I would find it incredibly useful if we had a way to filter out the top and bottom of the order book - only show us the X/Y middle orders currently placed on either side.
For example if there’s 25 OFFER orders and 25 REQUEST orders total, and I elect to show 3 offers / 5 bids, it would only show the 3 lowest priced offers, the price margin, and the 5 highest priced bids. (And please remember those settings on each screen.)
The client never needs to get the data on the extreme ends.
If you really want to go crazy, alternatively let us specify an “order book depth” (or something) for buy/sell orders. This would only show enough of the best buy/sell orders in order to cover a minimum amount of units. So if you only need to show one order to cover the 100 RAT you’re looking to buy, that’s the only one you see.
For an additional bonus when this mode is enabled - show the average price you would be paying or getting if you were to trade that number of units. Call this the “spot market price average” or something.
You describe the implementation, but I don’t really understand why you want this change. What would we gain out of it? All I can think of are situations and edge cases where you would be clicking the “expand” button to see further into the orderbook and how annoying that would be.
(full disclosure, I personally dislike this and think this is a bad idea and\or there are better things to focus on at the moment)
You wouldn’t be clicking anything all the time, because it’d be a setting that sticks, you leave it off if you don’t want it. I should probably clarify if I didn’t state this already–the number of orders you see would be specific to each book. It would be a little annoying otherwise since some order books are much busier than others. (And it would be nice if you could quickly adjust that number up or down with a hover + mouse wheel.)
How often do you care about orders that are nowhere near actual market price? 99% of the time that stuff is noise. This is useful to save screen real estate if you monitor multiple order books on a constant basis in order to get a better sense of the current market price. It matters if the best order is for 1,000 units or 2 units. Obviously the usefulness is subjective depending on how you operate, but that’s the case with most features.
Looking at the reported “prices” anywhere other than order books tells you nothing about market depth. So you go to sell your whatever at the “best” market price and oops, there was only 1 item at that price, the next best offer was 10% lower, and the rest of your order doesn’t sell immediately. You’re not going to know that you need to sell at a better price unless you look into the order book. If you’re an older player maybe you wouldn’t care, but certainly newer players who need currency more urgently care if their order is going to fill immediately.
There is an alternative that might be even more useful - let us do market orders where we don’t specify a price, and instead display the average effective price given some number of units to buy/sell.
I don’t really have much to add. I understand the concept of saving space. Reducing that size makes a difference there. As an older player, but even in the beginning, there are so many different markets one can be involved in, monitoring the books like that quickly becomes overwhelming. My 2c
One interesting concept is called grouping. The markets here aren’t really liquid enough to implement this cleanly, but you summarize up all the orders within a price range. It helps provide a view deep into the orderbook without requiring a ton of space.
Actually I just thought of a fairly simple client-side alternative to this… the problem/annoyance is really that I want to see the middle of the order book. But when your screen first loads, it’s at the top of a long list and you have to scroll EACH of the books down to the middle to see the orders you care about.
If that scroll to the middle of the list could happen automatically when an order book is first loaded, I think that would do.
It would be overkill to do an extension just for this, but would it be possible for a browser extension to do that?
I’d be okay with it auto scrolling to the middle of the order spread, but it’s rarely large enough to benefit from that. Plus I like seeing the names of everyone in the book. If there are regular buyers or sellers, I often reach out to them.
Since this is a pretty specific and niche need, a extension would probably be a good way for you to get this. You can write a tampermonkey script, it’s much more lightweight and easy than a proper browser extension. That’s how people change colors of MATs and add icons to them.
Well it’s dependent on how much space you want to allocate for it, and what markets. Liquid markets always need to be scrolled, I guess I tend to use those more.
Auto scrolling to the middle does seem the best solution, and it could probably be done with an extension, but it’d be silly to have an extension just for that.
