What Is the DOM in Futures Trading?

The DOM, short for depth of market, is the price ladder futures traders use to place and manage orders: a vertical scale of prices with the quantity of resting buy orders alongside one side and the quantity of resting sell orders alongside the other. It is a window onto the order book, which the CFTC's glossary describes as a market structure that matches bids and offers on the basis of their price, the time they reached the market, or both.

What makes the DOM worth understanding is what it leaves out. Some size on it is hidden by design, some has been placed with no intention of ever trading — which is illegal, and has been prosecuted — and where an account carries no depth entitlement the ladder draws one row a side, because that is all the feed sends.

What is the DOM in futures trading?

The DOM is a ladder panel listing prices in one column and resting order quantity beside them, with your own working orders drawn at the price they sit at. Sierra Chart calls the version down the right edge of a chart the Chart DOM, documented as a price-ladder order entry interface; Quantower's equivalent is its Market Depth panel, documented as single-click order entry with a liquidity display attached.

The underlying object is the order book. The CFTC's glossary defines an order book as a market structure, electronic or otherwise, in which bids and offers are matched according to price and/or the time they arrived — the and/or matters, because it means arrival time is one basis for priority rather than a guaranteed one. A closely related glossary entry, Central Limit Order Book, describes a single book covering an entire market and accepting limit orders, and says the term is generally synonymous with order book.

The rungs themselves are simple. A bid, per the CFTC, is an offer to buy a stated quantity at a stated price; an offer signals willingness to sell at a price, and the Commission adds that an offer's price level may be called the ask. Stack those by price and you have the ladder. Whether any two of them become a trade is settled by the exchange's matching algorithm, which the CFTC defines as the rules — in software, electronically — governing when and if bids and offers match.

What is the difference between Level 1 and Level 2 market data on a DOM?

Level 1 is the top of the book, the best bid and the best ask, and Level 2 is the depth at prices behind them, which is what fills the rest of a DOM ladder with numbers. Neither label is the regulator's: the CFTC's glossary has no entry for Level 1, Level 2, market depth or depth of market. Quantower's Market Depth documentation uses both labels without defining either. The definition above is the one on our own platform and data pages, which describe the Level 1 included here as the best bid and best ask at the top of the book.

The distinction is commercial as much as technical. Sierra Chart's chart trading documentation states that a CME futures symbol shows more than one level of depth only if the subscription has the CME depth-providing exchanges enabled, and that CME bills depth data as an extra, so an account may not carry it at all. That is what the page says as of 16 September 2026; entitlements and their prices change.

Row count is a platform setting too: Sierra Chart documents a setting under Chart Settings, Maximum Market Depth Levels, capping the depth rows drawn on the Chart DOM and in its bid-size and ask-size columns. A short ladder can mean a thin feed, a deliberate cap, or both.

What do the columns on a DOM actually show?

DOM columns do not all read from the same thing. Some describe orders resting in the book, some describe trades that have already executed, and the rest belong to your own account — Quantower's DOM Trader documentation lists eighteen selectable columns, Buy, Sell, Profit & Loss and Comments among them, which shows how far a modern ladder has drifted from a plain bid-and-ask display.

The book-derived columns are the ones describing resting orders. Quantower documents its Bids column as the quantity of current buy orders at a given price and its Asks column as the quantity of current sell orders there, with Cumulative Size summing limit volume down the levels as a histogram and Imbalance expressing, as a percentage, how far one side exceeds the other at each price. Two further columns measure change rather than level: Number of changes counts how many times values have moved at a price since the panel opened, and Cumulative changes totals the volume that has changed there. Its Liquidity changes column, which the page also calls Pulling and Stacking, reads stacking as book volume rising on a side and pulling as book volume falling.

The trade-derived columns read completed transactions instead. ATAS documents its Smart DOM as bringing order book volume together with the stream of executed market trades in one window, and names Trades, Depth changes, Liquidity map and Footprint as analytical columns; its Built-in Volume Profile feature puts the volume already executed at each price against the ladder and flags the point of control. Trades that happened and orders that have not are separate kinds of evidence, and that panel shows both at once.

What does a futures DOM not show you?

A futures DOM does not show every order resting in the book, and nothing on it commits anyone to trading. The CFTC's glossary defines a hidden quantity order — also called an iceberg, or max show — as an order on an electronic trading system where only part of the quantity is visible to other participants, with more becoming visible as the displayed portion fills. Size can therefore be present at a price and absent from your screen.

The opposite failure also exists, and it is a federal offence. Section 6c(a)(5) of Title 7 of the U.S. Code, added by the Dodd-Frank Act, makes three kinds of conduct unlawful for anyone trading at a registered entity or under its rules: violating bids or offers, showing intentional or reckless disregard for orderly execution in the closing period, and spoofing. A parenthetical in the statute supplies the definition of the third: placing a bid or an offer that you mean to pull before it can execute. The CFTC's glossary entry for Disruptive Trading Practice sets out the same three categories.

The prohibition is enforced, and displayed depth is what one enforcement action turned on. Release 8104-19, dated 13 January 2020, records a settled CFTC action against Mirae Asset Daewoo Co., Ltd. over spoofing in CME's E-mini S&P 500 futures between December 2014 and April 2016, by a trader in the Seoul office of Daewoo Securities. The Commission found the orders were entered to be cancelled before execution, and that part of their purpose was a misleading impression of how much depth stood there. The penalty was $700,000, reduced for cooperation, with a cease and desist.

Does order book imbalance predict where price goes?

Two papers are worth putting next to the question, one on equities and one on the E-mini, and both measure the effect over short intervals rather than over a session. Neither establishes that reading a ladder by eye is profitable, and neither is a trading rule.

Cont, Kukanov and Stoikov, in the Journal of Financial Econometrics (2014, volume 12, issue 1, pages 47–88), studied limit orders, market orders and cancellations across 50 US stocks using NYSE TAQ data. They report that over short intervals order flow imbalance drives most of the price change, that the relation is linear, and that its slope falls as depth rises — the same imbalance moves price less in a deep book. Price change against trade volume came out noisier and less robust. Two qualifiers matter: it is an equities study and says nothing directly about futures, and the imbalance is measured at the best bid and ask alone, not down the ladder.

Work on the E-mini itself exists on a weaker warrant. Makoto Takahashi's Returns and Order Flow Imbalances: Intraday Dynamics and Macroeconomic News Effects, posted to arXiv in August 2025 and revised to a fourth version that October, fits a structural VAR to S&P 500 E-mini futures at one-second frequency within each fifteen-minute block. Pooled across days, its price-impact and flow-impact estimates are both statistically significant one second out, a shock is essentially spent inside that second, and macroeconomic announcements reshape the picture sharply: price impact up, flow impact down. It is a preprint rather than a peer-reviewed paper, so treat the figures as provisional.

How do you work an order on the DOM ladder?

You place, move and cancel orders by clicking the ladder itself, which is the whole point of the panel. Quantower documents the sequence for its Market Depth panel as choosing an account and time-in-force, entering a quantity, and then clicking the bid, the ask or the market button. Sierra Chart documents the management side: a working order is drawn as a line at its own price — a limit at the limit price, a stop at the stop price — carrying a clickable X to cancel it and a button for its quantity.

Repricing is a drag. Sierra Chart's documentation describes left-clicking an order line and dragging it to a new price, offers a menu when several orders share a level along with a cancel-all choice for that level, and notes that a Trading DOM window runs its price scale in one-tick increments, which makes hitting the price you want easier. One detail matters more than it looks: if a modification does not complete, say because you drag a line and put it back before releasing, nothing about the order has changed, and its place in the queue at the trading service is where it was.

That is why ladder trading and the choice between a limit and a market order are one subject. A limit order, in the CFTC's definition, is one where the customer sets a minimum sale price or a maximum purchase price, and Sierra Chart can display an estimate of where it sits in the queue, counting down as it nears a fill. A market order carries no price term at all: the glossary's Market Order entry has it filled at whatever price can be got at the moment it reaches the book. The panel reduces both to one click, which is convenient and is where the difference stops being noticed.

What does the DOM mean on a funded futures account?

On a funded account the first thing to check is the feed, because a DOM with no depth entitlement behind it is a ladder showing one row a side. Lumen accounts include Level 1 data for CME, CBOT, COMEX and NYMEX, which is the best bid and best ask; depth beyond that is not supplied, so a platform package bought for its full book tools has no depth here to draw them from.

The second is where your protective orders actually live. On R|Trader Pro, brackets, trailing stops and OCO orders are held server side at Rithmic; ATAS simulates OCO orders locally on your own machine, which means a closed platform or a dropped connection can leave one leg still working after the other fills. That is a difference a simulator never shows you.

The third is size. A DOM turns adding a contract into one click, and on an evaluation or a funded simulated account the limit on that click lives in the rules rather than in the platform: the contract limits attached to your account size. Working out how many contracts a stop distance actually allows is arithmetic to do before the ladder is in front of you, not while it is moving. Funded accounts here are simulated, with a real payout on the profits, and most people who attempt this do not succeed.

FAQ

Is the DOM the same thing as Level 2?

Not quite. Level 2 is market data, the depth at prices behind the best bid and offer, and the DOM is the panel that displays it. Quantower's Market Depth documentation uses both labels in one place, naming a header pane Level 1 market data and applying its ladder colouring rules to what it calls Level 2 quotes, though it defines neither term and the CFTC's glossary has no entry for either. A DOM panel with no depth entitlement behind it still opens; it just has a single row of size on each side.

Is depth of market data included with a futures data feed?

Not necessarily. Sierra Chart's documentation states that CME futures symbols need the CME depth-providing exchanges enabled on the subscription before more than one level appears, and that CME bills depth data as an extra, so an account may not have it at all. As of 16 September 2026 that is what the page says; entitlements change. Lumen accounts include Level 1 data for CME, CBOT, COMEX and NYMEX, which is the best bid and best ask, and depth beyond that is not supplied.

Can the size shown on a DOM be fake?

It can be incomplete by design and it can be dishonest in breach of federal law. The CFTC defines a hidden quantity order as one where only part of the quantity is visible to other participants, so real size may be missing from the display. Separately, 7 U.S.C. 6c(a)(5) prohibits spoofing, which the statute defines as placing a bid or an offer you mean to pull before it executes, and the CFTC has settled at least one such action over E-mini S&P 500 futures, for $700,000 in January 2020.

What is the difference between a DOM and a footprint chart?

A DOM is built from resting orders, and a footprint is built from trades that already executed. ATAS documents its Smart DOM as bringing both into one window, listing a Footprint column and a built-in volume profile that sets executed volume at each price against the ladder and flags the point of control. The distinction matters for data entitlements: our ATAS setup notes record that footprint and cluster charts are built from time and sales rather than from depth of market, so they run on a feed that carries no depth at all.