Only one of them runs Holdfast Liquidity Levels. This page explains which one, how to buy exactly that and nothing more, and what it costs on the two routes worth considering.
Every futures data feed sends you the order book at some level of detail. The levels are not interchangeable, and the industry calls several of them “Level 2,” which is where most of the confusion and most of the wasted money comes from.
| What you get | What it looks like | Runs Liquidity Levels? |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 Top of book |
Best bid and best ask, with the total size at each. One price on each side. | No. There is no book to read. |
| Aggregated depth Market by price (MBP) |
A ladder of prices, each showing one summed number: 500 lots resting at 21050. You cannot see whether that is one order or eighty. | No. See below. |
| Market by order MBO, order-by-order |
Every individual resting order, separately: its price, its size, and a message every time one is added, changed, or pulled. | Yes. This is the requirement. |
Holdfast's whole premise is that a large resting size only matters if it was real — if it stayed, and if it got traded against rather than quietly withdrawn. Every level the indicator draws is held to a validation clock for exactly that reason.
On aggregated depth, that test is impossible to run honestly. A price level showing 500 lots can go to 40 for two completely different reasons: 460 lots traded, or 460 lots were canceled. Those are opposite pieces of information — one is real absorption, the other is a spoof leaving the building — and market by price gives you the same number for both.
MBO gives you the individual orders and the add/change/cancel messages behind them, which is what makes the distinction recoverable. That is why the requirement is hard rather than a recommendation: without it, Liquidity Levels isn't degraded, it's guessing, and it would rather show you nothing than guess.
The free depth that ships with NinjaTrader will not do. The bundled Level 2 feed is aggregated top-of-book. It looks like depth, it fills a SuperDOM ladder, and it is genuinely useful for other things — but it does not carry order-level detail, and Liquidity Levels will show little or nothing on it. This catches people out constantly, because the ladder is populated, so nothing looks broken.
Holdfast is developed and traded daily on Rithmic, which delivers CME Group MBO into NinjaTrader 8 and is the only path the indicator is tested against. Other vendors carry order-by-order data for CME products, and the indicator reads whatever NinjaTrader hands its depth event — but Rithmic is what we can support, and it is what the rest of this page assumes.
CME Group is not one exchange. It is four, and market data is entitled and billed separately for each. Buying depth on CME does not give you depth on NYMEX. This is the single most common way traders pay for the wrong thing: they subscribe, load a crude oil chart, see an empty book, and conclude the indicator is broken.
Match the exchange to the product you actually trade:
| Exchange | What lists there | Common tickers |
|---|---|---|
| CME | Equity index, FX, some rates | ES MES NQ MNQ RTY 6E 6J 6B |
| CBOT | Treasuries, grains and oilseeds, Dow index | ZN ZB ZF ZT ZC ZS ZW YM MYM |
| NYMEX | Energy | CL MCL NG RB HO |
| COMEX | Metals | GC MGC SI SIL HG |
Buy one exchange if you trade one exchange. If your entire book is MNQ and MES, you need CME and nothing else, and paying for the other three is money for charts you never open. Most traders who use this indicator fall into exactly this case — index futures on one exchange — and the single-exchange subscription is the right answer for them.
Buy all four if you rotate. The moment you're regularly moving between index in the morning and crude in the afternoon, or you want gold available when it's the only thing moving, per-exchange subscriptions stop being a saving and start being a decision you have to make every month. Bundles exist because that decision is annoying.
Start with one either way. Adding an exchange later takes a few minutes on a billing page. There is no discount for guessing right on day one, and no penalty for starting narrow.
Micros and their full-size contracts are on the same exchange. MNQ and NQ are both CME; MCL and CL are both NYMEX. You do not need a separate entitlement for micros — but the two contracts do have completely different book profiles, so a size threshold calibrated on one will be wrong on the other. Calibrate each contract separately; the installation guide has the procedure.
Rithmic sells data through distributors as well as directly. Prop firms that clear through Rithmic negotiate group rates and pass them on, which means the same feed can reach you at two different prices depending on which door you walk through.
Apex has a Rithmic relationship and resells market data to its account holders at group pricing, below what the same entitlement costs retail. You add the data subscription inside your Apex dashboard; it arrives on the Rithmic connection you're already using for your funded or evaluation accounts.
Open a Rithmic account through a futures broker and subscribe to data yourself. You are the customer of record, the entitlement is yours, and it isn't contingent on anyone's evaluation programme or permitted list.
Traders in a prop evaluation who also trade a personal account often end up paying twice without meaning to, because the entitlements are per-connection and don't travel. Before you subscribe on a second route, check whether the charts you actually need can live on the connection you're already paying for — Holdfast doesn't care which account is connected, only that depth is arriving.
There are no prices on this page, and that is deliberate. Every fee below is set by CME Group, Rithmic, or the firm you route through. None of it is ours — Holdfast is an indicator developer, not a data reseller, and we earn nothing on any of it. Those rates change without notice, so a number published here would be quietly wrong by the time you read it, and it would be wrong in a decision you are spending money on.
So what follows is the structure of the bill, which does not change, and a link to each rate card so you get the current figure from the people who set it.
This trips people up more than the actual amounts. Your monthly cost is never one line item:
| Component | Set by | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Exchange market data fee | CME Group | Charged per exchange, per month, at the same published rate no matter who bills you. Depth (which is what you need) costs more than top-of-book. There is a large gap between the non-professional and professional rate — see below. |
| Platform / connection fee | Rithmic, or the firm reselling it | What you pay for the pipe itself. This is the half that differs between routes: a prop firm may absorb or discount it, while direct subscribers pay it in full. Ask what it is before you sign up — it is easy to miss and it recurs. |
Some brokers and firms quote you one bundled number covering both. That is fine — just make sure you know whether the number you were given includes the exchange fees or sits on top of them.
CME's non-professional rate is a small fraction of the professional one — the difference is large enough to dwarf every other choice on this page. Most individual retail traders qualify, but the definition turns on things like whether you're registered with a regulator, trade for an entity, or use the data in a professional capacity, and your data provider decides your classification, not you. You'll be asked to self-certify when you subscribe. Answer it accurately; a misclassification gets corrected retroactively, and the correction comes with a bill.
| Line | What it depends on | Where to read the rate |
|---|---|---|
| CME depth, one exchange (e.g. CME only, for index futures) |
Billed per exchange, per month. Depth costs more than top-of-book, and the non-professional rate is a fraction of the professional one | CME Group fee schedule |
| CME depth, all four exchanges | Four times the single-exchange fee, unless your provider offers a bundle | CME Group fee schedule |
| Rithmic platform / connection | Varies by plan and broker; charged on top of exchange fees | Rithmic pricing |
| Apex market data add-on | Group rate, below retail; billed in your Apex dashboard | Apex Trader Funding |
The honest summary: for one exchange as a non-professional, depth data is not the expensive part of trading futures — it sits in the same range as charting software, and it is a fixed monthly cost rather than one that scales with how much you trade. The expensive mistakes are structural, not the rate: paying for exchanges you do not trade, or paying twice by running two routes at once. Both are avoidable by reading section 02 before you subscribe rather than after.
The corner badge is the diagnostic. Liquidity Levels reports its own data state on the chart rather than failing silently. No depth data during an active session means the book isn't reaching you, whatever your billing page says — that message is the ground truth, and it is worth trusting over any rate card, dashboard, or support reply.
Probably yes. The depth bundled with NinjaTrader is aggregated market-by-price, which fills a SuperDOM but does not carry order-level detail. The fastest way to know for certain is to add Liquidity Levels to a chart during an active session and read the corner badge — it distinguishes between no depth at all and depth that lacks the detail the indicator needs.
No. Tide and Grip read price and run on any data feed NinjaTrader accepts, as do the free tools. Only Liquidity Levels requires MBO. If you buy the bundle before your data is sorted, two of the three work the day you install them.
Not meaningfully — with no MBO feed there is nothing for it to read, and you'd be evaluating an empty chart. Sort the data first. You can still install it in the meantime: the corner badge reports exactly what your current feed is and isn't carrying, which is a useful answer on its own.
Not usually. Evaluation and funded accounts come with a connection; market data is generally a separate subscription you add yourself. Check your dashboard before assuming either way — this is the most common reason a new Apex user sees an empty book.
No. Buy the one exchange your instrument lists on. Adding another later is a few minutes on a billing page, and there's no discount for having guessed right at the start.
Assume not. Every figure here is set by a third party and changes without notice; we've linked the source for each so you can check the current number rather than trust ours. If something on this page is materially out of date, tell us and we'll correct it.
No. We're an independent indicator developer with no commercial relationship to either, no affiliate arrangement, and nothing to gain from which route you pick. Rithmic is simply what the indicator is built and tested on, and Apex is the cheaper door to it for people who are already customers.
Liquidity Levels holds every resting level to a validation clock, so size that appears and vanishes never reaches your chart. Only liquidity that stayed gets proven.