NYSE Open Book: Basic How To

This is the NYSE Open Book for my trading software. Without getting into too much detail here it shows me the depth of the market for the individual stock as far as the nyse limit orders are concerned.It is split into two sections of data,the first being data for the Bid,and the second being data for the Ask.Ignore the grey areas that is just level 1 data.
I will start from left to right and describe each column as column 1,column 2 and column 3.I will do this twice for both the Bid side and the Ask side.

Column 1 you will see the nyse label,that just means there is a nyse limit order there.(If you change the settings you can also see ARCA,ISLD,and so on, but we don't care about those right now.)

Column 2 you will see the best bid price in this example it is 44.71.

Column 3 you will see the number of shares being bid, in this example there are 1800 shares being bid(I am very visual and only like to see the 18,add the 2 zeros on in your head.For myself this gives me a better visual perception of the differences in the depth).Most software you can show the entire 1800 if you like.
Looking down in the book you will see the different price levels, hence the depth of the book.

Now repeat columns 1,2,and 3 in the right half of the book and you have the limit orders for the Ask.

The orders will come in and out of the book as the stock trades,when I post my trades I will often say big size came in at the bid or offer,when I say that I just mean a large limit order came in. I will also say size stepped up for longs or size stepped down for shorts,there I'm saying that they came up or down a price level in the book.

This is just scratching the surface of how to read the nyse book.I will explain the correlation of the nyse book and the Level 2 (marketmaker w/time and sales),how to spot the specialist,and how to spot floating orders, in another post. For a small fee ;)Just a joke.

If you have any questions feel free to comment.