Number beside Bid/Ask on ChartTrader

[reach4thelasers]

Hey there,

Sorry for the basic question, but what's this number circled on the attached screenshot?

thanks,

Kevin

[NinjaTrader_JamesC]

Hello,

Thank you for your post.

This information is the Market Depth or Level II data. The numbers represent the number of standing orders at the "A:" Ask and "B:" Bid.

I'm placing a link below that goes over how Market Depth works.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

[FMtrader]

Hello,

Thank you for your post.

This information is the Market Depth or Level II data. The numbers represent the number of standing orders at the "A:" Ask and "B:" Bid.

I'm placing a link below that goes over how Market Depth works.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

I suspect James that the question could also relate to why FX pairs show weird numbers like 1:1 for the bid ask. I appreciate that FX doesn't traditionally report volume as there is no central exchange so what do the number appearing in the bid ask area of chart trader actually mean? I have seen these numbers myself on FX pairs and have wondered what they are.

[NinjaTrader_JamesC]

Hello,

Thank you FMtrader I didn't catch that part of the picture!

Realizing now that this is a Forex pair, FMtrader is correct in that there is no centralized exchange so these numbers do not have the same meaning as they would if this were a futures instrument.

I looked into this further and found out that the FXCM Volume sent from their API does not represent order executions or order updates as compared to what you see with a futures feed or what is reported from other Forex providers.

The FXCM Volume data that is being sent represents the number of "tick" updates that occurred to the bid/ask during a specific time interval. Therefore, the volume reported in NinjaTrader for "bid" and "ask" will be the same (this also includes last price, since NinjaTrader substitutes bid price for last).

Since the API is "polling" based, not every tick makes it to the platform. Therefore, the volume updates you see are the number of bid/ask ticks that were missed since the last price update.

For example, if you are looking at the T & S feed (i.e., a 1-tick feed), the "Volume" that you see does not tell you how many trades were executed at that price. This "Volume" instead reflects the number of bid/ask updates that occurred since the last tick was received.

Additionally, due to the "polling" nature of their feed, no two clients would see the same exact updates, which means the volumes will be different when comparing two users charts.

Sorry for the confusion and hopefully this answers the original question. Thanks again FMtrader for pointing this out.

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

[reach4thelasers]

Thanks for the clarification James!