Using the terminal

The futures terminal is one screen with several panels around a chart. Most of them are read-only readouts; the only panels you can act on are the market ticker (click a market to switch to it), the account panel's cancel buttons, and the order ticket. Nothing you click on the chart, the orderbook or the trades tape places an order.

If you have only traded spot before, the important difference is that these are perpetual futures. You are trading a contract that tracks a price, with leverage, and the contract never expires. Because there is no expiry, positions are held together by a recurring funding payment between the two sides of the market, which the terminal shows as an annualised rate in the market header.

Picking a sector

The sidebar splits markets into three sectors under Futures: Crypto, Stocks and Forex. Each is its own page (/futures/crypto, /futures/stock, /futures/forex) and each renders the same terminal, but the market list is filtered to that sector only. The ticker band, the default market and the fallback all see just that sector's books.

• Landing on a sector opens a default market: ETH for Crypto, GOOGL for Stocks, EURUSD for Forex.
• Switching sector while you are on a market that does not belong to it moves you to that sector's default.
• Markets are ordered by 24h notional turnover, so the top of each list is the deepest book.
• To jump to a market in a different sector without using the sidebar, use the global search (the search field in the top bar, or Cmd+K / Ctrl+K). Choosing a result sends you to the correct sector and opens that book.

the exchange does not publish an asset-class field, so the split is a curated list maintained in this app. Gold, silver, oil, copper and natural gas sit under Forex alongside the currency pairs.

The market ticker (marquee)

The scrolling strip across the top is the fastest way to change market. It is the only in-terminal market switcher.

• It lists every market in the current sector, in 24h notional order.
• Each item shows the asset icon, ticker, mark price and signed 24h change, tinted green or red. A flame badge appears when 24h change is above +3%.
• Click any item to switch the terminal to it. That is its only action.
• The band pauses while your cursor is over it, so you can click something that is moving. If your system is set to reduce motion, the strip does not scroll at all.
• The selected market is highlighted.

You can move this band to the bottom of the terminal or hide it in the Layout dialog. If you hide it, search (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K) becomes your only way to change market.

The market header

The strip above the chart is a readout with no controls. Left to right: asset icon, base ticker, the word PERP, a green badge with the market's maximum leverage, the mark price, and the 24h change.

The maximum leverage badge is the market's own ceiling, not yours. It differs per market: BTC reads 100x, AAPL reads 10x. Your actual ceiling is the lower of that number and your account leverage setting.

Then four figures:

• 24h high and 24h low. This window is a rolling trailing 24 hours, not a calendar day, so the numbers drift continuously rather than resetting at midnight.
• Open interest, the total size of open positions in that market. It is quoted in the base asset, not dollars. Multiply it by the mark price to get a USDC figure.
• Funding APR, the current estimated funding rate annualised. Green is positive, red is negative. It is an estimate and it moves; what you were actually charged or paid shows on the Funding tab of the Account page.

Three prices exist for every perp and they are genuinely different at any instant. Mark price is the exchange's valuation of the contract, and it is what drives your unrealised PnL, your liquidation price and the order price guardrails. Index price is what the underlying asset is worth on spot exchanges. Last price is simply the most recent trade. This terminal shows mark price in the header and in the ticker, the book mid in the orderbook, and last traded prices in the trades tape. When they disagree slightly, nothing is broken.

The chart

Candles with a volume histogram along the bottom. The interval buttons at the top right are 5m, 15m, 1h, 4h and 1d, with 1h selected by default. Each loads 200 candles and refreshes every 15 seconds.

Two things to know:

• The visible range refits to all 200 bars on every refresh, so a manual pan or zoom is undone within about 15 seconds.
• There are no drawing tools, no indicators and no chart type switch. Crosshair is always on.

The orderbook

Nine price levels per side. Asks are shown reversed above the middle in red (highest ask at the top), bids below in green. The band in the middle shows the mid price in bold and the current spread.

The shaded bar behind each row is that level's size as a share of the largest single size on either side, so it is a relative depth cue, not a running total.

Rows are not clickable. Clicking a price or a size does not fill the order ticket. The book refreshes every 1.5 seconds, and empty levels are padded with dashes so the panel never changes height as depth moves around.

Latest trades

The tape underneath the book lists recent fills as Price, Size and Time. Price is green when the aggressor was a buy and red when it was a sell. Time is your local clock. It fetches 40 trades and refreshes every 3 seconds, showing 14 rows on desktop and 12 in the inline layout. Read-only.

The account panel

The pane under the chart has five tabs, each with its own refresh cycle. Until you enable trading, every tab reads "Enable trading to see your account." Positions, Open orders and Balances carry a count badge.

• Positions (5s): Market with a green LONG or red SHORT tag, Size, Entry, Mark, Liq. and uPnL. There is no close button and no per-row action. To close a position you use the order ticket: tick Reduce only, choose the opposite side, and submit.
• Open orders (5s): resting orders with Market, Type, Price (or the word "Market"), Filled as executed over quantity, and an X to cancel. The X cancels immediately with no confirmation step. Important: this tab shows regular orders only. Stop entries and TP/SL brackets are algo orders and do not appear here, so they cannot be cancelled from this tab.
• History (15s): completed regular orders, newest first, with the exchange's own status string. This is order history, not closed-position history. Realised PnL per closed position lives on the Closed tab of the Account page.
• Balances (10s): Asset, Available (holdings minus frozen) and Frozen.
• Transfers (30s): your last 30 deposits and withdrawals with chain, timestamp, signed amount and status.

On desktop the pane is a fixed height with its own scrollbar, so a long list can never push the chart off screen. Wide tables scroll sideways inside the pane.

Changing the layout

The Layout button sits at the top right of the centre column, next to the market header. It opens a dialog with a wireframe preview and three choices, each saved the moment you click it. There is no Apply button.

• Order entry: Left or Right. Default Right.
• Orderbook and trades: Left or Right. Default Left.
• Markets ticker: Top, Bottom or Hide. Default Top.

If you put the ticket and the book on the same edge they stack there, with the book kept nearest the chart. The chart always stays in the middle. Note that the preview cannot show the difference between book-left/ticket-right and book-right/ticket-left; both draw as side, chart, side.

Reset to default at the bottom restores ticket right, book left, ticker top, and the two default column widths. The dialog stays open.

Layout is stored per device in your browser. It is not tied to your account and does not follow you to another machine or browser.

Resizing the columns

The hairline dividers between the chart and each side column are drag handles, on desktop widths only. Drag left or right to resize that column. The pointer target is wider than the 1px line it draws, and the divider turns brand-coloured when you hover or focus it.

They also work from the keyboard: tab to a handle, then ArrowLeft or ArrowRight moves it 10px and Shift with an arrow moves it 40px.

Widths are clamped: the orderbook column between 200px and 460px, the order ticket between 260px and 460px. The clamp is also applied when a saved layout is loaded, so a width you set on a large monitor cannot squeeze the chart on a laptop. Every change is saved immediately.

On a phone or tablet

There are three arrangements, not two.

• Phone: one column. Ticker, market header, chart, then the orderbook with the trades tape underneath, then the account panel. No side columns and no resize handles.
• Tablet: the same, except the orderbook and trades sit side by side.
• Desktop: the three-column arrangement with draggable dividers. The terminal is pinned to the height of the window, so the page itself does not scroll; each panel scrolls inside its own frame.

Below desktop width there is no order ticket column. Trading happens through the two fixed Long and Short buttons at the bottom of the screen, which open the full ticket as a sheet with that side already selected. The layout choices for order entry and the book still save, but only take visible effect on desktop.

Loading, refresh and errors

Each panel loads on its own and shows placeholder blocks until its first response: six blocks in the market header, 19 bars in the orderbook, one per row in the trades tape, a full block for the chart, three rows per account tab.

Refresh cadences: markets 5s, orderbook 1.5s, trades 3s, candles 15s, positions and open orders 5s, balances 10s, order history 15s, transfers 30s.

If the market list itself fails to load, the whole terminal is replaced by a red line reading "Could not reach Swapmos" plus the underlying message. That is a connection problem, not a problem with your account, and nothing about your positions has changed.