Getting acquainted with ATAS platform. Review of functionality

Getting acquainted with ATAS. Review of the platform functionality

Any exchange is a battlefield between robots and human beings where everyone is for himself. It is crucial to have a competitive advantage under such circumstances. That was the reason why we developed the ATAS (Advanced Time And Sales) platform. Originally, we developed it for ourselves. Later, when we made certain of its usefulness, we opened it up for all.

You are reading this text now, which means you look for a way to benefit from price movements on the exchanges. Well, our ATAS platform will help you in it. Although ATAS is not a magic wand with a Profit button, it is capable of becoming a reliable and essential tool for professional trading.

Start to use ATAS absolutely free of charge! The first two weeks of use of the platform give access to its full functionality with 7-day history limit.

To try ATAS free of charge

Introduction

Getting acquainted with ATAS is a series of 3 articles. They will be useful for those who are interested in analysing exchange volumes but haven’t tried the ATAS platform yet.

Every article of the series consists of 2 parts:

  1. video review;
  2. text description with screenshots and links to valuable practical materials on volume analysis.

Subject of the first article – Platform review

We will show you in this article:

  • what the ATAS platform is capable of doing,
  • how to start working with the platform,
  • how to get an advantage for exchange battles with the help of ATAS.

Part 1. Video review

Vladislav Shevchenko, a professional trader, demonstrates a powerful arsenal of the ATAS functionality.

Part 2. Text description

Information in the text part of the article correlates with the video content. You can:

  • use the text part to master the platform functionality better,
  • or go to the next article with a video – ‘Getting acquainted with ATAS. Working with charts’.

Content of the text part:

  • How to download the ATAS platform.
  • Main window of the platform.
  • Connecting quotations.
  • Platform modules: Smart DOM, Smart Tape and others.
  • Functions for working with charts.
  • Brief review of indicators.

There is a form for comments below the article. If you have questions, we will be glad to answer them.

We wish you useful reading!

How to download the platform

You can do it in 3 easy steps:

  • Go to atas.net.
  • Register, specifying your real email address.
  • After you have registered, go to the Personal Area. The Download section has a link for downloading the setup file.
How to download the platform

The platform will work without limitations for 14 days after installation. After that, you can either buy the license or trade cryptocurrencies (it is free).

The ATAS platform works in the Windows environment only. You need the Parallels emulator in order to install ATAS on Mac. You will find more details in our video – Installing ATAS on Mac.

Useful links:

  • ATAS YouTube channel. Webinars with professional traders and video reviews of the ATAS platform.
  • ATAS blog. Useful articles on trading and volume analysis.
  • Knowledge Base. All links are available in the description to this video. The Knowledge Base includes instructions on indicators, modules, trading account connections, quotations and other platform elements.
  • Our page on Facebook.

Main window of the ATAS platform

You launch the platform and the Main window opens. This is the place, from which all modules and platform elements are controlled.

There are three tabs in the main window (marked with number 1 in the picture below):

  • Home (the most necessary functions);
  • Settings (settings of working spaces, hot keys, color themes, interface languages and exchange parameters).
  • Help.

The Home tab includes:

(2) – buttons, which call the ATAS platform modules. Modules open in individual windows. For example, the Chart module or DOM module;
(3) – call button for broker/exchange connection settings;
(4) – space for organisation of the trader’s journal (log) and viewing of the account, trade and position data. Control the processes.

(5) – you can check the server and quotation connection status in the bottom left corner of the main window. If the status line is green, everything is fine.

Quotation connections

ATAS connects to its own servers for loading historical data.

In order to get real time data, connections to exchanges / brokers are required. By default, the platform receives online quotations only for cryptocurrency exchanges.

  • Russian market: the most popular connections are QUIK and Transaq. The MT5 platform connector has appeared recently.
  • Western markets: a popular connection is Gain Futures. Quotations will be received during 14 days in the demo mode. There are limitations on the order book depth and the number of simultaneously opened instruments.

Let’s see how quotations are connected to the ATAS platform using the Gain Futures example:

Quotation connections
  • Go to the instruction and click the link (1), which opens the demo account registration.
  • Fill in all fields in the registration form on the Gain web-site and send it.
  • After that you receive an email message with login and password.
  • Then you come back to ATAS and call the connection manager (2) where you find a list of all available connections to exchanges and quotation providers.
  • Press Add (3) and select Gain Futures (4).
  • Insert the login and password, which you received from Gain by email.
  • Press Ready and the connection appears in the list.
  • Press Connect and the connection name should turn green.

Advice

If you have connected quotations, you can use the Smart DOM, Smart Tape, Chart and other modules, which we will consider later, to the full extent.

The Smart DOM module

DOM (Depth Of Market) is a module for working with the order book.

Here you will see limit buy (1) and sell (2) orders.

The Smart DOM module

We called the order book ‘smart’ for a good reason since it is capable of:

  • showing profiles (3),
  • showing open trades and orders on your account,
  • tracking executed trades on the exchange (4),
  • saving and loading various templates.

An important specific feature of the Smart DOM is a possibility of executing trades.

You can post orders by clicking Bid and Ask columns. If you need to cancel an order, press the cross button at the bottom. You can also open trades with market orders pressing MKT at the bottom of the columns.

For trader convenience:

  • there are options of account selection, trade volume selection and the protective strategy function in the upper panel;
  • there are buttons for reversing or closing all positions in the lower panel.

Useful links:

Hello

Smart Tape is the advanced Time & Sales. It provides data about just executed trades in the common column format: Time, Price, Volume…

Unlike other analogues, the ATAS platform Smart Tape module provides the trade flow data in a form, convenient for analysing, because it groups orders of the same type (aggregation algorithm). In the result, the tape moves smoother and it is easier to monitor it.

Red font colour means market sells, while the green one – buys. Non-spread trades are blue.

The +/- column shows the number of Up/Down ticks, which come in sequence. For example, there was the price of 100. Then goes a trade at 101 – this is an UpTick and we will see ‘+’. Then goes another trade at 101 and ‘+’ stays in place. If the next trade is at 102, we will see ‘++’. If the next trade is at 101, we will see ‘-’.

Other functions:

  • the tape freeze button allows stopping the tape and attentively analyse the section of interest;
  • filters are required for filtering out the market noise;
  • tape speed and buy and sell strength indicators;
  • flexible set-up of colours and templates.

Useful links:

Bid/Ask Tape and All Prices modules

The Bid/Ask Tape or Spread Tape module (marked with number 1) shows buys and sells in the spread. Which means that buy trades are accumulated in a trade while the spread is not changing.

This type of information display is useful due to the fact that it helps to identify the balance between buyers and sellers more clearly and find out on which side the initiative is.

The All Prices module accumulates statistical information on each price level – how many trades there were at the level, what their total volume is, Delta, etc. Information could be filtered out by date and sorted out descending/ascending.

Useful links:

The News and Alerts modules

The News module loads new articles from our blog and you can also load RSS feeds from other news web-sites and track the news feed directly from this module.

The News and Alerts modules

The Alerts module enables you to work with sound alerts and set their transmission to Telegram or your email address.

Useful links:

Now, we will consider the Chart module.

The Chart module

It is the basic module and there is a lot of information about it. We split it into 3 subsections:

  • Menu review.
  • Cluster charts.
  • Chart Trader.

Review of the Chart module menu

Time is shown horizontally and price – vertically. Both scales could be expanded / contracted by the mouse for comfortable viewing. If you expand the time scale horizontally, clusters will appear at some point instead of candles and an additional menu will appear to the left for managing cluster modes.

By default, the profile is added to the chart in the left part and market depth indicator – in the right one.

There are buttons in the upper menu, which provide the following functions:

  1. Setting up a frame (including arbitrary and unique).
  2. Setting up the chart type.
  3. Activating drawing objects (lines, profiles and titles).
  4. Adding / setting up indicators (classical and advanced – more than 100 in total).
  5. Connecting automatic chart strategies (your developed trading strategies for algo-trading will be available here).
  6. Templates for charts. They could be kept in the template list or saved in a separate file on the hard drive.
  7. We will consider the Chart Trader for executing trades and account selection a bit later.
  8. Setting up the chart scale.
  9. Smart Tape quick opening with a possibility to view trades on the historical data with the help of linking.
  10. Making chart screenshots. After you press it, a new page with a ready link to the screenshot will be opened in the browser.
  11. The button of chart cloning and attaching the chart to working layers. We will speak about it in detail in our next article with the chart review.

You can also get into chart settings (12) from the upper menu. There are 4 tabs here for:

  • visual settings (changing background, text, candle and line colour);
  • cluster settings (cluster background colour, cluster text size and a lot of other parameters – we will speak about it in our third article);
  • trading parameter settings, where you can change colours of trade markers, positions and other visualizations;
  • template settings, which we already mentioned.

Advice: you can use the context menu for convenience. It contains basic functions. In order to call it, mouseover the chart and click the right mouse button.

Useful links:

Cluster charts

There are 2 ways to switch to the mode of cluster charts (Footprint):

  1. expand the horizontal time axis by the mouse;
  2. select in the upper menu > Mode > Clusters.

Let’s consider the additional menu to the left for managing clusters.

Clusters are calculated and displayed in 5 modes in ATAS.

  1. By Volume.
  2. By the number of executed Trades without reference to the trade volume. For example, the volume of 1 trade could be 15 contracts or 5 contracts or 1 contract, but it will be one trade in any case.
  3. By Time. Numbers reflect the number of seconds the price spent in each cell.
  4. The Bid x Ask mode shows buy and sell trades separately. ATAS has a special built-in algorithm, which splits trades from the exchange into buys and sells and highlights them correspondingly. Aggressive sell trades are shown red to the left and aggressive buy trades are shown green to the right. Aggressive trades are matched with passive limit orders, which means that you can see at the same moment how many limit buy orders were executed – in red colour, and limit sell orders – in green colour to the right.
  5. By Delta. The Delta shows predominance between aggressive buys and sells and immediately highlights it with proper colour. If there were more aggressive buyers than market sellers at this price in this candle, you will see a cell, marked with a proper colour, and a number of contracts, which corresponds to this predominance.

There are several types of cluster charts in each menu item. Select the one, which would be the most informative for your approach.

Useful links:

Indicators

There are 3 ways to call the indicator manager:

  • Press the hot key combination Ctrl+I.
  • Use the upper menu panel.
  • Call the context menu by clicking the right mouse button and select Indicators there.

Indicator manager consists of 3 areas:

  1. A list of available indicators (there are about 100 of them and their number increases). In order to add an indicator to the chart, select it in the list of available indicators (1) and press the Add button.
  2. The list of indicators, added to the chart.
  3. Settings of the selected indicator (the picture shows settings of the Cluster Search indicator). If you change the setting of an indicator, which has already been added to the chart, ATAS will apply them automatically straight away.

If you select one indicator in the left section of the manager, its current settings will appear in the right section. There are links to each indicator description under the settings. If you want to read a detailed description, click and read the description in the Knowledge Base.

All available indicators are split into several groups:

  • The first group is Bid x Ask, Delta, Volume. You will find the Vertical Volume, Delta and Cumulative Delta (it shows the dynamic change of the buyer or seller predominance) indicators here.
  • The next section is Clusters, Profiles, Levels. Here you can find the most powerful indicator for working with clusters – Cluster Search. We will speak about it in more detail in our next article. There is the Volume Profile indicator and its derivative indicators of Dynamic Levels and Maximum Levels and also Cluster Statistic.
  • The Order Flow group. It includes the Big Trades indicator, which detects big trades in the Smart Tape and shows them directly in the chart. You can view aggregate or individual trades. The Dom Levels indicator reflects the Smart DOM levels directly in the chart. Market Power, Speed Of Tape, Tape Patterns and OrderFlow Indicators are the Smart Tape derivative tools and they are required for working with the order flow. The Speed Of Tape indicator deserves special attention – it is a very interesting tool.
  • Other. It includes Depth Of Market and External Chart, which displays candles of the selected period in the chart over the regular ones. Then go tailor-made user indicators: RTIndicator and HRanges. You can set session colours and separate sessions from each other using different colours.
  • One more big group of indicators is Technical indicators. It includes many well-known classical indicators: RSI, MACD, CCI, etc. It also includes the Margin Zones indicator. The Open Interest indicator (for the Moscow Exchange futures) shows entries and exits of traders in real time. All these indicators could be combined with the volume analysis indicators.

Scalping DOM deserves special mention. This trading drive, similarly to many other software developments, helps to implement scalping strategies in various markets. 

Useful links:

Chart Trader

Chart Trader is a trading panel. There are 2 ways to activate it:

  • click the respective button in the upper menu;
  • press the key combination: Ctrl+T.

The vertical Chart Trader panel will appear to the right from the chart:

  1. There is a set of control buttons in the upper part of the panel. The button titles make it clear which trading operations they are responsible for. You can assign keyboard hot keys to buttons. The current state of open positions is displayed below the order control buttons.
  2. The order working volume.
  3. The order expiration date.
  4. OCO orders allow creating a combination of 2 pending orders – for example, buy and sell orders. If the price gets to one of these orders, the other is automatically cancelled.
  5. Selection of a brokerage account.
  6. Protective strategies are required for automatic stop loss and take profit posting. You can set up trailing for a protective stop loss to move automatically through the set price scale, allowing the profit to grow.

You can also turn on trading from the chart in one click by activating this function with this button (7).

You can also post orders:

  • from the context menu, which opens after you mouseover the chart and click the right mouse button;
  • using hot keys.

ATAS allows setting up the trading process as it is best suited for you. Find a quick and safe way, which would be most comfortable namely for you.

Useful links:

The Statistics module

Let’s come back to the interface of the ATAS platform Main Window in order to consider the important Statistics module.

It allows users to analyse results of their trading both in real time (1) and for a certain period of history and for a certain account / instrument.

Here (2) you can view a number of executed trades and efficiency factors – profit factor, average loss and average profit, drawdown data and others.

There are tabs in the module where you can view the trade journal (3), equity change chart (4), information about orders (5) and their execution (6). Additionally, there are data on accounts and open positions. Logs are the registered ATAS platform actions, which are required for monitoring the platform operation.

All these reporting data are collected and intuitively organised in one place, so that a trader could use them with convenience.

The Settings tab

In conclusion, we will consider the rest of the menu items of the platform main window.

The Settings tab

You can use the Settings tab for setting up:

  1. Workspaces, which you create while using the platform and save them before you close the platform.
  2. Layouts. You can add the platform charts and modules to these layouts and switch between the layouts for a quick load of the selected windows. It is a useful function for those who have a small number of monitors and lack the working space.
  3. Colour theme. You can choose the light or dark theme.
  4. Interface language. There are 3 languages available at the moment: Russian, English and German.

Then (the block is marked with number 5) there are sound and hot key settings. You can change the Time Zone for showing time in the charts and other platform tools. The Commissions button allows you to set commission values for all instruments or for each individual instrument. It is useful for accurate registration of your actual results.

Common Settings allow you to change the Value Area percentage and remove a limitation of the displayed Smart DOM levels, setting the ‘0’ value. You can also clear cache, accumulated in the platform, from here.

The Help tab (marked with number 6 in the picture) contains information about your license and validity of access to what markets and until what date. You can go to the Knowledge Base and our web-site platform update page from here.

Results of the first article of the ‘Getting acquainted with ATAS’ series

You have just made your first steps in mastering the ATAS platform.

We accept that you have a feeling of something big and still unclear. It is absolutely natural, since we’ve made just a brief review of the rather complicated software in our first article of the ‘Getting acquainted with ATAS’ series.

Move step by step and use the ‘Getting acquainted with ATAS’ articles as a guide. If your experience of studying the financial markets is not more than 1 year, you will definitely learn a lot of new things studying the materials, which you find using the useful links.

We will give more specific descriptions and instructions in our next articles. And we hope that your questions will exhaust and the ‘puzzle will complete’ after you read them.

What to do next?

Information in this article cannot be perceived as a call for investing or buying/selling of any asset on the exchange. All situations, discussed in the article, are provided with the purpose of getting acquainted with the functionality and advantages of the ATAS platform.

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