BackLabSimulated order book
Order-flow trading for futures, on macOS
Read the tape, not the chart.
See who traded at every price, where size is resting in the book, and move your orders right on the chart. Twelve futures, from the Micro Nasdaq to gold and crude.
Install BackLab Try it on this page
Orders route to your Tradovate demo account until you switch live trading on yourself.
Twelve futures. One cockpit.
Tick value per contract. Each market keeps its own drawings, alerts and stored history.
- IndexMNQMicro Nasdaq-100$0.50 / tick
- IndexNQE-mini Nasdaq-100$5.00 / tick
- IndexMESMicro S&P 500$1.25 / tick
- IndexESE-mini S&P 500$12.50 / tick
- IndexMYMMicro Dow$0.50 / tick
- IndexYME-mini Dow$5.00 / tick
- IndexM2KMicro Russell 2000$0.50 / tick
- IndexRTYE-mini Russell 2000$5.00 / tick
- MetalsMGCMicro Gold$1.00 / tick
- MetalsGCGold$10.00 / tick
- EnergyMCLMicro Crude Oil$1.00 / tick
- EnergyCLCrude Oil$10.00 / tick
Footprints · scroll to fill one candle
Every trade lands on the side that took it.
One candle, drawn the way BackLab draws it. Each print goes to the buyer or seller who crossed the spread, read from the quote at that moment. Beside it, the book’s resting size over the last minute.
- The book is waiting
Before anyone trades, the candle is an outline. The heatmap already shows the size resting at each price.
- Trades arrive
Each print lands on the bid or the ask, depending on who crossed the spread. Darker cells mean more volume.
- An imbalance, and a bracket
A price where one side outweighs the other is flagged. Drag from the entry to set your take-profit and stop.
Orders on the chart
Know the risk before you click.
Drag the target and the stop. BackLab prices both in dollars for the contract and size you pick, and sends them as real orders when you’re ready.
- Every price snaps to the contract’s own tick
- Move or cancel working orders straight from the chart
- One button flattens every position and cancels every order
Indicators and overlays
Turn on what you trade with.
20 indicators and 8 order-flow overlays, each with its own settings, colours and line styles. Try four of them on this chart.
- VWAP anchored to the session, regular hours, week or month
- Key levels: prior day, overnight, opening range and initial balance
- Volume, session and TPO profiles, Smart Money Concepts and order blocks
Alerts
Alerts on all twelve, all the time.
Put an alert on any line, level or shape. BackLab records every market in the background, so an alert on gold fires while you’re watching the Nasdaq.
- Crossing, entering, leaving, or moving past a level
- Once, every time, or only when a bar closes
- In the app, in Notification Center, in your Discord or at a webhook
Everything in the app
The full kit.
Built around order flow and futures, with the charting, journaling and risk tools a day trader reaches for every session.
Indicators 20
- SMA, EMA, WMA, HMA, VWMA
- VWAP with deviation bands
- Bollinger, Keltner, Donchian
- Supertrend, Parabolic SAR
- Pivots: classic, Fibonacci, Camarilla
- RSI, MACD, Stochastic, Stoch RSI
- ADX / DMI, ATR
- OBV, CVD
Order flow 9
- Bid × ask footprints
- Liquidity heatmap
- Key levels
- Order blocks
- Smart Money Concepts
- Volume Profile
- Session Volume Profile
- TPO / Market Profile
- Higher-timeframe candles
Drawing 67
- Trend lines, rays, channels
- Fibonacci retracement, extension, fans, time zones
- Gann box and fan
- Regression trend
- Anchored VWAP
- Anchored and fixed-range profiles
- Shapes, paths, text and notes
- Alert lines
Charting
- Time, tick and range bars
- Renko
- Split chart on two timeframes
- Saved layouts
- Watchlist for all twelve
- Command palette and shortcuts
- Chart snapshots
- Full visual customisation
Trading
- Tradovate demo and live
- Several logins at once
- Brackets you drag
- Chart right-click orders
- Trailing stop
- Flatten everything
- Front-month roll
Risk
- Daily and weekly loss limits
- Max loss per trade
- Contract and position caps
- Lock and flatten on a breach
- Demo routing by default
- Session break handling
Journal
- Built from broker fills
- Best and worst excursion
- Fees by day
- Calendar of daily results
- Economic events
- Trade cards in Discord
Data
- Bars and ticks stored locally
- History filled in the background
- Charts open when signed out
- TradingView webhook alerts in
- Apple silicon and Intel
Up and running in three steps.
- Sign in with Google
It puts you on the list that hears about new builds. There’s no password to create.
- Download and open BackLab
Open the installer — it puts BackLab in place and opens it. It keeps itself up to date after that.
- Connect your Tradovate demo account
Sign in inside the app. Charts, footprints and orders start on demo.
Install
First, sign in.
Signing in puts you on the list that hears when there’s a new build. There’s no password to create, and your address isn’t shared with anyone.
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Download BackLab
On a Mac, open the downloaded .pkg. The first time, macOS says it can’t verify the developer — click Done, go to System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway, then open the file again. It installs BackLab into Applications and opens it.
On Windows, open BackLab-windows-setup.exe. If you see “Windows protected your PC”, click More info ▸ Run anyway. It installs and opens by itself.
After that BackLab updates itself, so you never download it twice.