Stock Analysis
Software for Traders

On a standard volume bar, 500 shares traded looks the same whether it was one institutional order or 500 separate 1-share retail orders. The bar only tells you the total — it doesn’t tell you how that total was assembled.

Smart Tape removes that ambiguity. It shows every execution as a separate print, in the exact order it happened, without merging small trades together or splitting a large one apart. Each line on the tape is one real trade — nothing more, nothing less.

You see the exact size of each execution, the price it hit, and which side of the spread paid to get filled. That last part matters: it tells you whether the buyer was aggressive enough to lift the offer, or the seller pushed through the bid — the kind of detail a volume bar alone can’t show.

Put together, that’s the difference between a real block trade and a hundred retail clicks that would otherwise look identical on a chart.

Say most trades that hour were under 500 shares, and then a single 50,000-share order prints. On a standard chart, that’s one bar among hundreds — nothing marks it as different from the bars around it, so it’s easy to miss entirely.

Big Trades and Big Trades Adaptive flag executions like that automatically as they happen. You don’t have to watch the tape line by line waiting for something large to print — the tools do that scanning for you and mark the exact price where the trade went through.

Adaptive adjusts the size threshold to the stock and the session instead of using one fixed number — so what counts as “large” scales with how that particular stock actually trades.

On a standard chart, a candle shows open, high, low, and close, and the volume bar below it adds a total — say, 10,000 shares while the stock moved from $50.00 to $50.20. Neither shows how that volume split by price or by side.

Footprint opens the same candle into a ladder of executions, price level by price level, showing where the volume sat and who was aggressive at each price.

• Cluster Statistics summarizes each bar underneath it — volume, delta, trades, bar height — so you read the shape of the move at a glance.
• Stacked Imbalance flags consecutive price levels where aggressive orders on one side outnumber resting orders on the other — several in a row marks real conviction, not noise.
• Cluster Search filters the whole session for that kind of activity — volume spikes, delta spikes, imbalances — instead of scrolling bar by bar.

Say a stock spends most of a session trading in a tight range, then briefly spikes higher before dropping back. On a standard candle chart, that spike looks just as significant as everything else — a tall wick, same visual weight as the rest of the session.

Volume Profile shows the difference. Instead of plotting price against time, it plots price against volume, turning the session on its side to reveal exactly where the most shares actually changed hands. The range where the stock sat for hours builds a tall shelf on the profile; the brief spike barely registers, because almost nothing traded there.

Those high-volume shelves tend to act as support and resistance going forward — that’s where the most participants already agreed the price was fair. The value area marks the core range the market accepted, so you can see the boundaries at a glance instead of reading every price level by hand.

A stock can sit flat for an hour while, underneath, buyers are aggressively lifting the offer the entire time — or sellers are quietly unloading into every small uptick. A candle chart won’t show you which. Flat price could mean nothing is happening, or it could mean two sides are fighting to a standstill.

Delta shows that balance directly: the difference between aggressive buying and aggressive selling in each bar, not just how many shares traded.

Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) stacks that balance across the session, turning bar-by-bar pressure into a running total you can read as a trend of its own.

That running total is where it gets useful. If price stays flat while CVD keeps climbing, buyers are building a position underneath a chart that looks like nothing is happening. If price grinds higher while CVD is falling, the move is running on thinner participation than the chart suggests — worth a closer look before you take the breakout at face value.