Trades (Tape)

A list of recent trades (executed fills) is often called the tape. The name comes from older markets: before the 1960s, prices were sent by telegraph and printed on a physical ticker tape. Electronic trading moved the tape to screens and added fields such as side and size, but the usual layout stayed the same: a list or table. On older, slower venues a human could still scan trades per minute. Modern markets — especially crypto — produce far more prints, so a pure table becomes hard to use. Filters (minimum size, group by price) help, but they still lean on reading numbers. A histogram of total size per time bucket (as in the TradingLite example above) shows intensity, but it hides price. MarketLens aims at a visual tape that still reads like a tape — size and price together, without a wall of rows.

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Single market

Following the principle that values should be visually measurable, each trade is a stripe (bar) whose length is proportional to size. The order book next to the tape provides a natural size reference: the same N pixels on the tape and on the book mean the same size S (shared size scale).

• X (price) is shared with the book; each stripe sits at its trade price
• Green stripes are buys, red are sells (depends on the selected color scheme)
• Large trades are drawn as stripes separated by a tiny gap, so big prints stay readable as stacked segments instead of one solid block
• Time on the right is non-linear and shows how much size traded and how quickly activity clusters

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Multiple markets

Aggregation is straightforward: trades from all selected markets are drawn on the same view. Time is not continuous print-by-print across venues. Prints are synchronized into time slices (groups) — 1 second on screen — so multi-market activity stays readable. Hover a market in the markets list to highlight only that venue’s trades on the tape.

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Liquidations

Liquidations are forced trades on futures markets when a position is closed because the account can no longer meet margin (bankruptcy / liquidation process on that venue). MarketLens marks them with a fire icon. If size is large enough, a stripe is drawn for the liquidation as well. Venues report liquidation prices differently: See also: L2 order book, Unified order flow.