Frequently Asked Questions

Futures like NQ (Nasdaq-100), GC (gold) and BTC (bitcoin) trade on one central, regulated exchange with a single consolidated price feed — and every broker's cash index or CFD is derived from exactly that future. Building the statistics on the futures gives one clean, consistent dataset that isn't distorted by an individual broker's spread, feed or session quirks. Because every figure here is a ratio (range vs ADR, moves in SD), it is price-scale-agnostic and carries straight over to the matching CFD.

Yes. The cash index or CFD your broker offers (for example US100 / NAS100, XAUUSD or BTCUSD) tracks the underlying future very closely during the cash session, so the opening-range behaviour is effectively the same. Two things to keep in mind: your broker's spread, commission and exact quote times differ slightly from the futures, and you must still measure the opening range at 09:30–09:45 New York time. Always back-test on your own broker's symbol before trading it live.

Because currency futures are quoted the other way round. A CME currency future is the foreign currency priced in US dollars — the yen future (6J) is dollars-per-yen — whereas the spot/CFD quote most people watch, USD/JPY, is yen-per-dollar. The two are inverses, so the 6J chart is flipped versus USD/JPY: when USD/JPY rises (the dollar gains on the yen) 6J falls, and vice-versa. So a short-side edge on 6J is the same trade as long USD/JPY — don't read the futures direction as the USD/JPY direction. The same flip applies to any pair normally quoted USD/XXX (USD/CHF, USD/CAD…). Pairs already quoted XXX/USD — like the British pound, where 6B matches GBP/USD — line up with their future and need no flipping.

Prices are one-minute bars from Databento (CME/COMEX GLBX.MDP3, front-month contract); macro-news dates come from the US Federal Reserve and FRED. Nothing is logged or hand-picked by eye. The whole dataset is recomputed from fresh market data automatically once a week.

Most symbols — NQ (Nasdaq-100), ES (S&P 500), GC (gold), SI (silver), CL (crude oil), NG (natural gas), 6B (British pound), 6J (Japanese yen), 6E (euro), 6A (Australian dollar), 6S (Swiss franc), FDAX (DAX 40), NKD (Nikkei 225) and YM (Dow Jones) — reach back to 2008, roughly 4,700 trading days each. RTY (Russell 2000) starts in 2009, the year its contract became genuinely liquid. BTC (bitcoin) starts at its CME launch in December 2017. The time-horizon control lets you narrow any symbol to any recent window, right down to the last month.

All times are computed in US Eastern time and then relabelled into the timezone you choose at the top of the filters. The US and Europe switch between summer and winter time (daylight saving) on different dates — roughly two weeks apart each spring and autumn — so during those short windows the New York open lands an hour earlier or later on your local clock than usual (for example 15:30 vs 14:30 Berlin time). The opening range is always anchored to the real market open; only the clock label moves. Keep this in mind when reading the timing charts around late March and late October / early November.

A breakout is the first time price pierces the opening range after it forms. The default trigger is a touch — the moment price first reaches the edge — and the Entry control lets you switch to a 5-minute or 15-minute candle close instead (later closes give fewer trades at a higher win rate). The Entry control works on the preset or a custom opening range — free on Nasdaq, and on every market with Pro. The break direction sets the trade: Long above the range, Short below.

Eight, all under Trade Type in the Filters. Breakout goes with the break. Reversal fades a break that fails and trades it the other way. Failed Breakout fades a break once a 5 or 15 minute candle closes back inside the range. OR Close enters at the opening range's own closing price the moment the window ends, in the direction you choose — the control group for every breakout edge. Rebreak waits for the range to break, pull back inside and break the same edge again. Break and Retest waits for the break, then buys the pullback with a limit back inside the range. Reversal Rebreak and Reversal Break and Retest run those two off the day’s reversal instead of its first break. The Docs explain each in detail.

One SD is one full opening-range width, measured from the broken edge. It is the natural unit of risk: entering at the break with a stop at the opposite edge risks about 1 SD, so targets, drawdown and the equity curves are all expressed in SD / R multiples — comparable across instruments no matter their price.

No — they are a simplified simulation: enter at the breakout (the edge on a touch, or the trigger candle's close), stop at the opposite edge, exit at your chosen SD target or the cash close, with no spread, commission or slippage. They exist to compare how conditions change the outcome, not as a live track record. The "Simulate costs" dropdown lets you deduct a rough per-trade cost so the curve is a little more realistic, and the 1 Contract risk mode shows the same curve in money for one full-size contract per trade instead of in R.

Nothing is hidden for being thin, so a bucket of three days can show a 100% win rate. Always read the trade count beside the win rate; widen your filters or the time horizon when a bucket is too small to mean anything.

The ORBit Analyzer (visible when you expand the tool to full width) breaks your currently-filtered trade sample down by every filter dimension — direction, day of week, volatility (ADR%), relative volume, opening trend, overnight gap, news and more — and shows the trade count, win rate, profit factor, total R and return-to-drawdown for each bucket. It is a fast way to see which conditions improve or hurt the edge. The headline directional-bias card at the top shows the long-vs-short split for your current filters.

Time and place (in the expanded tool — it fills the right side of the ORBit Observer dashboard, and is free for everyone) shows two things about trades after the breakout: how far they run (extension in SD units) and how deep they pull back (retracement as % of the range) before reversing. Both are shown as distributions — each trade lands in exactly one band — alongside timing charts showing when the peak run or deepest pullback typically forms during the session. Retracement is winners-only, so it answers "how much heat do eventual winners take?" These charts follow your Target exactly like the equity curve does — a winner is a trade that reached it, run and retracement capped at that exit. The stop is the one fixed piece: they always use the opposite edge of the range, whatever your Stop-loss setting, so the winner count here can differ from the equity panel's if you've set a custom stop-loss.

ORBit Big Picture (expanded view) is the context module: two standalone views of the backdrop a setup is trading into, read straight from price and positioning history. The seasonal curve is the averaged cumulative return path through the year, with a detrend option and a current-year overlay; click any two points to measure that calendar window (average return, win rate, years up, best and worst year) with a per-year bar chart below. The COT report charts weekly CFTC positioning per trader group against price, as raw net positions or as a 0–100 COT Index — where the current net sits inside its rolling range, 6 months by default or 3 years — with extreme zones shaded. Neither is an ORB trade filter. Both are free on NQ; other markets follow your plan.

NQ (Nasdaq-100) is completely free — it just needs a free account (a one-time email link, no password) — and the entire analysis toolkit runs on it: the ORBit Analyzer, Time and place, the ORBit Big Picture (seasonality, COT, expected volatility, fundamentals), the equity curves with Monte Carlo and out-of-sample validation, custom opening ranges, the custom stop-loss, saved edges, the portfolio builder, the prop-firm simulator, in-tool trade charts and cross-instrument testing. The one thing Pro adds beyond data is the ORBit Indicator for NinjaTrader 8, a chart tool that is paid on every market including Nasdaq. The other fifteen markets are on the paid Pro plan: ES (S&P 500), GC (gold), SI (silver), CL (crude oil), NG (natural gas), BTC (bitcoin), 6B (British pound), 6J (Japanese yen), 6E (euro), 6A (Australian dollar), 6S (Swiss franc), FDAX (DAX 40), YM (Dow Jones), RTY (Russell 2000) and NKD (Nikkei 225).

Click any locked symbol tile to open the subscribe panel and get the Pro plan, then check out. After paying, log in with the same email and every symbol unlocks immediately — their full history loads just like NQ. You can manage or cancel your subscription any time under Account → Plan & Billing.

Not right now — there is one paid plan, Pro, which unlocks every market (current and future). We keep it simple with a single plan rather than lots of small tiers. Nasdaq (NQ) stays free forever with the whole analysis toolkit, so you can use it at no cost before deciding. (The ORBit Indicator for NinjaTrader 8 is the one chart tool that stays with Pro on every market.)

On free Nasdaq (NQ) the whole analysis toolkit is already free — custom opening ranges, the custom stop-loss, in-tool trade charts, saved edges, the portfolio builder, the prop-firm simulator, cross-instrument testing, the ORBit Observer chart bridge and the TradingView indicator export all work on NQ at no cost. A paid Pro subscription adds the other fifteen markets — their full history and every feature, exactly as they work on NQ. Pro also carries the Discord "Pro" role and locks your price for life.

The opening range defaults to the standard New York session range: 09:30 to 09:45 Eastern time (15 minutes). That is the range the headline NQ statistics are computed from. The Custom option opens a picker where you can set any start and end time in 5-minute steps across the whole trading session (5 minutes to 16 hours) — so you can study a 5-minute range, a 30-minute range, a 1-hour range, an Asian-session open, or anything else. It is free on Nasdaq, and works on every market with Pro. The separate Entry control sets the breakout trigger — a touch (the default), or a 5- or 15-minute candle close.

ORBit is our top plan: everything in Pro plus a MetaTrader 5 expert advisor and a NinjaTrader 8 algo that load a saved edge by its Preset Code and place the ORB trade for you, hands-free, using your own risk settings. The MT5 EA runs whole portfolios; the NinjaTrader algo runs one edge per chart and is built to conquer prop challenges. New customers buy ORBit directly, no Pro plan needed first, and Pro subscribers can upgrade to it at any time. Details and pricing are on the pricing page.

€50 a month for subscriptions started by 31 October 2026 (the early-bird price), €60 a month after that. It includes everything in Pro, so no separate Pro plan is needed. A Pro subscriber upgrades from the pricing page or the tool: the rest of the current month is charged pro rata straight away and the subscription moves to the ORBit price. Moving back from ORBit to Pro works the same way. Like every plan, the price you sign up at stays as long as the subscription stays active.

Each licence key can run on up to three computers at once — a rolling 30-day window rather than a permanent list, so a computer you retire frees its slot on its own. Every terminal, NinjaTrader install and account on one computer shares its slot, and the MetaTrader 5 EA and the NinjaTrader algo draw on the same three, so that covers a normal setup (your PC, a VPS and a spare machine, however many prop-firm terminals each runs) but is not meant for handing the key to someone else: attaching it on a genuinely new, fourth computer returns a clear "too many activations" message rather than a silent failure. If you need a slot back sooner — a machine you have already replaced, say — every computer is listed in the ORBit module of the tool with its own Rename and Release buttons; releasing one frees that slot for the next computer (a released machine that still runs loses the licence on its next daily check, so it swaps a seat rather than adding one).

Any MetaTrader 5 broker. The statistics come from futures, so the EA needs to know which of your broker's symbols matches each market — US100 for Nasdaq, XAUUSD for Gold and so on. That is the Symbol Mapping tab of the ORBit EA module: pick a ready-made map for a partner broker (Fusion Markets, E8 Markets, or AvaFutures Mini and Micro for real exchange futures) or set the symbols yourself. The map travels with your Preset Code, so there is nothing to type into MetaTrader.

Yes — prop traders are who it is built for. The MetaTrader 5 EA runs on any MT5 prop account, and the NinjaTrader 8 algo runs one edge per chart, built for futures prop challenges. Two things to check with your firm first: that it allows expert advisors or algos, and that it allows trading around news releases if your edge does. Use the Daily Loss Halt input to stay inside the firm's daily drawdown, and test the edge in the free Prop-Firm simulator before you pay for a challenge.

From the tool: open the EA Monitor (or the Algo Monitor for NinjaTrader), pick the account and click Send Logs. The next time that computer checks in, ORBit EA 3.0 or later (or the ORBit Algo) uploads today’s and yesterday’s log to us, so we can see what happened without you hunting for files. The account has to be online, and the upload never carries your licence key or your balance. You can send logs once an hour.

There are no passwords. Enter your email in the "Log in" box at the top of the page and we email you a one-click magic link. Clicking it signs you in for 90 days on that browser, so an active subscriber rarely has to log in again. Your access is tied to your email, so use the same address you subscribed with.

Use it on as many of your own devices as you like — logging in anywhere is just another magic-link click, and switching devices never loses your saved edges or settings. A subscription is for one person, though, so to keep that fair the account keeps a lightweight, non-identifying record of the devices and rough locations it is signed in from. If a device well outside your normal pattern shows up, that specific device is asked to confirm itself with a one-click email link before it can load paid data — a short one-time check, not a lockout — and access that looks like the same account running from unrelated places at once is reviewed by hand. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what is recorded.

No — your price is locked for life. As new symbols and features are added the list price will rise, but as long as your subscription stays active you keep the price you signed up at. Lock in early and you are grandfathered in.

Open Account → Plan & Billing once logged in — cancel from there, or open the secure billing portal to update payment details. Billing is monthly and you can cancel anytime; access runs to the end of the paid period.

Plans bill month to month, so cancelling simply stops the next renewal and you keep access until the end of the month you have paid for — the current month is not refunded pro rata. At checkout you agree to immediate access, which under EU law ends the 14-day right of withdrawal for digital services once access begins (section 5 of the Terms). If something went wrong with a payment, email contact@tlfx.trading and we will sort it out.

Two optional emails, both off until you turn them on under Account → Notifications: ORBit Releases (one email per site release) and New Software Versions (one email when a new build of the EA, the algo or an indicator is available). Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link. Each release is also posted to the Discord server, and the full history is on the Changelog page.

Three quick steps. First, click Join the Discord to enter the server. Second, on your Account page (log in with the same email you subscribed with) click Connect Discord for Roles and authorise — that links your subscription to your Discord account. Third, claim the role inside Discord: click the server name at the top left → Linked Roles → Pro → Finish. Discord only hands out a linked role once you claim it there. With the ORBit plan, claim ORBit there instead — each plan carries its own role. If you later upgrade, change or cancel your plan, your role updates by itself; after an upgrade to ORBit, claim the ORBit role once in the same menu.

Yes. Once you've been a subscriber for about three months, a Leave a review option appears in the Account menu at the top of the tool (it stays locked until then, so reviews come from people who have genuinely used the tool for a while). Write a short review — optionally with a screenshot — and once it has been checked and approved it appears on the public testimonials wall. As a thank-you for an approved review, we credit you one month free on your subscription, applied to your next invoice. It is entirely optional and your honest opinion is what we are after — a review is never required to use anything.

See the Testimonials Wall →

A thank-you for members who find critical bugs. If you are an active Pro or ORBit member and you are the first to report a bug we confirm as critical, your next bill is skipped: your next month is on us. The free month is given once per member. Report it under Account → Bounty Hunter with the steps to reproduce it; we review every report and email you our decision. What counts as critical: anything that costs you or us money because of a bug or an error, such as statistics, trades or filters that give a result the data does not support; the ORBit EA or Algo trading differently from its edge (wrong entry, stop or size, a missed exit, orders placed twice or never); a way to reach paid data or the EA without paying, or being billed the wrong amount; and a security hole such as reading another member's data. What does not count: anything that costs nobody money, such as typos, layout issues, feature requests and anything already known. The bug must be reproducible, only the first report of a bug is rewarded, and our decision is final. Report security issues only through the form, never in public or on Discord, until they are fixed. The free month is only for active members: if your subscription has ended or is set to end, no free month applies. The reward has no cash value, and we never name bounty hunters publicly.

Report a Bug →

Open the tool at /app, pick your instrument, and set your opening-range window — a preset duration or any custom start and end time, free on Nasdaq. The collapsed view shows the equity curve and the headline day-outcome rates. Click "Expand to full width" to access the detailed tabs: ORBit Analyzer (per-filter breakdowns, plus an out-of-sample / Monte Carlo / cross-instrument validation workbench in its dashboard), ORBit Observer (take a setup to your TradingView or NinjaTrader chart, alongside Time and place — how far trades run and how deep they pull back), ORBit Assembler (blend several saved edges into one combined equity curve, with the prop-firm simulator), ORBit Charts (a verifiable ledger of every trade in your filtered sample), and ORBit Big Picture (seasonality, COT positioning, expected volatility and a fundamentals backdrop for every market you can access). Apply filters — day of week, trading style, volatility, relative and prior-day volume, opening trend, overnight gap, opening-range close and path, prior-day break, news and more — and every panel recomputes instantly.

Yes. The free ORBit Indicator for TradingView draws the setup live on your chart. Set up your filters in the tool, open ORBit Observer and click Send to TradingView in the Take It to TradingView tile, then paste the copied preset string into the indicator settings. The indicator then draws the opening-range box, the extension and retracement stat lines (median, average, Q1/Q3), timing lines and a dashboard that flags when today's market conditions are outside your filter set — so you can see at a glance whether the current day matches your edge.

Yes — this is free with any account. The Saved Edges tile on the ORBit Assembler dashboard lets you name and save your current filter configuration. Saved edges sync to your account so they are available on any device when you log in. Save as many as you like, and group them into watchlists — five slots, each freely renameable, so a library of setups stays sorted. Anonymous (not logged-in) visitors can see the feature but need a free account to save.

ORBit Observer (a tab in the expanded view) is where you take a setup from the tool to the chart you actually trade on. It holds two tiles, one above the other — Take It to NinjaTrader and Take It to TradingView — each with a one-time setup, what to do every session and a link to its full guide. The TradingView side is free for everyone: it hands you the preset string for whatever filters you currently have loaded, and pasting it into the indicator's Preset field draws your opening range, the SD reference grid, stat lines and a condition dashboard on your own chart. The NinjaTrader side is the more capable one — instead of reading frozen numbers it asks the service what today's conditions have historically implied, then asks again as the day confirms itself. That one is part of Pro on every market, Nasdaq included. Beside both, Time and place shows how far trades run and how deep they pull back.

Yes. Every saved edge has a Share button that creates a link. Posting that link — in Discord, on X/Twitter, on Facebook, anywhere — unfurls a preview card showing the edge's real equity curve and headline numbers; anyone who opens the link gets the exact setup loaded into their own tool. The Share popup has one-click buttons for X, Facebook and Reddit, a Discord button (copies the link and opens the server to paste in your channel) and a "Download image" button for Instagram (post the picture, drop the link in your caption). To load a setup someone sent you, use the Import edge button under "Save current setup": paste the share code (or just open the link) and you'll see what it contains before adding it. A shared edge only loads on a market you have access to — if you're not subscribed to that market you'll get a clear note with a link to the plans.

The Portfolio builder (in the expanded tool — it fills the right side of the ORBit Assembler dashboard, and is free on Nasdaq) lets you combine several saved edges — even across different instruments — into a single blended equity curve. Select the edges you want in the Saved edges tile (right beside it on the same dashboard) and hit "Add to portfolio", and the tool resolves each edge's trade stream independently and merges them in date order. A "Split risk" toggle models a fixed total-risk budget spread across all strategies (each trade risks 1/N of a unit) rather than stacking full risk on each. You get a combined equity curve, metrics and a Monte Carlo simulation of the blended strategy, in R or, with the 1 Contract risk mode, in money for one full-size contract per edge.

The Prop-Firm simulator (a tile on the ORBit Assembler dashboard) is completely free for everyone — no paid plan needed. It takes the blended trades of your active portfolio and resamples them, trading day by trading day, into 5,000 simulated challenge attempts under the rules of popular prop firms (E8, Apex, Lucid, The5%ers). It counts real trading days, including the days your edge does not trade, so a strategy that trades rarely takes as long to pass as it would live, and trades on the same day count together against the daily loss limit. Size each trade as a percentage of the account or as a number of contracts, and set separate consistency limits for the challenge and the funded account. It reports your estimated pass rate, cost to get funded (challenge fee ÷ pass rate + activation fee), expected first payout and net EV. Presets for the most common firms are built in; every parameter is editable.

The tool covers sixteen futures markets today — picked for the real intraday liquidity an opening-range tool needs. There is no fixed list of what comes next: new markets and features get built when they are genuinely worth building, and what members ask for in the Discord carries a lot of weight.

Yes. Reach out with your idea and if it looks worth testing, we will build it and run our own checks. Several of the filters and panels here started as user requests, so every promising idea gets a fair shot — not all of them make it in, but each one is genuinely considered. Contact us here:

ORBit pulls your preset and broker symbol map from our server, so MetaTrader 5 has to allow it to reach that address. You only do this once per terminal:

1. In MetaTrader 5, open Tools → Options (or press Ctrl+O).
2. Go to the Expert Advisors tab.
3. Tick Allow WebRequest for listed URL.
4. Double-click the empty row in the list below that checkbox, paste the address from the box below, then press Enter so it appears as a line in the list.
5. Make sure the new line shows a green tick (not a red cross), then click OK.
6. If ORBit is already running, remove it from the chart and drag it back on so it picks up the permission.

Tip: add the address exactly as shown — MT5 matches it character-for-character, and ORBit can only reach a URL that is on this list. This step is not needed in the Strategy Tester — it has no internet access, so load the Preset File and Symbol Map there instead.

No. Everything here is historical market-behaviour data for education only. Past behaviour is not a prediction of the future, and trading financial instruments carries substantial risk.