A desk code carries a direction. What it does not carry is any opinion about whether this is a market you personally should have money in this afternoon. That part is still a decision, and the market screen is where you make it.
Here is what is actually on that screen, what each number means, and the one that is most commonly misread.
The daily rate is not a price forecast
Start with the misreading, because it is the expensive one.
Each market publishes a daily rate. That rate is what a stake on this market earns across a full trading day, split across the three sessions. It is a property of the market as the platform prices it, not a prediction that the asset will move by that much.
People see a high rate and read it as "this asset is about to go up". It is not that. A rate is the rate. Reading it as a forecast leads to the mistake of chasing the highest number on the board, which is exactly the behaviour that turns a system into a lottery ticket.
The trade ticket also shows what this session pays, which is a third of the daily rate. Look at that number, because it is the one your trade will actually settle at.
Price freshness
Every market carries a price captured from its venue — crypto from the exchange feed, listed companies from the market data provider. The platform syncs these continuously, and a stake can only be struck against a price that is current.
If a market's price has gone stale, the market is not tradable and the ticket will say so rather than executing you at a number nobody is quoting any more. This is a protection, not a fault. A trade struck at a stale price is a trade struck at the wrong price, and which direction that error runs in is pure chance.
The minimum, and what it implies
Each market carries a minimum stake. It exists because a rate applied to a very small number rounds to nothing, and a trade that settles flat is a session spent for no reason.
Use the minimum as a floor, not a target. If the minimum on a market is a meaningful fraction of your balance, that market is too large for your account right now. There will be others.
The twenty-four hour range
The high and low over the last day are the cheapest volatility read available to you. A market whose range is wide has been moving; a market whose range is narrow has not.
This does not tell you what happens next. It tells you what kind of market you are in, which is a different and more useful question. Someone new to this is generally better served by a quieter market, because the habits are easier to build when the screen is not doing something dramatic while you are trying to think.
The desks holding it
The last thing on the screen is who is in this market right now. Every desk currently holding a coded position on it is listed.
Two desks in a market is more informative than one. It is not a guarantee of anything — desks can be wrong together, and often are — but a market that several independent desks have taken a position in is at least a market that several people have looked at today.
A short checklist
Before you paste a code:
- Is this session's rate worth the stake I am about to make? Not the daily rate. This session's.
- Is the market currently tradable? If the ticket refuses it, that is the answer.
- Is the minimum comfortable, or is it a stretch? A stretch is a no.
- Do I understand what this asset is? If the answer is no, the fact that a desk is in it does not fix that.
None of this takes more than a minute, and the minute is the point. The trade itself lasts sixty seconds and requires nothing from you. The decision in front of it is where all of your actual work happens.
