Limitations
What Tapeline is not good at
Every product page on this site describes what Tapeline does. This one describes where it is weak, what it cannot see, and what it cannot tell you. It is written to be read before you pay for anything.
Six factors can only see so much
Tapeline narrows a very long list into a shorter one. It is not a substitute for reading a company.
- Six factors compress an enormous amount of information into one number. Anything the six do not measure is invisible to the score — competitive position, management quality, pending litigation, customer concentration, contract terms, product cycle, regulatory exposure.
- Bottom-up research done properly goes far deeper than any screen can. A screen's only advantage is that it covers thousands of names in a minute; use it to decide what to look at, not what to conclude.
The data can be late, missing, or simply wrong
Every input arrives from an upstream source, and upstream sources fail in ways Tapeline cannot always detect.
- By law, company insiders have a few days to report a trade on Form 4, so the insider data is always a bit old.
- Company numbers only change when a company reports its results. For most companies the reading stays the same for weeks, and a company can later correct numbers it already reported.
- Economy data is published late and is often revised afterwards.
- Sectors are not always clear-cut. Big companies with many businesses, foreign companies listed in the US (ADRs), holding companies and funds with several themes often land in a sector somebody could argue with.
- When some of a stock's data is missing, its score has less behind it. The per-ticker confidence percentage shows how much of the data came back. It is shown in its own column of the scanner on a wide screen (a dash where a row has no reading) and on a ticker's own page when that ticker has a page and a reading; the scanner drops the column on a narrow phone screen for want of room.
- Feed outages have happened and will happen again. When one materially affects the product, it is written into the changelog with a date.
It describes stocks; it does not give advice
This is a general-information tool. It does not know who you are, and it is not built to.
- Tapeline is not a registered investment adviser and does not issue buy, sell or hold recommendations. The signal labels describe the state of the factor data; they do not prescribe an action.
- The product knows nothing about your circumstances, and by design it never asks — Tapeline does not collect portfolio size, capital, holdings, risk tolerance, experience or investment goals anywhere on the site.
- Because it knows nothing about you, nothing it outputs can be tailored to you. Whether a given reading fits your situation is a question Tapeline simply cannot answer.
- Scores describe measurements taken from published data. They are not forecasts, and no part of the product predicts a price.
Coverage and product gaps
Things people reasonably expect that Tapeline does not currently do.
- US-listed equities and ETFs, plus more than 100 crypto pairs scored separately from daily closes. Most crypto prices are re-read from CoinGecko about once a minute; a few pairs still carry a daily close, which can be several days old. Crypto scores are rebuilt about once a day where the data allows, so a score can be older than its price: each crypto page shows when its score was last computed, and a pair whose score stops updating leaves the ranked lists. No options, no futures and no individual bonds. Bond funds are covered: a bond ETF is scored like any other fund, as are exchange-listed notes, because they list like stocks (see below). One non-US listing, FFH.TO, still has a page; it carries no price and is not in the scanner.
- We score the stocks and funds that trade actively, not every listed security. Very small or rarely traded names may not be covered. The scanner's default view skips stocks that trade too little, funds that use borrowed money or bet against the market (leveraged and inverse funds), and listings that are not common stock, such as exchange-listed notes, preferred shares, warrants, rights and units. Those listings are still scored, and you can switch them back on in the scanner.
- A fund has no company accounts to read, so for most ETFs the Fundamentals factor is unavailable and the score rests on fewer inputs. It is not unavailable for all of them: about one scored fund in eight carries a fundamentals reading derived from what its provider reports, and that reading is not comparable to a company's.
- There is no backtesting feature, no portfolio tracking, and no execution. Tapeline does not connect to a broker and cannot place a trade.
- We don't show made-up 'what you would have earned' numbers: no yearly (annualised) return, no risk-adjusted score such as a Sharpe ratio, no pretend profit-and-loss, and no test of the method on past data (a backtest).
- It is one person's product. Support is one person's inbox, and new releases come as fast as one person can make them.
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