What is a public trade tape?

What belongs on a tape

The word comes from the ticker tape era, when trades printed to paper in real time and anyone could read the strip. A modern tape does the same job: it prints the operation's activity as a running public log — not a monthly summary, not a curated case study, but the raw sequence including the days when nothing happened.

Completeness is what separates a tape from marketing. Our own tape prints every cycle of the Bluechip desk: the setups it prepared for review, the orders it placed (and the long stretches when that number is zero), plus the fund dashboard's own warnings when something is degraded. If we only showed you the flattering parts, it would not be a tape.

• Every decision, timestamped, in sequence — including passes and quiet days.
• Published as it happens, not after outcomes are known.
• Losses and warnings printed in the same font as everything else.
• An archive that cannot be silently rewritten — ours lives in a public git history.

How to read someone's tape critically

Start with the gaps: does the record cover every day, or does it start conveniently after a rough patch? Check granularity: a tape of monthly summaries hides everything interesting. Then read a boring day closely — the entries where a desk decided not to act reveal its discipline better than any winning entry.

Finally, check that the tape connects to reality: real timestamps, real quotes, plausible frequencies. A tape is evidence, not proof — but it is evidence a vendor must produce continuously in public, which makes it the hardest signal to fake for long.

First-party data — from our own desk

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