Desktop: The DOM Ladder

The DOM is the desktop terminal's depth-of-market ladder — a price-centered book with the full order-flow read built in and a trading layer on top. Resting bid and ask depth flank a fixed central price spine, executed volume sits split against the spine as a footprint, and the pull/stack and delta analytics are always on — they are the point of the panel, not an overlay you toggle. When you arm it, the same ladder becomes your order-entry surface: click a row to place an order, click a chip to cancel it, and watch your position and P&L live on the rows.

From the menu bar: Add Panel → Order Flow → DOM V2 (Multi-lane depth ladder), or press Ctrl+Alt+D. The first press opens your primary DOM, which follows the terminal's active symbol.

Every press after that adds a new, independent ladder pinned to whatever symbol is active at the moment you add it — it does not follow later symbol switches. Each extra ladder is titled DOM · SYMBOL, runs its own live depth subscription, and releases it when you close the panel. So to stack ladders across instruments: switch to the symbol you want, press Ctrl+Alt+D, repeat.

There is also a ready-made wall: Presets → Order Flow → Multi-DOM lays out four live ladders side by side (ES · NQ · QQQ · SPY), each on its own symbol.

The eye anchors at the center and works outward. Prices run down a fixed tick grid in the middle of the panel; the book scrolls through the grid rather than reflowing it.

The footer keeps the session score: cumulative bid and ask totals with the percentage split.

Around the trade core, the analytics gutters run continuously — there is nothing to switch on:

• Pull/stack & delta meter — a seven-stripe cluster whose midline pins to the touch and tracks it as the market drifts. One stripe is the live bid/ask depth imbalance; three are pull/stack momentum measured at three book depths (size being added to the book pushes a stripe up, size being yanked pulls it down); three are signed tape delta over the last 50 / 200 / 1,000 trades. A glance tells you whether liquidity is stacking or pulling, and whether the tape agrees.
• Delta history — a per-price column of fading net-delta blocks next to the spine: blue for net buying, red for net selling, brightness decaying with recency, saturation scaling against the visible window. Recent bursts of one-sided business stay visible at the prices where they happened.
• Session cumulative delta — the left gutter keeps the session-long buy-minus-sell tally, so the intraday flow always has its session context.
• Reconstructed tape — the right-edge column leaves a decaying trail of executed prints per price level. The trail ages in trades elapsed, not seconds — a fast tape leaves a short bright trail, a quiet one a long persistent trail. Print intensity is size-tiered against the running typical trade size: routine prints stay dim, outsized prints render at full brightness. Levels that keep absorbing volume escalate to a saturated churn color and persist longer — the absorption read.

The ladder has two centering modes, shown on a chip in the header:

To get back: double-click anywhere on the ladder to recenter on the inside market and re-engage FOLLOW, or click the LOCK chip — releasing it recenters immediately. Wheel scrolling moves the window about three ticks per notch.

The trading layer is gated behind one explicit switch. The header carries a row of chips:

While ARMED, the ladder is one-click — no confirmation dialog:

• Click anywhere on the bid side of the spine (depth bar or footprint cell) → buy limit at that row's price.
• Click the ask side → sell limit at that row's price.
• The price spine itself is a dead zone — clicking a price never trades.
• The BUY / SELL buttons send market orders at the chip quantity; FLATTEN closes the symbol's position; CANCEL pulls every working order on the symbol. All of them respect the same ARM gate.

A trade click on a SAFE ladder never trades — it flashes a hint telling you to click the SAFE chip to arm. Each placed order also stamps a brief fading tag on its row, on the side you clicked, so you get immediate visual confirmation without looking away from the book.

Resting orders live on the ladder, not in a separate list:

• Each working order draws a chip on its price row — B 2 ✕ / S 2 ✕ for entries, TP 2 ✕ / SL 2 ✕ for bracket legs. Buy chips sit on the bid edge, sell chips on the ask edge.
• The whole chip is the cancel target. One click cancels that order — sized so a misclick near your order cancels instead of double-filling. Cancelling works even when the ladder is SAFE, because cancelling only ever reduces risk.
• An open position draws an average-price rail — a horizontal line across the trade core at your average fill (blue when long, red when short) — with a live chip reading quantity, average price, and unrealized P&L in points, colored by sign.

The same working orders and position are mirrored as order lines on the chart, so the ladder and the chart never disagree about where your risk is. Every fill also lands in the Trade Journal automatically.

Three more header chips attach a bracket to every entry the ladder sends:

• TP and SL hold the take-profit and stop offsets in ticks. Click a chip to cycle the presets (off → 2 → 4 → 8 → 12 → 16 ticks); wheel over it to fine-step up to 32. Off means no leg.
• The template chip (BRKT) opens a menu of named templates: No bracket (raw order), 1 lot · TP 4t / SL 8t, scalp templates at 2/4/8/12 ticks with matched stops, and two two-target groups — 2 targets · break-even stop and 2 targets · common stop, where the second target sits at twice the first's offset. Picking a template sets the TP/SL chips (and the quantity, when the template implies one); the chips stay live for fine-tuning, and hand-tuning flips the template label to CUSTOM.
• Bracket legs arrive as their own TP / SL chips on the ladder rows and cancel like any other working order.

Right-click any ladder row and pick Alert at <price> to arm a price alert at that level. The direction is inferred from where the row sits relative to the market, and the alert lands in the terminal's Alerts panel (opening it for you if it isn't already up). Alerts are a read, not a trade — they work on every column and ignore the ARM gate entirely. The same right-click works on the chart.

I built the gate this way on purpose: one-click speed matters when you scalp, but speed without an explicit arm step is how fat-finger stories start. Arming is one click when you want it hot — and the ladder is never hot because you forgot it was.

• Connect Your Broker — getting live depth into the ladder and the trading safety model.
• Trade Journal — every ladder fill is journaled into round-trip trades automatically.
• Workspaces & Presets — saving multi-ladder layouts like the Multi-DOM wall.