Rakuten
Securities will add a feature to its “MARKET SPEED II” desktop platform on July
19 that shows customers where their own orders sit in a stock’s queue in real
time.
The broker
calls the tool, named “OrderBoost,” an industry first, though it defines that
claim narrowly and says a related business-model patent is still pending.
The
company, part of internet conglomerate Rakuten Group, said OrderBoost breaks
the standard order book, known in Japan as the “ita,” into individual orders
instead of showing only the combined size resting at each price.
Rakuten
Securities and its rivals have been competing for a new generation of
Japanese investors,
and the broker’s account base crossed 14 million in April.
What OrderBoost Shows
Traders
OrderBoost
has three parts, according to the firm. An “Order Indicator” displays
the book order by order as bars, which the company said helps traders read
large-investor activity and the balance of supply and demand.
An
“Order Book List” shows every order resting at a chosen price, with
quantities, in the sequence they were placed, so a customer can gauge how far
their own order is from execution.
A third
component counts corrections and cancellations for each stock in real time. Rakuten Securities said heavy order churn can point to
algorithmic activity from large investors, a reading it framed as reference
information rather than a confirmed signal.
The broker
did not disclose how it calculates or verifies the queue position it displays.
That last
point matters, because queue position from tools like this is generally an
estimate that leans on the quality of the underlying data, not a guaranteed
exact rank.
The Idea Is New in Japan,
Not Worldwide
Showing a
trader their place in the line at a given price is well-worn ground outside
Japanese retail broking.
Bookmap, a
charting platform used by futures and active traders, has for years displayed
an approximate queue position built from order-by-order data, and it openly
flags that the accuracy depends on the feed behind it.
Exchanges
have built similar visibility into their own infrastructure. CME’s
market-by-order feed lets a participant locate their order in the queue using
anonymous identifiers, while Cboe’s EDGX equities exchange tags retail orders
on its market data feed so other traders can gauge their position.
What
Rakuten is doing is packaging that kind of view for mainstream retail equity
investors on a domestic-stock desktop tool.
Rakuten’s
“first” is scoped in a footnote to the five largest Japanese online
brokers by account count, SBI, Matsui, Monex, Mitsubishi UFJ eSmart and itself,
and it rests on the company’s own comparison as of July 6.
Domestic
rivals have been leaning on other products. SBI Securities launched crypto
contracts for difference in September 2025, its first crypto product, and Monex has
pushed its own US and digital-asset lineup.
On its own
side, Rakuten has invested in a 24-hour US stock venue and rolled out AI research tools.
With commissions on domestic equities already driven to zero, data features
have become one of the few ways left for these brokers to stand apart.
Free Access Tied to Margin
Trading
OrderBoost
will be free for customers who make five or more domestic margin trades in a
month, with access running from the day after they hit that threshold through
the end of the following month, the company said. From July 19 to the end of
August, Rakuten will open the tool to all account holders regardless of trade
count as a trial.
MARKET
SPEED II, first released in 2018, is a Windows desktop platform that handles
domestic and US stocks and CFDs, with algorithmic order types and multi-window
layouts.
Rakuten has
kept adding functions to its trading tools, including pre-market and after-hours US
trading earlier
this year.
The broker,
which describes itself as a “partner in asset building,” did not say
whether it plans to bring OrderBoost to its mobile app.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
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