There are a lot of trading platforms created for different types of financial markets and institutions. Some of them offer trading on currency markets, others on stock & derivative markets — Futures, Stocks, ETFs, OTC, Options.
But all of them are united by one goal — to create a tool that will simplify the decision-making process, as well as facilitate the process of placing orders and their further management.
Quantower is a fast, modern and powerful trading platform developed by Quantower company. Thanks to wide customization, modularity and progressive solutions, our trading software can meet the specific needs of even the most demanding traders.
In this article, we conduct a review of the most interesting features of the Quantower platform, and who knows, maybe one of them is exactly what you were looking for all this time and didn’t know the solution was right here all along :)
Multi-Asset Coverage
The platform offers a broad list of connections for different markets:
- FXCM, OANDA, LMAX, cTrader (Pepperstone, ICMarkets, FxPro) — for FX traders
- BitMEX, Bitfinex, Binance, Binance Futures, Kraken, HitBTC , Coinbase Pro, OKEX — for crypto traders
- Rithmic, IQFeed, Interactive Brokers, MetaStock, Barchart, ActiveTick, Alpaca, Exante — for futures, options, and stock traders
To start trading, just enter your credentials in the selected connection. In addition, the platform provides trading via Trading Simulator on generated quotes. It allows to quickly evaluate the trading and analytical functionality of the platform even on the weekend.
Synchronous connection to different brokers and data providers allows analyzing FX, stocks, digital assets, futures & options from one source, and place orders to other sources without the need to reconnect with them.
Full Customization
Control Center is the starting point for launching panels, connection & workspace management, and settings for the entire terminal. Unlike the most single-windowed apps, Quantower is a multi-windowed application, meaning that you can arrange your trading panels on any of available screens, sticking to screen sides or side-by-side with other apps and etc.
Quantower have also made some improvements in approach to panels management, and created so-called “Groups, Binds & Templates”.
- Groups allow nesting several panels into one;
- Binds combine several panels in one entity;
- Templates allow to save any customized panel, Group or Bind and invoke them later in one click.
Quantower allows creating as many workspaces as you want. Manage and switch over them with one click. As well you can detach necessary panels on another monitor and manage by workspace lists.
Charts, indicators & drawings
The platform provides standard and advanced chart types, which allow analyzing markets from different sides. In the chart settings, the user can select:
- Time and Tick charts
- Point & Figure, Heikin Ashi, Line Break
- Renko, Kagi, Range Bars, Footprint (Cluster Chart), TPO Profile chart (Market Profile)
As well Quantower represents several ways of chart styles — candles, bars, line, area, dotted line. With the Timeframe selector, traders can easily switch over various predefined chart types, time periods or create custom intervals and save them as Favorite by pressing Star icon.
For advanced users, the developers have implemented a Cluster Chart (Footprint) that displays volume data inside of each bar. Besides, Volume Profiles, Historical Time & Sales, and Time and Price Statistics are available in the platform to assess the imbalance between buyers & sellers, and their intentions to future price movements.
A set of 40+ drawing tools allow you to focus on trends, support and resistance, gaps, pivots, and other price patterns. Trend lines & channels, Gartley patterns, Fibonacci and Gann tools, and other drawings can be easily drawn in one click. For quick access to any drawing, it is enough to put them on the side panel, after activating the Star icon next to them.
The platform offers more than 40 technical indicators which are divided into 6 categories:
- Channels
- Moving Averages
- Trend, Oscillators
- Volatility
- Volume indicators
It is worth noting the Overlays feature, which displays two and more assets in the same chart area. By using an overlay tool, a trader can visually compare multiple assets simultaneously. For the correct comparison of several assets, it is important to use different price scales such as absolute, relative, or logarithmic.
Volume Analysis Tools — Volume Profile, Footprint chart, Time Statistics, and more
Quantower provides traders with a variety of advanced volume analyses features. It allows you to see the traded volume at each price level, assesses the balance between buyers and sellers and understands the intentions of traders regarding the future price.
Volume analysis tools include proprietary and well-known analytics:
— Cluster chart, known as Footprint
It allows to look inside the price and see all market actions. Cluster chart combines several important characteristics like time, OHLC prices, trading volume, number of buy and sell trades.
— Volume Profile: Step profile, Right & Left profile, Custom volume profile
Volume Profile displays the trading activity over a specific time period at certain price levels. Volume profiles are horizontal histograms that show the distribution of selected volume data for each price level. This allows you to more accurately see the zones of maximum trading interest, and as a consequence, the “true” support/resistance levels.
— Time Statistics, known as Bar Statistics
It’s a remarkable functionality that shows extended volume statistics for each individual bar — Total volume, Trades, Buy and Sell volume, Delta, as well as custom filters. For example, you can see how many buy or sell trades have passed in one candle from the total trading volume, assess the delta and the average trade size.
— Time Histogram
Time Histogram is similar to Time Statistics tool that shows volume data as a vertical histogram for each bar. But unlike Time statistics, it allows you to visually evaluate the data for each bar, not only by colors but also by the shape of the histogram.
— Historical Time & Sales
If you want to see how the trades distributed in a particular bar, then the Historical T & S will be indispensable. By selecting any bar, you will see all the trades from the first second. In this case, you can set up filtering to display data with a certain volume or apply to sort by price, volume, etc.
TPO Profile Chart (a.k.a. Market Profile)
Time Price Opportunity or TPO Chart, shows the price distribution during the specified time, thus forming a profile. This allows you to understand at which levels or ranges the price has spent the most time, as well as to determine the main support and resistance levels.
Trading functionality
Being a multi-asset platform, Quantower allows trading Forex, Stocks, Futures, Options, Digital assets, and ETFs. Depending on the connected data provider or broker, the platform supports various orders types, including Market, Limit, Stop. At the same time, orders have different time restrictions which set how it will behave during the trading session.
Quantower provides several options for placing orders for maximum efficiency:
- Chart trading — quick order placement and modification in one-click
- Order Entry — allows you to configure all the order’s parameters before sending it to the order book
- DOM Trader — place a resting or aggressive order directly in price ladder. You can also place bracket orders or OCO.
- DOM Surface panel — analyze historical limit order book and place your orders on the strongest levels
- FX Cell — monitor quotes and submit a market order by bid or ask price in a single click
- Crypto Order Entry — specially designed panel for crypto traders. It allows exchanging one currency to another by setting the necessary quantity.
All detailed information about working orders, open positions, and the current P/L of the portfolio is available in the Orders and Positions panels. The history of all trade actions — placement, modification, cancellation or execution — is available in the Orders History.
In addition to exchange-traded instruments, Quantower allows you to create, analyze and trade non-standard instruments. Using the Synthetic symbol panel, a trader selects the unlimited number of instruments that will be included in the spread and sets their weights or number of contracts for buy or sell. The panel automatically calculates Bid / Ask prices for this spread, and as a result, you can start trade it.
Trading Simulation and Manual Backtesting
Quantower provides a Trading simulator, an excellent trading tool that allows emulating the execution of orders under any connection, including those that do not allow trading. An exceptional feature of the panel is that you can practice your trading without risking your money in real time. Given the fact that, crypto exchanges do not offer demo trading, this tool is ideal for crypto traders.
Testing of trading strategies is one of the most important and necessary steps for successful trading. But for traders who are not experienced in developing of algorithmic strategies, Quantower team have created a module for manual backtesting called History Player.
The significant advantage of History Player over other backtesting software is that you can:
- test on any trading instruments with any vendor or broker. This is especially useful when you have access to the data feed that does not allow trade execution.
- during the testing using any built-in or custom indicators and drawing tools directly on the chart
- test multiple instruments at the same time
- test on different types of charts — Time-based charts (Bars, Candles, Lines), Ticks, Renko, Heiken Ashi, Price Range
- place orders via chart, order entry or DOM panel
- set different time frames and speed of testing
But that’s not all. To work with historical data from third-party data providers, the devs created Historical Symbols panel. It allows you to import trading quotes and on its base to perform technical analysis or backtesting.
Quantower Algo solutions
Quantower provides a set of solutions for creating custom modules for the trading platform. Besides standards, such as automatic strategies (trading robots) and indicators, you can create your plugins and even connectors to brokers or exchanges.
We are proposing to use popular and, at the same time, simple language — C# with integrations with major IDE’s instead. At the moment, an extension for Visual Studio is available on the marketplace.
You can read the manual of how to install Visual Studio and our Quantower Algo extension in our knowledge base as well as several examples of how to create indicators.
Trade options with Option Analytics panel
https://www.quantower.com/options-trading-features
At first glance, the panel looks familiar to option traders — Option Desk, Analyzer, Working Orders & Positions. But as soon as you start working in Options Analytics, you immediately notice the pleasant moments.
— Joint mode of Option Desk & Analyzer
Add Paper positions in the options desk and the strategy analyzer will immediately show the option profile. This mode will allow you to see all changes in options desk — prices, volatility, options Greek values — and option profiles on one screen.
— Overlays
Use the overlay functionality for a versatile analysis of the position, when creating option strategies. In addition to the P & L, you can add Delta, Theta, Gamma, Vega, Rho. Thus, you simultaneously see changes not only for the option risk profile but also for other portfolio’s parameters.
— Analysis of real & test options positions
Adding of test positions is performed with the options desk in a single click. To do this, select the strike you need, then in the Paper Positions column set the required number of orders. The selected strikes will immediately appear in the table of test positions, and the corresponding option profile will be displayed on the chart. By activating the checkbox in the Analyze column for the selected strike, you add it to the strategy builder.
— What-if Scenario analysis
Assess the impact of volatility and time decay on the options trading strategy using What-if analysis.
DOM Surface panel (updated Order Flow surface)
Order Flow Analysis is a trading method that allows you to predict the actions of large market participants, as well as their intentions regarding the future price.
Using the DOM Surface panel, a trader sees all changes of limit orders in the Order Book (depending on the depth of market data), which is presented as a Heatmap. The panel shows the placement of limit orders, their changing, canceling or execution by large market participants, as well as the imbalance between buyers and sellers.
Unlike other types of charts, such as Footprint (or Cluster chart), the Order Flow shows not only aggressive market orders but also limit orders, which have a greater influence on the price behavior.
Forward Curve panel
Forward Curve is the plotting of the current price for each futures contracts on commodity on a single curve. By changing to the Term Structure, you will see the ratio of all contracts to the current.
Additional features and future plans
In addition to a wide set of “must-have” functionality, Quantower proposes an impressive list of complimentary plugins and this list is constantly growing. Among those, who attract the most attention:
- Exchange Times — to quickly determine which exchanges are currently running;
- Market heat map — building a heat map from a specified set of symbols using Change or Volume value;
- History exporter — for exporting history from any symbols and connections with multitasking support.
- Symbol Mapping — allows you to create a connection between different date feeds and trading connections.
- Stat Matrix — shows the correlation between different assets (instruments)
- Alerts Log — collects all alerts that come from different panels, such as Chart, Watchlist etc.
Check our future plans, features that are in current development in the Roadmap section.
Pricing model
Quantower trading platform is available for download from the official website without any advance registration. It can be used on a monthly basis subscription and price depends on included functionality. At the moment 3 packages are available:
Free license is granted by default once you have created a Quantower Account. Also, it will be available all the time when you don’t have any active paid License. Using Free license you will get:
- one active connection to any broker, data feed or exchange
- 2 indicators per chart
- 1 symbol overlay per chart
- Order Flow Surface panel
- Options Analytics is temporarily available for free
Crypto Package contains the necessary functionality for professional analysis and trading in the cryptocurrency market. For this package are available:
- all connected crypto exchanges,
- simultaneous connection to several exchanges,
- volume analysis tools — Cluster chart, Volume Profile, Time Statistics, Time Histogram, VWAP
- Order Flow Surface panel (but not DOM Surface)
- advanced features — Renko, Kagi, P&F and Heikin-Ashi chart types, Unlimited Overlays, Unlimited Indicators, Trading Simulator, Chart and Indicator Alerts
Multi-Asset Package includes all options that are available in the Crypto Package, plus gives access to Forex, Futures, Stock brokers and other data feeds.
All-in-One Package includes all available features and connections. Also, all new features will be automatically added and available while your subscription is active.
DOM Surface license activates full access to the DOM Surface panel. In the free version of the panel, all accumulated data disappears after 3 minutes.
Power Trades Scanner license activates the scanner that shows the execution of big amount of orders during a short time.
Volume Analysis license activates all available volume tools:
- Cluster chart
- Volume profiles (Right & Left, Custom, Step profiles)
- Time Histogram
- Time Statistics
- VWAP tools
- Historical Time & Sales
Advanced Features license includes non-standard chart types, simultaneous connections, additional functionalities for working with symbol’s history, unlimited chart overlays, and trading simulation.
Options Trading license activates Options Analytics panel. Currently, it’s available for free usage.
Besides, there is a possibility to use the platform in B2B cases. We are ready to provide a white-label platform, an unlimited amount of licenses and second line support for the very attractive price. Contact us if you have any additional questions about the platform or B2B opportunities.
