Every trade in a U.S. stock leaves a public report behind. Traders call that report a print. BigTape finds the few prints that are unusually large and puts them on one clear chart.
One trade, written down
The word comes from the paper ticker tape that once printed trades as they happened. The idea has stayed the same. A print is one trade, written down for anyone to see.
Each print holds four plain facts. It has a price, a number of shares, a time and the kind of venue where the trade happened. Here is a print as BigTape describes it.
$212M print at $131.40, 10:42:07 ET. Top 10 since 2016. Dark. Side unknown.
Read it one piece at a time. At $131.40 a share, 1,613,000 shares come to about $212 million, so that is the print's size. The time is when the trade happened, in Eastern time. “
One label changes how you read the time. A
Most trades are small
A heavily traded stock can see hundreds of thousands of trades in a single day. Most of them are small, often a few hundred shares or fewer. On a chart, thousands of ordinary trades blur together.
A few trades are far larger than the rest. Picking them out turns a blur of activity into a short list you can read. That is why BigTape starts with size.
Size is also the fact you can read without guessing. The price, the shares and the time are in the report, and the dollar value is simple multiplication. Nothing about it depends on a theory of what the trade meant.
Big compared with what
A dollar figure on its own can mislead. In a giant index ETF that trades billions of dollars a day, a $40 million trade can be routine. In a smaller company, the same $40 million could be the largest trade since 2016.
So BigTape compares every print with its ticker's own history. It ranks each print by dollar value against that ticker's trades since 2016, or since its first covered day if that came later. The largest is the
Every print shows both numbers. The dollars come first, so you always see the size. The rank tells you how unusual that size is for this ticker.
Reading prints on the chart
On the chart, each print is a circle at its time and price. A solid blue disc means the trade happened on an exchange. A hollow pink ring means it happened off-exchange, which BigTape calls Dark. Shape is the kind of trade, fill is where it traded, size and number are the rank: the bigger the circle, the rarer the trade is for this ticker. A Top 10 print carries its rank number, and the #1 Print is the biggest mark, with 1 inside.
Select any print to see its details. You get the size, the rank for that ticker, the exact time and the venue type. A panel called “Price after this print” shows what price did next, for context. A print does not cause or predict a price move, so read that panel as history.
The chart draws the top 10 prints by all-time rank in the part of the chart you're looking at. Pick Show 5, Show 20, Show 50 or Show all under Prints to change that. The Simple view shows prints and Dark Levels only; Standard and Everything add other kinds of marks. The shapes stay the same in every view, so what you learn here carries over.