The terminal is the screen a trader spends their day on. It is one page in the browser, no download and no MetaTrader bridge, and it is theirs to arrange: a grid of modules they place, resize and save.
This page is the reference for what is in it. If you want to decide which screens your traders open it on, that is Terminal presets.
The grid
The terminal fills the window. It never scrolls, and it never has a leftover strip at the bottom: the row height is measured from the window, so the same layout on a laptop and on a 32 inch monitor is the same arrangement at a different size.
How fine the grid is, is the trader's choice, from 6 by 3 up to 24 by 12. A coarse grid is easier to arrange and a fine one lets a narrow order ticket sit next to a wide chart. Modules do not float upward into gaps: an empty cell stays empty, because a chart jumping into a hole somebody left on purpose is the thing that makes a grid feel like it is fighting you.
Dragging happens from the title bar only. That is not a detail: a chart wants every pixel of pointer input for its crosshair, and a grid that grabs a drag anywhere in the cell makes the chart unusable.
Making the grid smaller than the modules on it will fit does not delete anything. Whatever no longer fits is parked in a strip above the grid, and the trader puts it back or throws it away when they have made room.
Arranging
Edit layout turns the grid into something to arrange. The cells show through every empty place, and the module under the pointer lights up with a ring in your colour and a handle on each side and each corner.
A module moves by its title bar. A light card with its name follows the pointer while the module itself stays where it was, faded, and the place it would land is outlined. Letting go puts it there. Over a place it does not fit, nothing is outlined and letting go leaves it where it was. Escape cancels a drag at any point. Any of the eight handles resizes it: a side in one direction, a corner in two, never below the size the module needs to be usable.
Holding a module over another one makes room for it. The module underneath splits into five parts, and the part under the pointer names what will happen and fills up over a second:
- Near an edge the module underneath moves away from it, and whatever it runs into moves along. The top pushes it down, the bottom up, the left side right and the right side left.
- In the middle the two trade places, each taking the other's size.
Where pushing runs into the edge of the grid, the module underneath goes to the largest free place nearby instead, the place the dragged module came from included, the way apps trade places on a phone's home screen. Only when neither fits does anything get smaller, and the module being moved gives up size before any module already in place does. A part that cannot make room says No room, so nobody waits a second for nothing.
Once the second is up the room opens, and it stays open while the pointer stays on the place it opened. Letting go keeps it, moving away puts everything back.
Adding works the same way. Clicking a module in the list puts it in the largest free place, and dragging it lets the trader choose: into free space, against a module to make room, or onto the middle of a module to replace it. When the grid is full, the list says so and points at replacing.
Modules
Fifteen, in four groups.
Trading
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| Chart | Price chart with its own tabs, drawing, and trading straight off the chart. Each tab keeps its own market and timeframe and stays loaded, so flipping between six markets is instant |
| Order ticket | Buy and sell, market and the four pending types, sized in lots, in money or as a share of the largest order the account can open, with a slider up to that order, and one tick box for take profit, stop loss and closing part early. Doubles as the editor for a position already open. See The order ticket |
| Order book | The depth ladder, where the feed carries a book. Where it does not, it says so rather than drawing an empty one |
| Positions | Everything open, with profit recalculated per row from the last tick rather than from the server's copy |
| Pending orders | Orders waiting for their price, with cancel |
| History | Positions already closed, with their result |
Market
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| Watchlist | Everything you offer, searchable by ticker or company name, filtered by shares, ETFs, crypto, futures, forex or indices, each with a count. Stars for favourites, a six week line beside the live price, and the change since the previous session. A star shows under Favourites at once, everywhere on the screen. A watchlist opens on the favourites when the trader has any, and after that on whichever filter it was last on in that browser |
| Instrument info | Where one market stands: the day range and year range drawn as bars with the price marked on them, the day's open, previous close and volume, and the leverage, lot sizes, tick size, spread, commission and swap your firm charges for it |
| Market hours | Whether this market is open, when that changes, and the sessions coming up |
| News | What is on the calendar for this market's currencies, and what your rules do about it |
Account
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| Account | Balance, equity, open profit, used and free margin, margin level, and today's result |
| Challenge progress | The profit target in money rather than percent, trading days done against the minimum, and calendar days used against the limit |
| Rules | Daily loss and drawdown, each filling toward its limit, amber at three quarters and red at nine tenths, with the exact equity the account fails at written underneath |
Other
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| Connection | Feed status and latency to the venue of the chart last used |
| Notes | A scratchpad kept per account |
A layout holds at most 40 modules. Nothing stops a trader putting three charts and two tickets on one screen if that is how they work.
Colour groups
Every module that shows a market carries a coloured dot in its title bar. Two modules with the same colour follow the same symbol.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is what makes several charts worth having. A chart, a ticket, a ladder and an instrument panel all in red move together when the trader picks a market in any one of them, while a second set in blue stays where it was. There are five colours plus not linked, which is a module pinned to one market and left there.
A colour nobody is using any more lets its symbol go, so a chart the trader closed does not keep a price stream open behind their back.
The order ticket
The trader picks buy or sell from the two prices, then market, limit or stop. A limit or a stop takes its price from a field or from dragging its line on the chart, and the ticket says whether that price sits above or below the market.
Size is typed in lots or in the account's currency, whichever the trader prefers, with the other shown underneath. One line says what a lot is on that market: so many units of a coin, so many shares, or one contract and what a tick of it is worth. A slider under the field fills in a share of the largest order the account could open right now, which is the smaller of what its free margin pays for and what the challenge allows on one market, less what is already open there. It uses the same leverage and limits the server checks, so 100% is an order that passes. The third choice, %, types that share instead of dragging it, decimals included, with the lots and the money it comes to underneath. While it is chosen the slider gives way to four buttons for a quarter, half, three quarters and all of it, and the minus and plus move by one percent, never below the smallest order. The share is of the largest order as it is at that moment, so it follows the free margin and the price. A line under the field says what the size means for the account: what a move of 1% in the price is worth, and how much of the balance that is. The smallest order and the steps between sizes are the market's own, so a trader can buy 0.001 BTC, or hundreds of millions of a coin that trades in millions. Every figure on the ticket, and every field while it is being typed in, is grouped the way the trader's language writes numbers, such as 155,030.5 in English and 155.030,5 in Dutch.
Take profit and stop loss sit behind one tick box, "Take profit / Stop loss". Each has a price and a value beside it, in a unit the trader picks: a share of the balance, an amount of money, or ticks. Typing either one fills in the other. A price the trader typed stays exactly where they put it however the market moves, while a value they typed keeps its meaning, so its price follows the entry. A stop typed as an amount rounds toward the entry, so the loss is never larger than what was typed. A stop or a target on the wrong side of the price is flagged before anything is sent, and the ratio of risk to reward shows beside the tick box.
Closing part early is a line under the take profit: a price, and a quarter, half or three quarters of the position. The rest stays open with its own take profit and stop.
Under that the ticket shows the margin the order takes, with the leverage it is worked out at, and the spread, and the button says exactly what will be sent, such as "Buy 0.5 @ 155.40". Lots, money or a share, whether the tick box is on, and its unit are remembered in the trader's browser.
Modifying a position from the positions list turns the ticket into its editor, in the same form: the take profit, the stop loss and the early partial close, checked against the current price, and a line to close part of the position at the market straight away.
In the older designs
Propper - OG and Tactical keep the ticket they launched with: separate switches for stop loss, take profit, the partial close and sizing by risk, contracts as the only size, and a trade overview with tick value, notional and margin.
The ticker
Along the top of the terminal, between the account and the layout, runs a ticker of up to twelve markets with how far each has moved since the last session closed. They are the markets your traders opened the most positions on over the last seven days, counted across the whole firm. A firm with fewer than twelve traded markets that week gets the rest from the markets you offer that traded the most money in their last session. The choice is refreshed every five minutes, and every trader of your firm sees the same strip.
A click on a market puts it on the trader's first chart, and on everything in that chart's colour. The ticker only scrolls when it does not fit, stops under the pointer, and stands still for traders who asked their system for less motion. A market without a price yet is left out until it has one. While a layout is being edited, the ticker makes room for a line on how the grid works.
Layouts
An arrangement is saved on the server under a name, so a trader's screen follows them from their desktop to their laptop. The layout menu holds two kinds.
Your presets come first, under your firm's name and with a lock. Where their modules stand is yours, and a trader cannot move or resize anything on them. What is inside the modules is the trader's own and is kept per preset: the market on a chart, its timeframe and tabs, a watchlist group, notes, the colour that links modules. When you change a preset, the next time they open it they see your new arrangement with their own markets still in it.
Under the presets come the trader's own layouts, as many as they like: a dense one for the open, a quiet one for holding positions.
Saving is automatic, a little under a second after the last change, on a preset as much as on their own layout, with a spinner in the layout menu while it happens and a dot if it failed. There is no save button, because a screen somebody is rearranging all day should not need one.
From that menu a trader can also:
- start editing the arrangement, in the Default design, where the Edit layout button stands right beside the menu. The older designs keep only that button
- on a preset, Make a copy to edit, which copies it with everything they set inside it as a layout of their own and opens it for editing. The edit button says the same while a preset is open
- switch to another layout
- start a new layout from an empty grid, or rename, duplicate or delete one of their own
- star any layout, a preset or their own, as the one the terminal opens on
On a phone
Below 1024 pixels wide the grid is switched off. A twelve column grid on a phone gives cells about thirty pixels across, and no amount of resizing turns that into an order ticket.
What replaces it is a fixed view with four tabs along the bottom:
| Tab | What is on it |
|---|---|
| Chart | The chart, on the market picked in the bar above it |
| Trade | The order ticket for that same market |
| Positions | Open positions, pending orders and history, stacked |
| Account | Balance and margin, challenge progress and the rules |
They are the same modules the grid draws, not a second version of them, so anything fixed on one screen is fixed on both. All four tabs share one market, which is the only sensible reading of a colour group on a screen showing one thing at a time.
Nothing here is arrangeable and nothing is saved. Layouts, the module picker and the colour groups are desktop only, and the Account tab says so. This view exists so a trader away from their desk can see where they stand and get out of a trade.
The chart works with a finger the way it does with a mouse. Dragging along the price axis on the right stretches or squeezes the prices, and dragging the chart itself moves it through time. A tap puts the crosshair at that point, and a plus beside its price on the axis opens the menu a right click opens on a desktop: an order or an alert at that price. Holding a finger down keeps the crosshair and lets it follow the finger.
A stop, a target or a pending order is dragged by its label, not by the line. On a desktop the line itself can be grabbed, but on a phone a swipe across the chart would catch a real stop and move it without anybody meaning to.
Which screen the terminal opens on
The layout the trader starred, a preset or their own. A trader who starred nothing opens on your default preset. A firm that never made a preset has one anyway, called "Standard", holding the platform's arrangement until you change it. See Terminal presets for how to set yours.