Trader Talent Pro futures trading platform FAQ

Your username and password for Trader Talent Pro will be the same username and password that you already chose to use for tradertalent.com when you registered. Remember, both username and passwords are case sensitive.

You will be able to access the login page (pictured below) once you have registered, via  the Account section in tradertalent.com 

Once you are logged-in to the Trader Talent Pro futures trading platform you will see a + tab in the top left hand corner. By clicking on this tab you will have options to drag and drop any new tabs, such as new trading ladders (DOM), quote boards, charts, order tickets, time and sales (Tick Stream), blotters and much more.

Don’t worry, click the + tab at the top left of the main screen and on the right hand side you will find “workspace templates”. Here you will have the option to choose from a previously saved workspace or you can choose the default workspace.

All Tryout takers and Live traders will need to purchase exchange data from within Trader Talent Pro. This is a cost the exchanges charge and is of no financial benefit to Trader Talent. 

Payments and subscriptions are handled by a third party. You can choose your data and pay with card by going to ‘Application settings’ icon in the top right then selecting the Subscriptions tab.

Then view the data packages available.

Generally you will want to select the ‘CME Bundle Depth of Market‘ option which includes CME, NYMEX, COMEX and CBOT. However if you only wish to trade the US indices like the mini S&P and currencies you could just buy the ‘CME, Depth of Market‘ for less. If not planning to trade on the ladders top of book might suit you.

Generally Comex is where the metals are, Nymex is where the energy products are, CBOT is mostly the bonds and Dow, and CME the currencies and other stock indices.

Remember we currently assess Tryouts on these products which are all CME based. You can buy data from other exchanges but we will not assess you on those products.

Data for the Tryouts is cheaper than data when live as the exchange defines you as professional when trading with a prop firm.

On the DOM (depth of market) or ‘ladder’ you can place a trade by clicking on the column left of the price to enter a buy order and to the right of the price column to enter a sell order. There are also two buttons at the top of the ladder ‘Buy Mkt’ and ‘Sell Mkt’  – if you click on one of these it will buy or sell at the best available price. See this video for a full demonstration on placing a trade.

The picture below shows a trader with 1 lot long position at 3277.75 indicated by the green triangle in the price column as well at the notation at the top ‘1@3277.75’ and is working a buy limit order at 3276.75 and a sell limit order at 3278.50. Working order totals are shown at the base of those columns in green and red text.

There is a box at the top of all trading ladders (DOM) that says QTY (quantity). Here, you can enter the number of futures contracts that you wish to trade or use the dropdown provided. Keep in mind more lots executed requires more futures margin (a greater trading balance).

See the question lower down ‘What is margin and how can is see how much “Initial Margin” I am using up?

If you exceed 100% of you margin allowance it will liquidate your trades automatically as you will have exceeded your risk parameters.

The Trader Talent Pro Tryouts do not offer ‘day margin’ reductions, your margin calculation is always based off full initial exchange margins relative to your balance.

Working orders can be found in the “Orders” tab on the dashboard. By using the filter you can also type ‘f’ to filter filled orders or ‘w’ to filter working orders. This is demonstrated in this video.

You can also check the base of specific ladders to see if working orders are in it that market off-screen. In the example below there are two orders on the bid (green text) and two on the offer (red text):

You can exit a futures trade on any futures trading platform by the doing the opposite of what you did when entering the trade. If you bought the market you are now “long”, so you will need to sell the same number of futures contracts to exit your long position and get “flat” when you have no open positions.

In Trader Talent Pro There is also a button at the top of all ladders that can be used to exit at market and cancel all working orders “Exit at Mkt and Cxl”. Tip: This is a helpful tool if you are exiting a position in a “fast market” or if some news or data has been released.

It is always good  practice once you are finished trading for the day, to click the “Exit All Positions Cancel All” button under the Equity tab dropdown. This will ensure any working orders, stops or open positions across your entire system are cancelled and open positions flattened. 

Your P/L will be displayed in the top right hand corner of your workspace between Equity and Initial Margin. Open P/L is the running P/L for open positions. If this is moving, you have an open position on. Your total P/L reading is net i.e. it takes into account your trade costs, exchange fees etc and should be what you rely on to determine whether you are approaching your stop.

You can also set up your Positions tab to show your P/L aka PnL (profit a’n’d loss). The number shown here does not include trade costs ie it just shows the profit or loss of the position without the cost of execution.

By clicking the cog in the top right of this module too, you can select which other columns you wish to show and in what order. This is shown towards the end of this video.

Expand the Equity tab at the top of the page inside Trader Talent Pro which will show you your Equity balance (total account balance), open P/L and Total P/L (profit or loss) for the session:

At the top of all trading ladders (DOM – depth of market) and charts there is a small + symbol tab which says ‘New Tab’ when hovered over. Click that and it will give you the option to add in a new product via a search.

Futures trade on various monthly expiries with different codes, so make sure you select the most active contract at the time. The active month is the one that has traded the most volume (number of futures contracts) for the day. Depending on the product the most common months for products like equity index futures, bonds and FX and their related codes are:

• Dec – ‘Z’
• March – ‘H’
• June – ‘M’
• Sep – ‘U’

but things like oil products actively trade other monthly expiries too.

For example if you search ‘dow’ you may be presented with suggestions of YMM2, YMU2, etc. being June 2022, September 2022,  of the E-mini Dow futures contract expiries respectively. You would be shown similar if searching ES or E-mini S&P500 futures. As of writing in May 2022 the June 2022 futures contract will be the front month trading the most volume with some lower volume trading out in the September contract. June would be the one you would choose to open. 

In Trader Talent Pro, go to the bid or ask column each side of the price and right click at a price you wish to have the order triggered at.

In the image below the trader has right clicked in the cell to the right of 3279 to place the stop.

As soon as the market reaches that price and trades it, the stop order will search for the best bid to sell into. Usually this will be the same price but if the market is thin or the order coming through the market which triggered it has already absorbed everything on the bid at that price, or more further down the book, your stop may execute where it can find the next available bid. This difference is referred to in trading as ‘slippage.’

Orders in Trader Talent Pro are not stored on your computer and sent to the exchange when the price trades but rather they are co-located on CQG’s order system for fastest possible execution so slippage is minimised. This is one of the many reasons it is considered to be in the top 5 futures trading platforms.

On the trading ladder (DOM), go to the price at which you would like to buy or sell the futures contract and left click on the bid column or offer column each side of the price.

For example in the image below the trader clicked where the ’14’ is shown to add his 1 lot to the bid queue at the price of 3281.75. (To cancel the order hover over the order cell showing ‘1’ below and an X will appear, click that to remove the order.

You can see a demonstration of this in this video.

The best way to keep an eye on your futures trading strategy performance is to use the performance centre in Trader Talent Pro. This can be found in + tab in the top left of the trading platform.

TIP: This feature is vital for traders who would like to find patterns in their futures trading strategy and it can be a great tool to help you risk manage your futures trading and learn from your mistakes. Think of it as an automated futures trading journal.

Hover over the chart (candle chart in the pictured example) with your mouse. After a second or so you will see that a selection of icons will appear. Click on these to make personalised amendments to your charts including altering the timeframe, chart type (TPO is market profile), trading indicators for futures trading and other settings.

Yes. Trader Talent Pro has order ticket functionality for those who do not like to trade off the ladders (DOM) or charts.

To an an order ticket module to your workspace select the plus sign in the top left of the platform then drag the order ticket icon onto your workspace.

Yes you can trade directly from both the quotes and charts.

There are trading buttons at the top of all our charts that can be used to enter and exit the market. Once you are in a trade on Trader Talent Pro it may display your entry on the chart where you are long or short the market but you can turn this on or off by clicking the cog symbol at the top right of each chart, select ‘settings…’ and change the order line checkbox.

To trade from an item in your futures quote board, double click to the left of the symbol on the hamburger type menu icon which will open a tradable product summary.

On the top right hand side of the dashboard in the Trader Talent Pro futures trading platform, there is a visual slider displaying in percentage terms how much margin you are using. TIP: Always be aware of how close you are to breaching 100% of your Initial Margin. If you breach this it will constitute a rule break and require a reset to be purchased.

In the below example the trader has 5 lots (futures contracts) of ES

As CME says here “Speculative (“Spec”) /non-member initial margin requirements for all products are set at 110% of the maintenance margin requirement for a given product.”

and you can see here at the time of writing maintenance margin for ES is $12,000 so initial margin (12,000 x 110%) is $13,200.  5 lots in our example would therefore require 5 x 13200 = $66,000. Which is about 81% of the trader’s Venture Tryout $80,000 balance.

If you have traded stocks ‘on margin’ this is not the same as futures margin, learn more in the short video below from CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange):

The products that are shown in Trader Talent Pro in orange text are not tradable as they are on delayed data feeds. 

To get live data you would need to purchase data by going into the top right ‘Application settings’ icon.

Remember, just because you can buy live data for an exchange doesn’t mean that its products are counted as tradable for the Tryout. Those can be found here.

If you get a message of “Order rejected”, this generally means that your account is in liquidation only mode or your limits have been adjusted to zero. You have either broken a rule or you are trying to trade outside of our trading hours. There will be more information available on tradertalent.com in a scrolling banner at the top of the page within 5 minutes if it is related a rule break on a purchased Tryout. 

Looking on tradertalent.com – in this case where the trader tried to clip many lots (futures contracts) at once which exceeded margin requirements. They had $39,991.72  balance available and an initial margin requirement of $52,800 so they were auto-liquidated from the position and would need to purchase a reset to get a fresh account on which to be assessed:

At present there is no chat enabled on Trader Talent Pro. Trader Talent will provide updates on this function in the near future. There is chat available on tradertalent.com which is typically responded to the same day if not the same hour, even if it shows offline.

This is where streaming market news gets fed directly to the Trader Talent Pro platform. Articles found in this tab usually have a link to the news provider that published this story. Simply click on this link to find out more.

Don’t forget you also have a 2 week free trial to Livesquawk with streaming audio news alerts and written updates, accessible as soon as you register on TraderTalent.com . The audio news squawk is much faster than the headlines provided within Trader Talent Pro and it can be purchased as a standalone product without needing any Tryout or other subscription from TraderTalent.com

Under the tab “Account” there is a dropdown menu. This will list the accounts you have purchased. The top account is the free Trial and all accounts below will be “TRYOUTS” and “RESETS”. The account at the bottom of the list is the most recent. TIP: Make sure that you are trading the correct account at all times. If you trade on the trial accidentally, profits made will not be counted toward your assessment.  

The below shows a trial account ‘TRIAL192’ a purchased Growth Tryout ‘TRYTG192’ and the first reset account of that Growth Tryout TRYTGR1921.

Resetting your account generates a brand new account to trade from.

TRYT = tryout

G = Growth (or V or R for venture and Rocket respectively)

The R after the G indicates a reset and if that exists the final number, in this case 1, indicates how many resets this user has had.

The 192 is a unique identifier to this user

You are limited to a single instance of the Trader Talent Pro futures trading platform at any one time, due to the exchange data usage limits. 

The colour of the text at the top of the product indicates the status of your data for it.

Red indicates the product is not receiving data likely because the futures contract month has expired.

Orange text indicates you do not have a subscription to the exchange where that product trades and is therefore 15min delayed.

White text indicates the data is real time.