Order book, tape and volume profile in one ladder — and right in the middle, the PRESS HUD. At the inside market it joins who is pushing with what price does about it, and tells you in one word which side is winning the fight right now.
At the inside market, sizes and prints often change faster than anyone can read them. Whether a wall holds, whether it reloads, whether the attacking side is moving anything at all — in a typical DOM you work that out in your head while price keeps going. CORTEX DOM works out exactly these questions for you and writes the answer where you are already looking.
Size per price, maybe volume. What matters right now is yours to decide — in real time.
| THE QUESTION AT THE INSIDE | TYPICAL PRICE LADDER | CORTEX DOM |
|---|---|---|
| Who is aggressive right now? | Count prints on the tape and weigh them in your head. | White tick: the time-weighted share of aggressive buying and selling, continuously. |
| Is the pressure achieving anything? | Hold tape and price movement against each other yourself. | Verdict from pressure and price response: IN CONTROL, ABSORBED, DRIFT, BALANCED or QUIET. |
| What is liquidity doing at bid and ask? | A number changes — why is left open. | Plaque per side: ABSORB, RELOAD, BLOCK or EXHAUST, pulsing, with duration. |
| What happened in this fight? | Counters often accumulate over long stretches. | RB/RA per episode: the last finished fight at exactly this price — live at the inside. |
| Is there hidden size in the book? | Only a hunch when more trades than is shown. | ICE (book-confirmed) and the ABSORB factor “traded ÷ ever shown”. |
| Did a wall just vanish? | The size is gone — without context. | PULL: large size vanishes with almost no trading — honestly marked as a suspicion. |
| What does a model say? | — | CORTEX tiles with direction, confidence and model quality — the same read as Heatmap and strategy. |
| Can I trust the data? | Rarely visible. | Footer with latency, messages per second, sequence gaps and data fidelity. |
Many price ladders show some of this raw data. The difference: CORTEX DOM turns it into one statement — at the inside market, at the moment it counts.
A thousand aggressively bought contracts can mean two things: the buyers are winning — or someone is taking everything off them. The number is the same, the meaning is the opposite. That is why the PRESS HUD lays two axes on top of each other:
The attacking side is getting its way. Green for buyers, red for sellers — the bar fills in their direction.
Lots of effort, no result: the other side takes everything. Often the moment a move starts losing its power.
No clear edge in aggression — and price wanders anyway. Movement without pressure.
No imbalance, no movement. Both sides hold each other in check.
And when there is barely any trading, the HUD says exactly that: QUIET — instead of inventing a verdict from too few prints.
The PRESS HUD sits right on the inside line of the ladder. Every element has exactly one job, and none of them hides another:
A DOM shows what sits at the bid or ask now. CORTEX DOM remembers what traded at that price, how often the size came back, and whether the attacking side is fading — and sums it up in one of four states:
A multiple of what was ever visible at this price has traded here — and price holds.
Read: hidden or refilling liquidity is soaking up the pressure.
The resting size keeps refilling while it is being hit.
Read: someone is actively defending this price.
A large visible wall takes the hits and mostly stays in place.
Read: open defence — visible and not broken so far.
Aggression at the inside has faded over several seconds while the other side held.
Read: the attack is losing steam.
The side columns think in fights, too — not in hours. RB and RA show the market orders at bid and ask in the last finished episode at exactly this price. At the current inside they count live. So you see what happened in this one skirmish, instead of a total that has piled up over the whole session.
Above the ladder sit two tiles: Tug-of-War puts buys against sells, and Hidden Flow relates delta to how far price has actually moved.
The CORTEX column marks events at the price level where they happen. Detection is the same as in the Heatmap and the indicator — every window sees the same event. Each one can be shown or hidden on its own, with its own minimum size and display time up to the whole session.
Absorption. A wall at the inside was hit and held.
Sweep. An aggressive order clears a wall or several levels.
Iceberg. Repeated same-size fills while the order refills — book-confirmed cases only.
Pull. Large resting size vanishes with almost no trading — a suspicion of spoofing or layering, not proof.
Exhaustion. The attacking side is spent.
Reversal AI. Reversal detection with direction, confidence and phase.
Takeover. One side takes over at the inside — currently being checked in a pre-registered test.
The direction tiles in the DOM come from the same CORTEX model that also feeds the Dashboard, the Heatmap and the NinjaTrader strategy. There is no second AI that could contradict the rest.
The Swing tile shows the model quality right alongside — honestly, even when it is weak. Every readout is model output, not advice. How CORTEX learns →
Tile values shown as an example.
That is why the footer shows what the display is based on. The data comes from your NinjaTrader 8 indicator over a local connection — the tape print by print, plus the depth of the order book. If something is missing, you see it.
Example values. TAPE = print by print, FRAME = fallback for older indicators.
Hides every control and side panel in all windows. What remains is the order book and a single CORTEX line.
A DOM-only layout: the PRESS HUD becomes large and the book shrinks to a narrow edge.
The overnight book is thin, the regular session is busy. PRE and RTH only adjust display filters — what is detected never changes.
14 days free — the full analysis layer with CORTEX DOM, no credit card required. The automated strategy is part of Pro.
Requirement: NinjaTrader 8 with a Level-2 market data subscription (dxFeed, Rithmic or CQG)
START TRIAL ▶ ONE CORTEX in detail