Overview
An orientation lap around Exocharts Desktop: the three window types, how symbol selection and favorites work across markets, and everything on the chart's top toolbar before you touch any order-flow settings.
What's covered
- The three window types — each new tab opens as one of three things. Chart is the full order-flow charting surface and the focus of this course; DOM is the depth-of-market ladder with the tape next to it; Web embeds an external site — TradingView, your broker's terminal, anything else — so it sits inside the workspace instead of in a separate browser.
- Connect a market and pick an instrument — the instrument selector groups symbols by market: crypto, futures, stocks and ETFs. Each group uses its own connection (dxFeed for futures, stocks and ETFs; exchange connections for crypto), so choosing an instrument determines both what the chart loads and which feed it uses.
- Favorites per market category — starring an instrument puts it at the top of the selector for quick access, but the starred list belongs to that market category alone. Your crypto favorites won't show up when you're browsing futures, so expect to build a shortlist per market.
- Search a symbol — typing a ticker highlights every exchange and connection that carries it, which is how you tell the sources apart when the same instrument is available in several places. Pick the source you want, then star it so you don't have to search again.
- Set the look-back period and chart type — the look-back setting controls how much history is pulled in, and the chart type controls what closes a bar: time, range, volume or delta. Periods aren't limited to the presets, so something like a 6-week chart is a valid custom setting.
- Find tick size, cluster mode, text type and indicators — these are the controls that decide how each bar is aggregated and labeled. This video only shows where they live in Chart Settings so you can find them; each one gets its own dedicated video later in this course.
- Hide the menu and copy the chart to clipboard — hiding the menu gives the chart the space the toolbars were using, which is useful on a small screen or a packed workspace. Copy-to-clipboard takes a snapshot of the chart as it currently looks, ready to paste into Discord, Twitter or a trading journal without a separate screenshot tool.
- Top-menu settings worth knowing early — global cursor syncs the crosshair position across all open charts so they read together; borderless windows and always-on-top change how the windows sit on your desktop; the connections manager is where data feeds are set up; the shortcut manager and custom sessions let you adapt keys and trading hours to how you work. It's also where the log file lives, which is the file support will ask for in a bug report.