Trading term
What is Time and sales?
Time and sales, also called the tape, is the running list of every completed trade — time, price, size and often whether it hit the bid or lifted the offer. It is the rawest record a market produces.
The tape scrolls continuously, one line per execution. Each shows the timestamp, the price, the quantity, and usually a colour indicating whether the trade occurred at the bid (a seller crossing) or at the offer (a buyer crossing). Nothing is aggregated, smoothed or interpreted — it is the market's actual transaction log.
Reading it, an old skill called tape reading, is about noticing character rather than individual prints. A steady drip of small trades at the offer reads differently from a sudden burst of large ones. Repeated big prints at the same bid price that fails to break tells you someone is absorbing supply there. Speed matters too: the tape accelerating is often the first sign of a move, before it shows up on a candle.
Its limitation is scale. On a liquid instrument the tape moves far faster than anyone can read, which is why most traders now consume it aggregated — as order flow, footprints or delta — rather than line by line.
A run of 100–200 share buys at the offer, then a single 8,000-share trade at the bid. No candlestick reveals that block until the bar closes.
For example
The tape prints a run of 100–200 share trades at the offer, then a single 8,000-share block at the bid, then the small prints resume. That one large trade at the bid is a seller taking liquidity in size — information no candlestick will show you until the bar closes.
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Explore Premium →Why it matters to you
Everything else on a chart is derived from the tape. A candlestick is just a summary of it; a moving average is a summary of the summary. Watching the raw prints is the only way to see size and aggression as they arrive rather than after a bar has closed, which is why it remains a staple for very short-term traders.
⚠ It's unreadable on liquid instruments
On an active stock or future the tape prints faster than the eye can follow, and trying to read it line by line produces the illusion of insight rather than insight. It also lies in fragmented markets, where a single order routed across venues prints as many small trades. Use aggregated views unless the instrument is genuinely slow.