How to Read a Market Bubble Chart
In short: Size is value, colour is movement. A big grey-green circle is a large company having a quiet day; a small bright red one is a minor asset falling hard. Change the timeframe and the colours redraw — the sizes stay put.
What the size of a bubble means
A bubble's diameter is its market capitalisation — what the whole asset is worth — not its price. A $600 share of a small company draws a smaller circle than a $40 share of a giant one, because price per share says nothing about the size of the business behind it.
The scale is deliberately not linear. Apple is worth thousands of times more than the smallest company on the board, and a truly proportional chart would render it as the entire screen and everything else as dust. BubbleMarkets buckets assets into ten size tiers instead, from 15 pixels for the smallest to 305 pixels for the largest at a 900-pixel baseline, then scales the whole board to your screen. You lose exact proportionality and gain a chart where every asset is actually visible.
You can switch the sizing metric to trading volume instead, which answers a different question — not "what is this worth?" but "how much of it changed hands today?" See market cap or volume for when each one is the right choice.
What the colour means
Colour is the percentage move over whichever timeframe you have selected: green for up, red for down, and the stronger the colour the larger the move. A pale bubble barely moved. A saturated one moved a lot.
The crucial detail is that colour intensity is calibrated per market, not globally. A 15% day is unremarkable in crypto and almost unheard of in foreign exchange, so the same colour means a different number depending on which board you are looking at. This is deliberate — a single global scale would render every forex board a uniform grey and every crypto board a wall of red and green. Why 15% means different things covers this properly.
What the timeframe changes
The timeframe pills — 1H, 24H, 7D, 30D, 3M, 6M, 1Y — recolour the board without resizing it. This is the single most useful control on the page, because it separates noise from trend.
An asset that is red on 24H and green on 30D had a bad day inside a good month. One that is green on both is doing something more durable. Flipping between the two takes a second and tells you more than either view alone.
One caveat worth knowing: the 1H view only exists for crypto, US stocks and ETFs. Forex, commodities, bonds and indices have no hourly feed we consider trustworthy, so rather than show you a fake hour that quietly mirrors the daily figure, the pill is hidden on those boards.
Reading the board in thirty seconds
Start with the biggest circles, because they move indices and funds. If the largest bubbles are green, the market is broadly up regardless of what the small ones are doing.
Then look for outliers: a small bubble in an unusually strong colour is an asset moving far more than its size would suggest, which is usually where the day's news is.
Then switch the timeframe. If the picture inverts, you were looking at noise. If it holds, you were looking at a trend.
Common questions
- Does a bigger bubble mean a higher price?
- No. Size is market capitalisation — the total value of the asset — not the price of one share or coin. A high share price with few shares outstanding draws a small bubble.
- Why are two bubbles with the same percentage change different colours?
- Colour intensity is calibrated per market. A 5% move is a big day for a currency pair and an ordinary one for a cryptocurrency, so the scales differ between boards.
- What does a grey or colourless bubble mean?
- It barely moved over the selected timeframe. Try a longer timeframe — an asset that is flat on the day is often not flat over a month.