Blog
Plain-English guides to reading stocks and scores, plus notes from building Tapeline. Newest first. RSS.
Single terms are defined in the glossary, and product changes are listed on what’s new.
A stock chart is a compressed record of every transaction ever made in one stock — not a prediction of the next one. This guide breaks down the four things every chart actually shows: price, volume, trend, and the support, resistance, and moving-average lines traders draw on top. Each is taught honestly — including where it quietly lies — and connected to Tapeline's Trend factor.
Read →MACD is the most-screenshotted indicator in trading and the most misread. Here's how the MACD indicator is actually built — the line, signal, and histogram — what crossovers and divergence mean, and where it whipsaws in choppy markets. Then, honestly, how Tapeline reads the same trend and momentum ideas underneath it as two separate factors.
Read →"Best technical indicators for swing trading" is the wrong question — no indicator predicts, they only describe. Here's an honest walk through RSI, moving averages, relative strength, and volume: what each actually measures, where it goes quiet, and how Tapeline folds the trend and relative-strength reads into named factors instead of a single line on a chart.
Read →A Bollinger Band squeeze is when a stock's volatility bands pinch tight — the classic sign that a large move may be loading. But a squeeze tells you when something might happen, never which way, and the fakeouts are brutal. Here's how to spot a genuine volatility contraction, why it fires false signals, and how Tapeline reads the directional context around it — descriptively, with no dedicated "squeeze" score.
Read →A stock rating can tell you what to do, or it can tell you what's true — and those are very different products. This post breaks down descriptive rating systems versus prescriptive buy/sell verdicts: the cognitive traps a verdict hides, the legal line it crosses, and why Tapeline's labels describe a state instead of issuing a command.
Read →"AI stock scanner" has become a marketing label, not a disclosure — most tools that wear it will show you the winners and name nothing that goes into the number. This is the honest case for the opposite: named factors, with each stock's score on every one shown. Transparency isn't an edge, but opacity should be a red flag.
Read →Sector rotation sounds like a strategy but is really an observation — which of the eleven GICS sectors the market has been favouring, and which it has left behind. Heading through Q3 2026, here is how to read sector leadership honestly: regime first, then Relative Strength by sector, without pretending anyone can forecast the next rotation. It connects that read to Tapeline's Macro factor and per-sector pages.
Read →RSI stands for Relative Strength Index — a 0–100 momentum oscillator that signals overbought vs oversold conditions. Here's how it actually works, what the 70/30 thresholds mean, and the three mistakes retail traders make using it.
Read →Momentum investing rewards stocks where price is sustainably accelerating up. The problem: pure 'biggest movers' lists are mostly noise. Here's how to filter for real momentum, including the three confluence checks that separate runners from head-fakes.
Read →Retail trading folklore says 'buy at the open', 'wait until the last hour', or 'never on Mondays'. A plain-English summary of what published market research says about intraday, day-of-week and month-of-year patterns: which ones still show up, and which have faded. Background reading, not trading advice.
Read →We benchmarked the four sub-$30/mo stock scanners retail traders actually consider in 2026 — Finviz Elite, Stock Rover Essentials, Zacks Premium, and Tapeline — across feature depth, data freshness and how open each one is about its method. Here's the honest matrix.
Read →SEC Form 4 — the filing every corporate insider must submit within 2 business days of a trade — is the rawest 'smart money' signal retail traders can access. But 90% of Form 4 activity is noise. Here's how to filter for the 10% that matters, and where Tapeline's Smart Money factor fits.
Read →'Smart money' is the most misused phrase in retail finance. It's not influencer alpha, not the latest hedge-fund headline, not yesterday's CNBC clip. Here's what Tapeline's Smart Money factor — one of the six — actually measures, what the data sources are, and where the lags lie.
Read →'Screener' and 'scanner' aren't synonyms — one gives filters, the other a verdict. Which you need, and where Finviz fits, decides which tool you keep.
Read →Most scanner scores are a number with no instructions. This is the opposite: a worked example on NVIDIA showing what each of the six factors is saying, how to read the radar, and when the composite is telling you the trade is harder than it looks.
Read →Most scanner sales pages are 50 filters and a screenshot. Here are the four questions that actually predict whether a tool will be useful in six months — and how Finviz, Trade Ideas, Zacks, and Tapeline answer them.
Read →Six descriptive labels, no buy/sell language. Here's what each one means, why we picked descriptive words, and what it means when a ticker moves between them.
Read →Updated 14 September 2026: we now score about 11,500 US stocks and ETFs. As published in May 2026: A third-party market-data feed covers thousands of US tickers. We actively score ~2,500 by daily dollar-volume — here's why that cutoff exists, what we do with the rest, and why bigger isn't better.
Read →One page per stock: its score, the six factors behind it, and what each one means.