe twice.

15. Signing in and the API

Pro follows your email address, not your browser. On a new device, type the email you used at checkout into the ACCOUNT box at the bottom of the deck and press SEND SIGN-IN LINK. The link arrives by email, works once and expires in fifteen minutes; clicking it signs that device in for thirty days. There are no passwords. Sign out with the SIGN OUT button in the header (or from the account box) whenever you leave a shared computer: it removes this device's access and its saved preferences.

Why is the TAPE empty? The tape lists regime changes as they happen. While CME Globex is closed (16:00 to 17:00 Chicago daily, Friday 16:00 to Sunday 17:00, and exchange holidays) nothing changes, so the tape says so and stays empty until the reopen. On a quiet window it also shows the last change and invites you to try another window.

API keys (Pro): create up to five keys in the ACCOUNT box. Each key is shown once. Send it as an X-TP-Key header:

/api/state returns the full snapshot the deck itself draws: every reading, the legs, implied and actual, the candles, the calendar. /api/events returns the tape, oldest first, with after as a cursor. Keys read; they cannot change alerts or create other keys. Revoke a key from the box and it stops working immediately. Keys of lapsed subscriptions fall back to the free, delayed data.

16. A daily workflow

1. Before the US open (08:30 Chicago, 15:30 South Africa in September): set the window to SESSION. What has the overnight done to oil and yields? That is the wind you will be trading into.
2. At the open: switch to CASH. Watch the first thirty minutes for the state to settle.
3. During the day: leave it on 30M. Glance at the hero word. Flip to 5M when something moves.
4. When the Dow does something surprising: check whether IMPLIED agrees. If it does not, and the amber banner comes up, treat the move with suspicion until you know what is driving it.
5. Around scheduled data (CPI, payrolls, the Fed): expect MIXED and SPLIT for a while. The legs need a few minutes to sort out who is winning.

17. Questions

Why futures and not my broker's US30 price? The Dow future trades almost 23 hours a day on a regulated exchange with published data. Your CFD is priced off it. Levels differ by a small basis; direction and timing match.

Why WTI and not Brent? WTI trades on CME, the same exchange as the other legs, so all four instruments come from one feed with one clock. WTI and Brent track each other closely.

What does "model fitted 2024-26 · descriptive only" in the footer mean? The weights that turn oil and yield moves into an IMPLIED Dow move were fitted on every US-hours 30-minute window from January 2024 to September 2026 (details in the repository file docs/BACKTEST.md). The fit is honest and the result is humbling: oil and yields explain about one percent of the Dow's 30-minute moves, and out of sample effectively none. So the state word tells you what the macro legs are doing, which is true by construction; the IMPLIED bar and the divergence alarm tell you whether the Dow is moving with or against them, which is a description, not a forecast. One more finding worth knowing: over 2024-26 as a whole, oil rising went with the Dow rising more often than against it. HEADWIND is a description of the wind, not a prediction of a fall.

Why did the state change when I switched windows? Because the move over five minutes and the move since last night are different questions. Both answers are true.

The deck says CLOSED but my broker is quoting. Your broker may quote a synthetic price when CME is on its daily break or over the weekend. The deck will not pretend to read a market that is not trading.

Does it work on a phone? Yes. The panels stack into one column and the charts resize.

19. Glossary

Any word on the deck with a dotted underline opens its meaning when you tap it. The full list:

18. The small print

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