Order flow tools come up a lot in the indicators board, usually with a lot of hope attached. Seven threads look at what retail forex traders can really see in a DOM, tick volume and tick charts. Read together they're realistic without being dismissive, so here's the combined version.
What the DOM in spot FX actually is
The depth of market thread starts with the key point. Forex has no single order book. The depth you see in MT5 or cTrader is your broker's own liquidity pool or aggregated feed, not the market. A reply found it mostly useless for direction but helpful for seeing how thin things got at certain times. Another reply suggests futures depth if you want a real order book for a currency, while remembering futures are only one slice of total volume.
The order flow thread makes the same point about third-party tools. If a spot FX product claims to show where the banks are positioned, ask what feed it's built on. That question rarely gets a satisfying reply.
What it's good for
Three threads find practical uses, and none of them is predicting direction:
- Price impact. The order size thread shows how to read it: if 3 million is available at the best ask and you send 5 lots, part fills at worse levels. For larger orders, the DOM gives you an idea of slippage before you click.
- Liquidity behaviour. The cTrader first impressions thread, three weeks on EURUSD and gold between 07:00 and 10:30 London, expected to see where size was sitting to lean on it for entries. What it actually gave was a much clearer picture of how liquidity behaves around the open and releases.
- Study material. The DOM screenshots thread captures the book on EURUSD shortly after 08:00 and again around 09:30 on calm days, comparing how quickly top-of-book size refreshes. The sample was still too small for rules, which that thread said plainly.
The tick volume thread explains that most retail platforms count price changes, not currency traded. It tends to correlate with real activity, so it gives hints, but it's broker-specific. A reply in the order flow thread notes tick volume from different brokers can look quite different for the same hour, so it's useful for comparing your own broker across sessions, not as a market-wide number.
Two replies add useful refinements. Compare against the same time of day rather than the last twenty bars, because the first M5 candles after the London open nearly always carry high tick volume, and that tells you nothing special. And for a proxy of real EURUSD activity, CME euro futures volume works, with the caveat that the front contract changes quarterly, so volume migrates from one expiry to the next around roll dates.
Tick charts aren't portable
The tick bars thread explains why a 233-tick chart looks different everywhere. Each broker aggregates from different liquidity providers and filters updates differently. Some send every change, others throttle. During news, one broker might produce three times as many ticks as another. So a tick-chart setup that works on one feed may not translate to another.
Overall
Retail order flow tools are best for execution and context: how thin the book is, how big your order is relative to it, whether activity is unusual for the time of day. The threads agree they're weak for direction.
For those using the DOM on cTrader or MT5, has it changed how you enter, or mostly how you size and time orders?
Threads this pulls from
- Depth of Market in Retail Forex: What You Can and Cannot See
- Order Flow for Retail Traders: What You Can Realistically Use
- Order Size vs Visible Liquidity: Estimating Price Impact From the DOM
- IC Markets cTrader DOM for order flow scalps: first impressions
- IC Markets cTrader DOM screenshots worth studying
- Tick Volume in Forex, What It Really Shows
- Tick Bars Across Brokers: Why a 233-Tick Chart Looks Different Everywhere
