The eight things people ask first.

Yes. Once you connect a live brokerage account and let a strategy trade in it, real money is at risk and you can lose some or all of it. If your brokerage account permits margin or short selling, you can lose more than you put in.

Tape does not guarantee, project or protect any outcome, and it does not reduce the risk inherent in trading. Practice trading is different: it is a simulation inside Tape, no order ever reaches a broker, and no money is at stake.

Every strategy runs in one of two engines. Rule-based strategies use no AI at all — they evaluate the conditions you configured and nothing else. AI-assisted strategies additionally send the market context and your configured rules to a Claude model, which returns a directional read — bullish, bearish or neutral — together with a written rationale.

The model does not invent rules, set your position size, or change your risk settings. Risk per trade, take profit, stop loss, universe and trading hours are yours, and they are enforced in code after the model answers. Every candidate carries its rationale into the journal, so you can read why a trade was taken after the fact.

Tape has no “crash mode” and makes no claim to protect you from a falling market. What it does have is mechanical: stop losses are evaluated continuously against live prices, autonomous positions are closed by the end-of-day sweep at the close unless you have explicitly opted out, and both kill switches remain available throughout.

You should assume that in a fast, gapping or illiquid market a stop can fill well below its trigger price, or fail to fill at all. That is a property of markets, not something software removes.

Always. You can pause or stop an individual strategy, halt everything in your account with the master switch, or close any position yourself. These are not advisory flags: the checks live inside the execution engine, so every path that could place an order has to pass them first.

A halt takes effect on the next evaluation and prevents new orders. It does not retroactively unwind an order that has already been sent to a venue.

Practice trading needs no broker at all — you can sign up and run strategies against real market prices on a simulated ledger straight away.

For live trading, Tape connects to Alpaca directly, and to Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Webull, E*TRADE, Interactive Brokers, Tradier, Public and more through SnapTrade. Tape is not a broker itself. When you connect a brokerage, your funds stay in your own account, in your own name, at your own SEC- and FINRA-regulated brokerage. Tape never takes custody of them and never opens an account on your behalf.

There is a free tier at $0 and a Pro tier at $20 a month, or $192 a year if you pay annually — which works out at $16 a month and saves you $48. That subscription is the whole of what Tape charges: no cut of your trades, no per-trade fee, and no revenue from how your orders are routed.

Your brokerage’s own costs — spreads, commissions, fees, margin interest — are set by your brokerage and remain between you and them. You can cancel at any time.

To run the product, Tape stores your account details, the strategies you configure, and the record of the orders and journal entries they produce. When you connect a brokerage through SnapTrade, Tape receives the access needed to read your positions and place the orders you have authorised — your brokerage login credentials are handled by that connection flow and are never entered into or stored by Tape.

Market data, news and filings come from third-party providers listed above. A full privacy policy is in preparation; until it is published, treat this answer as a plain description of how the product works rather than a legal commitment.

No. Tape is software. It is not a broker-dealer, not an investment adviser, and not registered with the SEC or FINRA in any capacity. It does not hold your money, take custody of assets, recommend securities, or provide personalised investment advice.

Practice trading is a simulation Tape runs. Live trading is executed by your own regulated brokerage, on instructions generated by the rules you configured.