Heat Map in Moomoo — see which sectors are hot and which are cold in one screen (screenshots of every step)

Open the Markets tab, then pick a market from the row at the top. For Bursa, tap MY.

Now scroll down. Don’t stop early, because the Heat Map section sits fairly far down, after IPOs, Market Movers, Dividend Rankings, Capital Flow, Investment Themes and a few more. In Part 6 later we’ll show you how to move it up so you don’t have to scroll that far every time.

When you find it, you’ll see a small box with eight coloured blocks. That’s just a preview. Tap the › arrow at the far right of the title to open the full map.

The full map takes over the whole screen. There are four controls you need to know, and they’re all on the top two rows:

• The ⓘ icon next to the title opens Moomoo’s official help page about the heat map. We’ll use that page in the next step.
• The two icons on the left switch the view between blocks and a list.
• Industries ▾ switches between the two sector levels.
• Filter opens every setting for the map.

At the top right there’s a refresh icon to reload the data, and a share icon to send the map as an image.

On the day this screenshot was taken, Financial Services was up only 0.40%. That move was small, yet the block took up almost a quarter of the map, because the financial sector is simply the biggest sector on Bursa.

Next to it, Utilities was up 1.80%, four times stronger. But its block was far smaller, so its effect on the KLCI index was lighter.

This is why you need to read size and colour together. A big, pale block is usually more meaningful for the market as a whole than a small block glowing bright.

Tap the ⓘ next to the Heat Map title. The Support page opens, and there Moomoo explains two things clearly.

First, how block size is worked out. The app divides the map’s area according to each sector’s market capitalisationMarket capA company's total value in the market.See it in the glossary →, so a sector worth twice as much gets a block twice as big.

Second, the colour scale. That page draws a strip from +2.0% to −2.0%, so you can see for yourself how quickly the colour deepens as the move gets stronger. There’s also a Red Up / Green Down option for people more used to red meaning up, as is common in some Asian markets. If the colours in your app look reversed compared with this tutorial (red up, green down), check this setting first, because every colour rule on this page will be flipped.

Tap Industries ▾ above the map. Two options appear:

• Industries — broad groups such as Financial Services (banks and insurers), Utilities (water, gas and power) and Consumer Products & Services (everyday goods). Use this when you want a rough picture of the market.
• Industry — finer industries such as Banking, Plantation (palm oil estates), Gas Water & Multi-Utilities and Semiconductors (chips). Use this when you want to know which part of a broad group is actually moving.

The difference isn’t cosmetic. On the same day, the Utilities group was up 1.80%, but switch to the Industry level and it turns out Gas, Water & Multi-Utilities was up 3.16% while Electricity was down 0.18%. One average number hides two opposite stories.

After switching to Industry, the same map breaks into dozens of small blocks. The big blocks up top are Banking and Plantation, and the further down-right you go, the smaller the blocks get, down to tiny unlabelled squares.

Those unlabelled squares aren’t a bug. They’re industries too small to fit a name, and that itself is information: the sector is too small to move the market.

Tap Filter at the top right. A sheet slides up from the bottom with four settings:

Here is what each choice means, one line each:

For the periods, the letter after the number is the unit of time: m for minutes, D for trading days, M for months, Y for years. So 5m is five minutes, 20D is twenty trading days or roughly a month, and 3Y is three years. Today is today only, and YTD is from 1 January until today.

If you’re starting out, leave everything as it is and change one thing only: the period. That’s what we do in the next step.

The default settings are Market Cap, Top 50, % Chg and Today. Once you change anything, the word Filter turns orange, so you won’t mistake the map for still being on default.

Scroll to the % Chg section in that sheet. There you’ll find twelve periods, from five minutes up to three years.

Tap YTD, meaning from the start of the year to today, then tap Confirm.

Here’s why this period matters: the heat map defaults to showing just one day. A single day in the market is usually noise, not a signal. A longer period shows a more meaningful direction.

Compare this with the daily map from earlier, and notice how different they are:

Banking was up 0.43% that day, yet since the start of the year it was only up 0.53%. That means the sector had been almost flat since January, and that day’s gain was almost its entire move this year.

Food & Beverage, on the other hand, was green that day, but down 18.50% since the start of the year. If you made a decision based only on today’s colour, you’d misread both of those sectors.

The block map is great for a broad picture, but it struggles to answer a simple question like “which sector is at the top today”.

Tap the list icon at the top left. The map turns into a table sorted from the biggest gain to the biggest loss: Utilities +1.80%, Energy +1.79%, Financial Services +0.40%, Construction +0.16%, and on down to the reddest sector at the bottom.

Every row has a small arrow on the left. Tap the arrow on Utilities, and three sub-industries appear below it:

• Gas, Water & Multi-Utilities +3.16%
• Electricity −0.18%
• Renewable Energy Electricity −0.34%

The sector was up 1.80%, but two of its three parts were actually down. One strong part pulled the overall average into the green.

This is the single most useful lesson from this whole tutorial: a sector number is an average, and an average can hide two opposite directions.

Go back to the block view, then tap the Banking block. The sector page opens, showing the sector’s own index, 1,042.723, up 0.43% that day, along with Components, Chart, Comments and News tabs.

The Components tab shows every stock in the sector, sorted by percentage change. That day: HLBANK +1.60%, HLFG +1.41%, MAYBANK +0.58%, AFFIN +0.50%, PBBANK +0.42%, CIMB +0.26%, then RHBBANK −0.51%, AMBANK −0.75%, BIMB −0.98% and ABMB −1.02%.

So that green block actually contained six rising stocks and four falling ones. A green block doesn’t mean every stock in that sector is up.

If you have to scroll past a dozen sections every time you want to see the map, sooner or later you just won’t bother. Luckily the order of sections on the Markets page can be changed.

Scroll the markets page all the way to the bottom. At the very end there’s a small button labelled ⚙ Edit. Tap it, and the MY Settings screen opens with a list of every section on that page, in its actual order.

There you’ll see for yourself why Heat Map is hard to find: it sits at position thirteen, after Shariah Compliant.

Press and hold the ≡ handle on the right of the Heat Map row, then drag it up.

Before we tap anything, what is a P/E? Imagine you buy a shop for RM100,000, and that shop earns RM10,000 of profit a year. You are paying ten years of profit to own it, so the shop’s P/E is ten. The higher the number, the more expensive the price is compared with the profit being made.

Now open Filter again, and under Display Value tap P/E TTM. Notice one thing: as soon as you pick P/E, the % Chg section disappears from the sheet, since the period no longer applies.

After Confirm, the number inside each block changes from percentage change to the sector’s P/E ratioP/E ratioA stock's price compared to the company's earnings — how much you pay for each ringgit of profit.See it in the glossary →, and its meaning of colour changes too: red for a low P/E, blue for the middle range, green for a high P/E.

Here are the P/E readings for several Bursa sectors that day:

Don’t read Semiconductors at 150.99 as “chips are 150 years expensive” either. A sector P/E gets high when the sector’s profit is low compared with its share prices, for example because profit is falling or the market is paying for expected future profit. It’s a sign to investigate, not proof that it’s overpriced.

That number 795 doesn’t mean the food sector is seven hundred times more expensive. Go back to the shop above: if its profit fell from RM10,000 a year to RM126 a year, the same price suddenly becomes “795 years of profit”. That is what happened here — the sector’s net profit shrank to almost nothing, so the P/E number shot up. In that situation a sector P/E no longer means much.

Use the P/E map as a door to ask questions, not as an answer. A sector with a low P/E deserves to be opened up and investigated as to why it’s low, and how to do that is covered in the fundamental analysis tutorial.