What is an Order Book?
An order book is an electronic list of Buy and Sell orders for a specific asset organized by price level. Bids from buyers and asks from sellers as well as their respective amount are displayed on the order book dynamicly. The amount of orders at each price point is called market depth. Orders on the order book are all ongoing orders for a specific asset in real-time. Order book data are vital information for traders' investment analysis.
Gate's order book consists of four parts: Long VS Short, Bids, Asks and Trades.
Long VS Short: this shows traders' opinions towards a specifc asset. This data comes from the real-time loan statistics of margin trading, which can be deemed as a reference.
Bids: A list of Buy orders with respective price and amount.
Asks: A list of Sell orders with respective price and amount.
Trades: this shows the latest trades in the market by combining both buying and selling orders.
Order book data increases market transparency and displays market sentiments as well as traders' real-time willingness to trade, which are critical for investment analysis. However, order book data is changing all the time, indicating that it is suitable for short-term analysis rather than long-term price trend analysis.
Functions of the Order Book
Gate offers the following additional functions for users to conduct analysis.
Shift Display Mode
You can click the double headed arrow on the top right to shift between different display modes. Take the BTC/USDT trading pair for exampl, you can choose either to display the Size (BTC) and Total (USDT) of each trade, or to display the Sum (BTC) and Sum (USDT) of each price.
### Hover Display
When you hover the cursor on a certain range of orders, the average price of these orders, total (base currency) and total (quote currency) will be displayed for your reference.
