BackLabPlatform
Everything you need to trade futures, in one window.
BackLab combines order-flow charts, the order book, order entry and a trade journal for twelve CME futures. Here’s what each part does.
Markets
Twelve futures, from the Nasdaq to crude.
Trade Micro and E-mini contracts on the Nasdaq-100, S&P 500, Dow and Russell 2000, plus gold and crude oil. BackLab knows each contract’s tick size, dollar value and session, and rolls to the front month for you.
- Each market keeps its own drawings, alerts and stored history
- A watchlist with last price, change, session volume and an intraday line for every market
- Position sizes and profit and loss use each contract’s real point value
- MNQ
- NQ
- MES
- ES
- MYM
- YM
- M2K
- RTY
- MGC
- GC
- MCL
- CL
Indicators and overlays
20 indicators and 8 order-flow overlays.
Turn on what you use from the Indicators tab and change any length, source, colour or line style. Oscillators open in their own pane under the chart, and every value is readable in the data window.
- VWAP anchored to the session, regular hours, the week or the month, with deviation bands
- Key levels: prior day high, low and close, overnight range, opening range, initial balance, weekly and monthly opens
- Volume, session volume and TPO market profiles, Smart Money Concepts, order blocks and higher-timeframe candles
- SMA
- EMA
- WMA
- HMA
- VWMA
- VWAP
- Bollinger Bands
- Keltner Channels
- Donchian Channels
- Supertrend
- Parabolic SAR
- Pivots
- ATR
- RSI
- MACD
- Stochastic
- Stoch RSI
- ADX / DMI
- OBV
- CVD
- Key levels
- Order blocks
- Smart Money Concepts
- Liquidity heatmap
- Higher-timeframe candles
- Volume Profile
- Session Volume Profile
- TPO / Market Profile
Drawing tools and alerts
67 drawing tools, and any of them can alert you.
Lines, channels, Fibonacci and Gann tools, volume profiles you anchor yourself, shapes, text and notes. Put an alert on a drawing and choose what triggers it: price crossing it, entering or leaving a shape, or moving past a level. It can fire once, every time, or only when a bar closes.
- Drawings are saved per market, and can be grouped, hidden and locked
- Alerts are checked on every market in the background, even with the chart on another symbol
- Alerts arrive in the app, in Notification Center, and optionally in your Discord or at a webhook
- TradingView alerts can be sent into BackLab through a personal webhook address
- Trend line
- Ray
- Extended line
- Horizontal line
- Parallel channel
- Regression trend
- Fib retracement
- Trend-based fib extension
- Fib speed fan
- Fib time zone
- Gann box
- Gann fan
- Anchored VWAP
- Anchored volume profile
- Fixed range volume profile
- Rectangle
- Path
- Callout
- Note
- Alert line
Footprints
See who traded at every price.
A footprint splits each candle into its price levels and shows how much traded at the bid and how much at the ask. BackLab reads the side of every print from the quote at that moment, so the split is exact rather than estimated from the candle’s close.
- Bid × ask volume at every price, with the candle’s delta
- Imbalances flagged where one side clearly outweighs the other
- Footprints are saved as they form, so they’re still there after a restart
Liquidity heatmap
Watch the book, not just the price.
The heatmap draws the size resting at each price in the order book, second by second, behind the traded price. Bands that hold show orders that stayed; bands that disappear as price approaches show orders that were pulled.
- Resting bids and asks, shaded by size
- The traded price drawn through the book
- Updates every second from the live depth feed
Orders on the chart
Place and move your bracket where you see price.
Enter from the trade panel or straight from the chart, then drag the take-profit and stop to the levels you want. Your open position, its average price and its profit or loss sit on the chart beside it.
- Drag a take-profit and stop off your entry
- Move or cancel working orders directly on the chart
- One button to flatten every position and cancel every working order
Risk rules
Limits you set once, enforced every trade.
Risk rules run inside the app’s engine, not in the chart window, so a click can’t get around them. Set them per account or for all accounts at once.
- Daily and weekly loss limits, and a maximum loss per trade
- Caps on contracts and open positions
- When a limit trips, BackLab flattens the account and locks new trades until the next session
- Orders go to your demo account until you switch live trading on
Journal and calendar
Every trade recorded, without typing a thing.
BackLab builds your journal from Tradovate’s own fills: entry, exit, size, profit or loss, how far the trade went against you and in your favour, and which session it was taken in. The calendar shows each day’s result next to the week’s economic releases.
- Trades matched from your broker fills, with commissions and fees by day
- Worst and best excursion for each trade, read from the recorded prices
- Economic events for the week, so you can see what moved the market
- Optional trade cards posted to your own Discord as each trade closes
Data vault
Your market history, stored on your Mac.
BackLab keeps the bars and ticks it receives in a local vault and fills in older history in the background. Switching symbol or timeframe paints from the vault straight away, and your charts still open when you’re signed out.
- Minute bars and tick-by-tick trades, saved as they arrive
- History filled in quietly, without slowing the live feed
- A trade journal that fills itself from your Tradovate fills
Try it on your demo account.
- Sign in with Google
It puts you on the list that hears about new builds.
- Download and open BackLab
Drag it into Applications and open it. It updates itself.
- Connect Tradovate
Sign in to your demo account inside the app.