FORGEMBO: the order book, order by order
The DOM tells you how much is at each price. MBO tells you who is in the queue.
The classic DOM shows, at each price, the total number of contracts waiting to buy or sell. It is useful, but it is a sum: 300 contracts can be a single 300-lot order or three hundred one-lots.
What MBO changes
Market by order splits that sum into the orders that make it up, in the order they arrived. In Forge each price appears as a queue of chips: one chip per order, with its size, from the first to be filled to the last.
- New orders arrive at the back of the queue.
- Orders get canceled anywhere in it: the chip vanishes without any trade.
- Every trade eats the first one in the best queue. When the queue empties, price moves on.
What you can read there that the DOM hides
- One big order versus many small ones. A level held by one order is not the same as one held by fifty.
- Liquidity that disappears before price gets there. On the DOM you only see the total drop; on MBO you see which order left and when.
- Orders that refill. A level that shows size again every time it gets hit gives away someone who is not showing everything they have.
The animation on our home page shows exactly this: every price with its queue, orders arriving, orders being canceled and trades eating the first one.
MBO requires your data feed to send the order-by-order book. The animations on the website use sample data, not market data.