An overview of orderflow platforms
What I use and why
I’ll start by speaking about some of the platforms I use and currently rely upon.
First up, there’s a lot to choose from and the innovations in the past few years have been nothing short of amazing, and inspired a new generation of futures Traders, to the extent where Rithmic had to do a server upgrade causing a period of chaos last summer.
A lot of this, I think, is a general move away in the retail space from price action only trading (which, I don’t think you can make money consistently from intraday, honestly- if you do, hats off). There was also a collapse in ‘simulated trading’ prop firms, which turned out to be a scammers paradise. I think this created a lot of general discontent. Many of these platforms saw the success of FTMO and tried to undercut them, to the somewhat predictable outcome of savvy traders taking advantage of cheap leverage. I cannot blame the trader for this, trading is all about thinking outside of the box and taking whatever free money is lying on the pavement.
Also, the Covid lockdown policy was the perfect storm in that many got accustomed to working from home and skipping the rat race altogether.
So, platforms.
I’ll rank the ones I’ve tried and create a subcategory for honorable mentions.
ATAS. This is my standard platform and if I were to pick one to use alone, it would probably be this. It’s not without fault but it feels like the most complete platform I’ve come across, and also doesn’t sacrifice the important things orderflow traders rely upon for usability. Things I really like are the highly customizable footprint, or cluster chart to give a visual representation of the time & sales, which has annotations that ‘snap to grid’. They have what they term the ‘Smart DOM’ and ‘Smart Tape’ respectively, which aggregate orders and make it easier on the eye. There’s also a few order flow indicators which point out important things, which has helped me systematize my entry method. The DOM bars, and market by order ‘MBO’, are easily popped on and off whichever chart you’re using. What sets this platform apart is that you don’t need to buy lots of add-ons, it’s got pretty much everything you need, and they take user input with regular updates. Some quibbles. The heatmap needs a little work, for this reason I rarely use it. It’s just not very dynamic. Stability used to be an issue, but since I run on a dedicated server close to the exchange, it’s not been an issue. Various updates have helped in this regard too.
Bookmap. In short, I really like it, and it’s created a lot of renewed interest in analyzing the DOM. I’ve had a lot of aspiring traders see this and ask me how to ‘learn Bookmap’. Really, it’s just a very dynamic and visual heatmap of the depth of market. I personally use it, and, it probably has the potential to be a standalone tool as well. Their market by order add-on has a lot of traders excited, but, I’ve personally not found that having the stop and iceberg information massively useful, but, it is not completely without utility. In short, it’s not the game changer you may think it is. But, it does really help in picking out the persistent large limit orders in the market and filter out the algos, and some of the noise. Could I live without it? Yes, but I have no reason not to. If I was forced at gunpoint to choose between them, I’d still pick ATAS. Bookmap also has a suite of additional, and there’s an inexpensive one I use a lot, because it’s part of my edge, I won’t talk about it much here. MBO, I’ve experimented with for a year. Sometimes it reveals things that I wouldn’t have known otherwise (such as abnormal iceberg amounts) but, I can count the amount of times this has happened on one hand.
Sierra Charts. The OG of futures platforms, and for good reason. It’s highly customizable, and people who have been trading for 10+ years usually use Sierra. If you’ve ‘grown up’ with the UI, or if your mind is of an engineering bent, then its clunky UI may not bother you all that much. I did not find it very intuitive, and found I really needed to spend time finding good templates. So, if you’re willing to spend quite a lot of time setting up or buying custom templates, then it’s perfectly fine. You will need to fund a futures account in order to get access to the Denali feed, and I personally had trouble getting it to work with Rithmic, but I am told it is possible. If you trade with a futures prop firm, then, you may find it a bit fiddly. With that said, it has everything you need and I expect some will like the 90s style UI.
NinjaTrader. I used this for about a month, and, its OK. I have some experienced trading friends who swear by it. The DOM is good, the footprint chart leaves a lot to be desired. It just doesn’t have all the functionality I need. It’s another one where, once purchased, you find you need to buy a bunch of add-ons to get it set up the way you like. When the likes of ATAS and Quantower are available for the same price, I don’t see much reason to bother with NT. The profiles and templates are perfectly fine. The one thing it does have going for it, is it has one of the best third party stacking & pulling indicators out there.
Quantower & Jigsaw are two other popular platforms which I haven’t used. I’d welcome feedback if you use these and if you like them.
Some honorable mentions.
Tradingview. This isn’t really an orderflow platform, but they are making strides in that direction. They have a footprint and profiles recently added. The thing that sets it apart is its usability and web based nature. It’s quite unique in this regard. You can look up nearly any symbol or ticker, annotate, scroll around and it will save it for you. It’s pretty neat but, I only really use it for ‘at a glance’ trading to take a look at where yields are at, or to keep track of the price action on other markets. What you have to be careful with is that you’re actually getting the real futures volume on your chart, and not tick volume. These are two quite different things and, the distinction is important. If you’re putting a volume profile on a CFD chart, or an x axis histogram, then it’s probably tick volume.
ClusterDelta. This gets a mention because of how darn cheap it is and how much they pack into an 10 dollar a month mt4/mt5 package. However, it’s designed for CFD traders, and transposes futures prices into CFD prices. This may be useful for some. They route exchange data through their own servers, which, unfortunately is a major drawback when speed is of the essence. There’s a slight, half second lag between the data and when you receive it. I also think they’re probably not supposed to be providing exchange data without the signing of the necessary contracts from the CME.
The next post will be a breakdown of some live trades I took last week in some detail.
I won’t ever be posting about trades I didn’t take, so, when my records are published, I can point to exactly where they were taken. This particular session was also called out ahead of time on my X page.
-Z