Market replay
How to open the order book, tape, and chart for a past date, where history comes from, how to scrub a recording, and how to practice demo trading with no orders sent to the exchange.
LootX opens market history right in your working panels. Pick a date and time in the order book and the panel switches to a recording: the order book, tape, and chart show that moment, and the bar at the bottom lets you scrub, pause, and change speed. You can practice demo trading on the recording: no orders go to the exchange.
Where history comes from
Exchanges publish trade history, not order book history. So the order book in the past exists only where the market was recorded — by your recording or by the LootX server, which records order books and tapes around the clock. For any other time there is the exchange tape.
The terminal looks for a window in this order: your recording → LootX server archive → already downloaded tape → exchange. The letters under calendar days hint at what you’ll get: T means the exchange tape exists, T O means a recorded order book also exists.
If only the tape exists for a window, the bar shows a tape only label. Bid and ask in such an order book are reconstructed from the aggressor side, and the size at a level is how much traded there, not how much was resting.
Access to the server archive, its depth in days, and the list of exchanges depend on your subscription. Without access, the calendar says “Server archive unavailable for this account.” and the terminal takes the tape from the exchange.
| Venue | Exchange tape |
|---|---|
| Binance spot, AsterDEX | No limit found, verified 45 days |
| Binance futures | Since the coin listing |
| Bybit futures | Since listing, except the current day |
| Gate | 180 days |
| OKX | About 3 months |
| Bitget futures | About 3 days |
| Bybit spot, Bitget spot, MEXC, KuCoin, BingX, Hyperliquid, Upbit, Binance Alpha | None — “This venue has no public trade history” |
How to open history in the order book
Open the calendar
Use the History button on the order book toolbar (“Order book history: choose date and time”).
Pick a date
Click for a single day. Shift+click or drag across days for a range up to 31 days. The ⚑ button leaves only days with your notes in the calendar.
Pick a time
On the day bar, bright marks minutes with a recorded order book, dim marks tape-only areas. Drag the window with the mouse; edges change its length; there are duration buttons. You can type the time in the Time fields: 8, 8:30, 0830, and 8.30 all read the same. Double-click a filled section snaps the window exactly to it.
Choose what plays
The Play toggle: panel — only this order book; link — the whole colored linking group: order books, tapes, liquidity maps; tab — the whole tab, each venue playing its own recording, all on the same clock.
Load
Load from TO takes only the recorded order book and never hits the exchange. TO or trades from exchange tops up with the exchange tape when the recording has gaps.
Below the bar you can see how much of the window is already on disk: “Window fully covered by your recording — playing from disk, no network” or “Locally recorded N min of M”.
Chart timeframe
The chart has a Select history timeframe on chart button: select a past interval no longer than 30 days with the mouse, Esc cancels. The chart must be color-linked to the order book of the same coin.
Playback controls
The playback bar sits under the order book; when the scope is “tab”, a single bar sits at the bottom of the window. It has the timeline, play and pause, step buttons, notes, clock, speed from 0.25× to 10×, and the Back to live mode cross.
The timeline is colored by activity: blue → yellow → red shows how heavily it traded relative to this same recording, not which way price moved. Colored segments above the timeline are your notes: select a segment, type a “Moment name”, and save.
Default keys: Alt+P — play and pause, Alt+← and Alt+→ — step back and forward. In the order book, ← / → also step. Bindings are changed in Settings → Hotkeys.
What plays along with the order book
- Tape and clusters — from the same recording; on scrub they rebuild rather than accumulate.
- Chart of the same scope — candles move with the recording position. The order book underlay on the chart and the “Large trades” indicator also pull data from the recording, not from the server.
- Liquidity map — rebuilds on scrub.
Demo trading and emulation
Clicks on the order book, order cancellation, and trading keys are executed by the recording’s demo exchange. The fill rule is conservative: a limit buy at price L fills on a trade below L or on a trade exactly at L from an aggressive seller; for sells it is mirrored. An order that crosses the book fills immediately at the best opposite price. Queue position at a level is not modeled, and there is no commission. The result shows as a “PnL … · N” card above the order book.
The ≈ button on the bar opens the network emulator — Emulate network latency: market-data and order ping, spike chance and size. Off by default. It also has two emulation items for your own actions: My order — liquidity in the order book and My trade — print in the tape.
Returning to live mode
Click the Back to live mode cross on the bar. Switching the coin in the panel also returns it to the live market. If the window doesn’t load, the panel stays on the live market and the calendar shows the reason.
Storage
Downloaded windows stay on disk: reopening the same time does not hit the network. The cache has a cap, 5 GB by default; when space runs out, windows not opened for the longest time go first. Your own recordings are not counted against the cap and are never deleted.
Bar replay on the chart
The Replay button on the chart is a separate mode: history to the right of the caret is hidden and bars open one at a time. Speed is in bars per second, from 0.5 to 10. Chart keys: P — play and pause, ← / → — step. The mode is not saved between launches.
Don’t confuse it with screen recording
The “Recording” circle in the window header is a screen video recording, not a market recording. F9 starts and stops recording of the window or panel under the cursor; clicking the circle also stops it. Settings → Recording: Background recording of last minutes keeps a buffer of length Buffer length, and F8 saves it to a clip. Clips are stored in Clips folder. Screen recording works only on Windows and loads the GPU.
Limitations
- A past order book exists only in a recording — no exchange provides one.
- A window is taken from your recording only if a single recording covers it completely.
- The arbitrage panel has no calendar.