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Learn
Big trades are easier to read than they look. Start with the five-minute guide, then come back whenever a word or an idea is new.
Read the tape in five minutes. Eight short steps, each with an example you can try.
9 articles
Short reads on one idea at a time, like why ranks compare a ticker only with itself, or what makes a Late Report late.
Read the articlesA print is one reported trade, and its dollar size is the first thing worth checking.
BigTape measures every print two ways, by its dollar size and by how rare that size is for its ticker, and the size ladder shows both at once.
Every trade has both a buyer and a seller, and public trade reports do not say which one started it.
Every print in BigTape is marked Exchange or Dark, and the label tells you where the trade happened and what was visible before it.
A Dark Level marks a price zone where heavy off-exchange trading added up, and Revisits and Level Breaks note what price did there later.
Some large trades arrive together, and BigTape marks three kinds of groups so you can read each one as a single event.
Auction prints and trades outside regular hours work differently from the rest of the day, and BigTape marks each kind so you can tell them apart.
Every BigTape screen tells you how current its data is, and this guide explains each data state and the times you will see.
A short routine for following big trades without watching all day, built on favorites, alerts that open the print and one catch-up card.
4 studies, all planned
Our research write-ups. Each one says what we tested, how we tested it and what we found, including results that didn't hold up.
See the studiesBigTape's studies ask plain questions about big trades, such as how rare a #1 Print is and when big prints arrive during the day.
We publish each study's question and method before we run it. You can see exactly what will be measured, on which trades and over which dates, before anyone knows the answer. Publishing first also means the method cannot quietly change later to suit a result.
Each study page sets out its definitions, the trades it includes, what it will report and what it cannot show. Results appear only after a study is run on licensed market data. Until then, any chart on a study page is an illustration on generated sample data, and it is labeled that way. When a result is published, it sits on the same page as the plan, so you can check one against the other.
The studies describe the past. They do not predict prices or recommend trades, and they never infer a trade's side.
A planned study of how often a ticker sets a New #1 Print, and how that rate changes with the length of its history.
A planned study of where big prints fall in the trading day, with the opening and closing auctions measured on their own.
A planned study of how often price returns to a Dark Level, measured beside ordinary price zones so it describes Revisits without implying they predict anything.
A planned study of whether unusually large prints tend to occur on days of unusually high volume, described as co-occurrence only.
For moving averages, VWAP, RSI and MACD, see Chart studies on the Features page.
30 terms
Every BigTape term in one plain line, with its mark. The app uses the same words, so what you learn here holds everywhere.
Open the glossaryThis ticker's largest single trade by dollar value since 2016.
One of this ticker's 10 or 100 largest trades since 2016.
Bigger than 99.9% of this ticker's trades since 2016; $50,000 minimum.
Traded on a public stock exchange.
Traded off-exchange, at a private venue or inside a broker. Side unknown.
Specially flagged trades landing on two or more venues within 5 milliseconds. Side unknown.