DOM reading was once the preserve of the scalper. A key skill for a scalper was to watch the DOM for certain behaviour and remember how the market reacted to certain key prices. This allowed them to recognize early signs of what a market might be about to do and quickly capitalize on it. But DOM reading has always been something that many people have struggled with due to the level attention and working memory required to be good at it, not to mention the amount of time to learn it – that is until now. Enter BookMap X-Ray. A game changer in DOM reading.
Historical Orderbook
Ostensibly, BookMap is just another orderflow tool. But it’s far more than that. Why? Because it shows you the historical book. Not only that, but as you scroll back, it shows you what the trading activity (and book and everything else) was like at the time. So for example, this means you can scroll back and see what the volume profile looked like earlier on in the session before subsequent trading happened.
Not bad, eh?
Volume Dots
For me the most useful thing here isn’t just the historical orderbook, but what the market does relative to it. The Volume Dots help to give a quick visual cue and if you hover over them, you can see exactly what they represent in terms of numbers.
They are based on the traded volume in the specific pixel they denote – this can be made to represent a larger or smaller time interval by using the zoom feature. The size of the dot is determined by the trade volume being represented.
They are also customizable by minimum trade size and pixel volume.
Expectations at key levels
One of the major drawbacks of a tool like BookMap is the too much information syndrome. So the key to leveraging this sort of tool imo is to use it selectively to garner information about how the market reacts at places that you’ve pre-identified as important to your personal trade plan. Otherwise there’s just going to be way too much information for most traders to handle on a moment to moment basis.
Consider what it is that you’re looking for and watch for signs of it occurring.
Click here for the COMPLETE BookMap review
A New Dawn
For me, BookMap X-Ray is an excellent new tool and almost certainly a new dawn for many traders in their efforts to DOM read and understand how a market is behaving. It’s getting better at an incredible rate too – VeloxPro (the developer) are tweaking and improving the software all the time and this is a great sign of a solid software developer.
