Tape

A century ago, stock prices arrived in brokerages on a narrow strip of paper printed by a machine that ticked as it ran — the ticker tape. Traders stood around it reading the strip as it came out, and “reading the tape” came to mean watching the flow of trades to get a feel for what the market was doing right now, rather than looking at a chart of what it had done.

The paper is long gone, but the word stuck. Today “the tape” means any live, newest-first record of what’s happening: the prints on an exchange, or, in BotStock, the stream of what your engine decided, filled and stopped today.

For example: if you glance at your tape and see three signals blocked in a row by the same risk limit, that’s the tape telling you something your P&L can’t — your rules are finding trades your settings won’t let them take.