(Last Updated On: September 27, 2019)

Level 2 and Time and sales is a tool where goes through all the orders. All the buy and sell orders.

With Level 2 you can send your buy and sell orders out in the market.

Lets look closer what each of these parameters mean.

  • SYMBOL – Stock symbol like TSLA,NFLX,AAPL
  • Last – Last price at the market
  • BID – The bid price is what buyers are willing to pay for it.
  • SHARE SIZE – any share size, must be entered to execute order
  • ORDER TYPE – LIMIT – your chosen price; MARKET – best market price; STOP – stop orders
  • SHRT – SELL your position or Open SHORT position
  • CXL – cancel last order sent
  • BUY – Sends out BUY order or COVER short position
  • PRICE – price for limit orders
  • EXPIRATION – when order is expiring.
  • POSITION – current share size open in market
  • ASK – The ask price represents the minimum price that a seller is willing to receive
  • VOLUME – shares traded over a trading day

Some more info about LV2

  • SPREAD – the price difference between BID and ASK price. In this case best BID price is 242.52 and best ASK price is 243.00. So the spread is 0.48. The bigger the spread is the harder is to trade cause straight away you are risking more to lose. For example if you buy 100 shares at ask price 243.00 and straight away sell it on bid for 242.52 you have lost $48 bucks.
  • Use the MARKET orders if you really need to get out of trade, Usually it fills you on BID or ASK price. Or in case of faster movement, slippage, it can fill you even lower. So it’s best to use LIMIT orders where you can chose the price.
  • Increasing orders on BID – more buyers are stepping in
  • Increasing orders on ASK – more sellers are stepping in

TIME AND SALES 

Or the tape. Here you see all orders what are accepted and are all the BUYs and SELLs in the market.

  • GREEN color is all orders executed on ASK; can be BUY or COVER orders
  • RED color is all orders executed on BID; can be SELL or SHORT orders
  • WHITE color is all orders in between BID and ASK price
  • QTY – quantity in shares

If the tape is going fast and suddenly stops, there might be change in direction

More green prints – more buying. Can be covering too if the stock was falling, might lead to reversal

More red prints – more selling. Or more people going short.

If you need to configure Time and sales so you see exact share size. Right click on T and S, configure and then remove tick from share/100 box.