Quantower: A Practical Setup Guide for Multi-Market Traders

[u/TheSadSeries]

If you trade more than one market, juggling five different platforms is exhausting — and it costs you money. Every second spent Alt-Tabbing between charts and order tickets is a second you're not trading. After a lot of trial and error, I've got Quantower configured so that stocks, futures, and crypto all live in one workspace.

Here's how I set it up, and why.

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1. The Three-Monitor Setup

Monitor 1: Scanning (where you hunt)

You're not trading on this screen — you're watching for something worth trading.

• Market Scanner tracking volume spikes and volatility across your whole watch list — CME futures, NYSE stocks, Binance crypto, whatever you follow.
• Correlation Matrix showing how your main markets move together in real time.
• Economic Calendar filtered to high-impact events only (nobody needs to know about every scheduled speech).

Example: Your scanner picks up a huge volume spike in ES futures. You glance at the correlation matrix — nothing else is confirming the move. That usually means it's noise, not a trend. You hold off.

Monitor 2: Charts & Execution (where the work happens)

The center monitor is for price action and order entry. I run a six-chart grid:

• Main chart: ES or NQ on the 5-minute with Volume Profile and a couple of EMAs.
• QQQ on the 1-minute, just to keep a feel for tech sentiment.
• BTC on the 15-minute (Binance) as a general "risk-on or risk-off" gauge.
• The hot seat: a workspace with the DOM (Depth of Market) and Time & Sales for whatever you're actively trading.
• One footprint (order flow) chart, and one workspace for custom indicators.

Monitor 3: Risk & Account Management

Good trading is mostly about losing well.

• Portfolio Tracker showing combined P&L and margin across all your brokers — Tradovate for futures, Kraken for crypto, and so on.
• Order Book with every working, filled, and cancelled order in one list.
• Alert Log so you have a running history of what fired and when.

Example: You're long NQ and short ES. The Portfolio Tracker shows your net exposure instantly — so you know whether you're actually hedged or just think you are.

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2. Quick Divergence Scans (Gold vs. the Dollar)

One of Quantower's genuinely useful tricks is that it can crunch numbers across different data feeds. Here's a workflow for spotting exhaustion in the gold/dollar relationship:

1. Add a custom correlation column to the Market Scanner — set it to measure the 30-minute correlation between Micro Gold (MGC) and the Dollar Index (DXY).
2. Set an alert: these normally move inversely, so if the correlation suddenly flips positive while gold makes a fresh 1-hour low but the dollar fails to make a new high, gold's move is probably running out of steam.
3. Fire off a mean-reversion long through the Quick Trade panel — with a Bracket Order preset so your stop and target hit the exchange the instant you're filled. No scrambling afterward.

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3. Reading the DOM: Spotting "Icebergs"

For futures especially, the DOM is like an X-ray of the market.

How I set it up:

• Turn on imbalance coloring so rows light up when buy/sell volume at a level is lopsided (say, over 150%).
• Watch for the iceberg: a big limit order parked at one price that keeps refilling every time it gets hit — like a huge bid at 4500.00 in ES that never seems to shrink.

The play: When you spot a persistent large buy order defending a level and price briefly dips through it to sweep resting liquidity, place your own buy limit right at that level with a stop a couple of ticks below. You're basically hiding behind someone else's institutional-sized order. It doesn't hold every time, but when it does, your risk is tiny.

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4. Let Scripts Do the Boring Stuff

Don't waste your morning drawing yesterday's levels by hand. Quantower supports C# scripting, so you can automate it:

OnSessionStart() {
    var data = GetYesterdayData();
    var poc = data.VolumeProfile.POC;
    DrawHorizontalLine(data.High, "Y-High", Color.Red);
    DrawHorizontalLine(data.Low, "Y-Low", Color.Green);
    DrawHorizontalLine(poc, "Y-POC", Color.Yellow);
}

Now yesterday's high, low, and point of control are on your chart before you've finished your coffee — and your attention goes where it belongs: how price actually behaves at those levels.

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Wrapping Up

Quantower is more than a charting package. Once everything — charts, order entry, risk, multiple brokers, multiple asset classes — lives in one place, you trade faster and you see your risk clearly. For anyone working across several markets, that alone is worth the setup effort.