Darqube Review – Is This Online Trading Terminal Right For You?

About Darqube

Darqube is a relatively new online trading terminal that offers an alternative to services like Trade Ideas, ThinkorSwim, and MetaTrader 5. The service offers a fair amount of customization, but the underlying features aren’t nearly as robust as what some of these more established terminals offer. You cannot connect a broker, the charting capabilities are limited, and there are no comprehensive scanners. Darqube is free for now, and the service has a lot of potential, so it’s worth exploring. Let’s learn more about this trading terminal in this review of Darqube.

Darqube Pricing

Darqube is currently free for all users. The platform states that it will likely roll out paid tiers in the future, but there are no details on when this will happen or what features might be put behind a paywall.

Darqube Features

Darqube is split up into several different apps, all of which are accessed through the platform’s web interface.

Terminal

The Terminal is Darqube’s primary app and the main feature of this service. With the Terminal, you can create an unlimited number of workspaces and organize them with news feeds, watchlists, technical charts, and more. To help you get started, Darqube provides several workspaces focused on market-wide news, cryptocurrencies, stocks, indices, and forex.

There are currently eight different widgets available in the Terminal to create a workspace, several of which are only used for monitoring cryptocurrencies. The most useful tool is the Info widget. This includes a summary of the asset in question (it works for stocks, forex, crypto, ETFs, mutual funds, and indices) complete with a basic line chart, analyst recommendations, and fundamental data. There are also several tabs that vary by asset type. For stocks, these include a company summary, earnings history, and statistics about insider and institutional holdings. For ETFs and mutual funds, the additional tabs allow you to explore the assets inside the specific fund.  

Other helpful widgets include the Screener, Watchlist, News, and Chart widgets. The Screener tool is extremely basic, as you can only sort stocks, ETFs, and funds by performance and valuation. There is no more advanced screening tool within Darqube for finding stocks based on technical setups or fundamental data. Charts are provided by TradingView and, while not all that customizable, offer several dozen common technical overlays. The News widget can be sorted by asset type and pulls from a variety of sources, including Twitter, Reuters, Bloomberg, Business Insider, CoinDesk, and more.

Bot Builder

The Bot Builder app is another attractive feature of Darqube. This is an app that lets you build automated workflows for trading in a drag-and-drop environment. You can add an unlimited number of conditions to your workflow, and for each conditional step in your workflow there is a wide range of options. For example, you can choose from dozens of technical indicators, common candlestick patterns, and fundamental metrics.

Within each conditional, you can have and/or operators as well as cross above or below logicals. Even better, the workflow can either stop if a condition isn’t met or be passed onto an alternative routing of conditions. That means that it’s possible to develop very complex trading bots that are able to consider multiple conditions in tandem when evaluating whether to execute a trade.

The biggest downside to Darqube’s bot builder is that the endpoint of your workflow must be either a buy or sell order. You cannot use a workflow to add assets to a watchlist or to send alerts. This is something that should be easy for Darqube’s creators to offer, so hopefully, these options will be available in the future.

Bot Marketplace

If you don’t want to take the time to create your own trading bot, Darqube also allows users to publish their bots to a centralized marketplace. Right now, there are only around a dozen bots available for purchase in the marketplace, and they range in price from $0.50 per month to $19.99 per month.

You can easily see their performance since being published to the market, their performance in backtesting, and how many other traders are using the bot. Darqube also allows you to inspect the backtest parameters, although you do not get access to the underlying conditions that a bot uses to trade.

Messenger

Darqube also offers a messaging platform that is accessible on its own or from within the Terminal app. For now, the messenger isn’t much help. There aren’t many users on Darqube as of this writing, and the messaging platform doesn’t offer a way to discover other traders. Rather, you have to directly search users by email. Unless Darqube offers a social media-esque feed within the messenger app, that means that it is really only useful for communicating with people you already know who also use Darqube.

Darqube Customization And Layout

Darqube is split into four different apps, although this separation makes the platform more difficult to use rather than easier. You must have multiple tabs open to use the different apps simultaneously. That said, most traders will predominantly use the Terminal app, so this isn’t a major problem.

One nice thing about the Terminal, in particular, is that you can create an unlimited number of custom workspaces using the eight available widgets. Widgets can be freely moved around the workspace, although Darqube doesn’t have a snap-to-grid feature to make placing the tools easier. Since most of the widgets support data for multiple asset types, you have a fair amount of flexibility in designing the focus of your workspaces. 

Compatible Brokers

As of this writing, Darqube does not integrate with any brokers. That’s disappointing since it means that one of the best features of the platform – the automated trading bots – are effectively useless. You can create or rent a bot to generate trading signals, but you would need to then place the trade manually with your broker. Alerts about bot trades only appear within Darqube and cannot be pushed to your phone or email, so you would need to constantly watch the platform to trade using a bot.

Darqube Platform Differentiators

Darqube has a lot of potential if the platform can be further developed. The Terminal is nice because it supports multiple assets, including cryptocurrencies, and enables you to set up highly customizable workspaces. However, the charting tools simply aren’t as good as they need to be for technical traders, and there isn’t a powerful stock or fund screener for generating trade ideas.

The trading bots are one of the stand-out features of Darqube since you can create multiple conditionals with branching workflows based on the results of those conditions. However, the potential of the bot builder and bot marketplace is vastly diminished by the fact that you cannot integrate Darqube with a broker at this time. As a result, the trading bots are more of a curiosity than a powerful trading tool.

What Type Of Trader Is Darqube Best For?

At this time, Darqube is primarily a news and basic research platform. It can be useful for traders who want to keep an eye on multiple markets, including the stock market, forex market, and crypto market. However, since you cannot place trades through Darqube and there are few tools for generating trade ideas, its utility is extremely limited. Darqube is still under development, and the platform has a lot of potential, so it may be worth exploring as a news feed or for practicing with building trading bots.

Pros

• Free to use
• Highly customizable workspaces
• Multi-asset news feed pulls stories from many sources
• Exceptional bot builder with advanced conditionals
• Bot marketplace with automated workflows for rent

Cons

• No broker integrations
• Limited technical charts
• Doesn’t offer an advanced stock or fund screener