Bookmap offers these kinds of features depending on the subscription level and which datafeed you’re using. Rithmic seems to be the one they favour.

This helped me snake my choice goin ff with bookmap. I don’t have any experience with jigsaw but have heard it is somewhat not user friendly I am mainly looking for order flow and icebergs to trade ES.

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Hi Dude. I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t totally agree with what you’re saying.

In terms of your point about “sketchy architecture” I’d say that this is definitely a risk with 3rd party front ends. That said, I think that a big part of the issue is the quality of the data that the platform is provided with. It’s really important to choose a high quality feed imo and as you mention it, BookMap supports TT (and I’m sure Jigsaw’s new standalone platform, Rapidtrader Pro, will too at some point).

As for being plugins/addons for bloated software, it’s true that Jigsaw needs a platform to piggyback on and some of its supported platforms are perhaps a little questionable. But this is changing as Jigsaw now have Rapidtrader Pro and BookMap for the the most part, is also standalone (I believe that they have a Ninja add-on, but other than this, it’s a standalone platform). Personally, I am confident that BookMap has a very fast and reliable architecture, but I cannot say for sure about Rapidtrader Pro as I haven’t tested it out.

Remember that you don’t have to execute on these platforms though if you don’t want to. They can be there just to provide you supporting information (if of course the information that they provide you with is helpful to your particular strategies).

Finally, I’d strongly suggest that you take advantage of a free trial for BookMap and actually test it out, side by side with the same data as your primary platform (e.g. TT/X_Trader and TT API). Unfortunately, I don’t believe that Jigsaw currently offer a free trial, but they do offer a 14-day money back guarantee.

Problem with frontends like Jigsaw and Bookmap is their sketchy architecture, which results in random lags, downtime, stuttering prices and so on. Professional frontends are expensive because they have an efficient, streamlined architecture with emphasis on stability.

Retail solutions are more or less plug ins on add ons for bloated software that use an external datafeed provided by the FCM. If you trade 5 ES contracts that might not make a big difference, but if you lose a tick on 100 cars in the ZB due to lagg, you might think twice about going the cheap route.

Especially since those “Pro” frontends become cheaper and cheaper, I don’t think Jigsaw is even an alternative. I mean, if you are trading based on flow, it’s just a different GUI…there is no additional information that you cannot get from a traditional DOM.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your comments. In response: –

1) Value is about more than just price. Value is a relative thing as traders well know. If you’re talking price, Investor/RT’s Trail of Intentions is available to subscribers with a Market Depth Analysis add-on package ($10/month extra) and a level 2 data feed (e.g. by connecting with S5/OEC Trader) and is similar to Jigsaw’s Auction Vista.

2) S5 currently have exclusivity on BookMap using OEC Trader (S5 Trader is a whitelabel of OEC) and that was the platform the review was done on. You can of course go elsewhere if you have a different datafeed, although I believe S5 BookMap will also work with others if you contact BookMap and ask them to set it up. As far as I’m aware, S5 also offers Jigsaw Trading Tools, so people do have the choice.

3) Perhaps the full headline price might seem to be a tad on the high side to some. However, if you think in terms of prop trading where many use a TT X-Trader/CQG-IC combo, potentially costing well in excess of this PER MONTH, not everyone is likely to agree. That said, I believe that competition is a beneficial thing for consumers – it not only drives prices lower, but also encourages innovation. It also benefits the vendors themselves by making their software more mainstream and reaching a larger audience.