Time and sales, free.

What you get

• Every trade as it prints, with price, size and the side that crossed the spread
• Aggressor flags taken from the venue rather than inferred from an uptick rule
• Trades aggregated the way the exchange aggregates them, so one large order does not arrive as forty rows of noise
• A running count of exactly how many trades have been loaded, so you know what the numbers are built on
• The same tape feeding the footprint chart, so what you read on the tape and what you read on the ladder cannot disagree

Why this is usually paid for

Time and sales is old technology and it is still behind a login almost everywhere, because it is bundled with level-two entitlements rather than priced on its own. In equities that bundling reflects a real exchange fee. In crypto it reflects nothing but habit — the venues publish the tape on a public websocket to anyone who asks.

So Basis asks, in your browser, and renders what comes back. There is no per-seat feed cost behind the tape, and a page that charged for it would be charging for the connection rather than the data.

How to use it

1. 1

   Open the tape

   The button below opens the terminal. In the Order Flow panel, choose the Time and Sales tab. Prints start arriving immediately; nothing needs configuring and there is no symbol to enter separately, since the tape follows the chart.

2. 2

   Read size before you read direction

   Direction on the tape is noisy — a run of small buys means very little. Size is the signal. One print several times larger than everything around it is a decision by someone with a reason, and those are the prints worth marking.

3. 3

   Watch the tape against a level

   The tape is most informative when you already have a price in mind. Put a level on the chart, then watch what happens on the tape as price reaches it: heavy prints that fail to move price are a different event from thin prints that sail through.

4. 4

   Use it to check what the ladder promised

   A wall in the order book is a claim until it trades. Keep the DOM and the tape side by side and you can tell absorption from cancellation: absorbed size prints on the tape, cancelled size simply disappears from the ladder without a trace.

Questions

Also free