Orderbook

How to open

Orderbooks can be opened by:

General

Orderbooks displays public buy and sell orders and are available as MBO (Market by order) and MBL (Market by level). Infront offers access to both Level 1 data and Level 2 data as well as consolidated orderbooks (combines orderbooks from the main listing exchange with multilateral trading facilities).

The order book window can be linked with order windows, see Linking windows for more information. For selected markets the Orderbook can be displayed differently, e.g FX or Fixed Income data.

Example

The example shows a MBO orderbook (left) and a MBL orderbook (right)

Market by Level (MBL) Orderbook - In this kind of orderbook all the public orders on a symbol from a specific exchange are accumulated into unique price levels. So if there are 35 orders at 52,30 SEK, there will be only one level in the orderbook with an accumulated volume of 55,748.

Market by Order (MBO) Orderbook - The Market by Order orderbook contains all details o single orders in the public orderbook. An MBO orderbook may contain a large number of orders with exactly the same price.  So you get much more detailed information about each order in the market.

Trading - If you place an order through a trading service using Infront, the orderbook will highlight the price level that matches the price of your active order (green below). The feature is on by default, but can be turned off in Settings.

An active buy order placed at price 52.20 and active sell order placed at price 52.65

Market By Level from MBO Orderbooks - Sometimes the MBO orderbooks may contains just too much information to be useful or digestible.

Accumulated MBL orderbooks aggregate all the orders that have the same price into one level. The advantage is that the detailed MBO information available. Each order will get a separate line in the orderbook viewable by clicking the + next to bid/ask.

To switch this on use the Window tool menu and select the "Visual preferences" tab. Select "Expand MBO levels" and then OK.

Summary lines

The Orderbook contains two summary lines. These can be turn on/off by right-clicking in the Orderbook:

Suspensions

If an instrument (normally a stock) is suspended, the Orderbook will automatically be displayed with a X mark. It is also possible to define a color for a suspended quote under Edit colors ”Background if Status Set".

Display of Auction Surplus volumes

Display imbalance volume in an opening or closing auction on the following exchanges; Xetra Frankfurt, Euronext Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo.

The screen shot below shows the current imbalance in the orderbook, it is  3 835 shares more offered than what will actually uncross in the auction. Uncrossing volume being 412 900.

Quote Driven Markets (LSE)