Time & Sales (The Tape)
The raw feed of executed trades — price, size, time, one line per trade.
What it means
Before charts, traders read the tape: every execution printed in sequence. Time & sales is that feed — each line a real trade with its price and size. Everything else (bars, volume, strength) is an aggregation of it.
Automated systems read the tape statistically rather than line by line: per-second aggregations of trade count, size and aggressor side preserve most of the signal while staying computable.
Why traders care
- The ground truth — when chart and tape disagree, the tape is right.
- Large single prints (blocks) are events worth detecting in their own right.
Related terms
Educational content, not investment advice. Engine details describe how TraderWe computes this value; other platforms may define it differently.