What Tape does

Eight things the product actually does — and the things it deliberately doesn’t.

Tape is a single iPhone app with a subscription. There are no tiers of service, no managed accounts, and no advisory relationship. This page is the full list.

01

Practice trading on a simulated ledger

A $100,000 practice account, priced against real market data, with no brokerage connection required and no real money involved. Practice accounts are segregated per user, so one account’s activity can never affect another’s. This is where most people should start and it is available on the free tier.

02

Strategy configuration

Over 120 strategies in the library, each configurable and runnable against a single symbol or a universe scan. You can also describe a strategy in plain English — “risk $100 a trade, take profit at 2%, stop at 2%” — and Tape parses that into a configuration you review before anything runs.

03

Autonomous execution against your rules

Attach a strategy to the autonomous engine and it scans on your schedule, surfaces candidates with a plain-language rationale, and stages orders inside the envelope you set. It never sizes a position or changes a limit on its own — those are yours, and they are enforced in code.

04

Automated exits

Take-profit and stop-loss levels are evaluated continuously against live prices. An end-of-day sweep closes autonomous positions by the close unless you have explicitly opted out. Fills in fast, gapping or illiquid markets can land away from the trigger price — that is a property of markets, not something the software removes.

05

Backtesting with realistic costs

The backtest engine applies the same decide-to-fill lag and liquidity-tiered slippage as the live execution path, and reports gross and net separately. Backtest results are hypothetical, are not a record of actual trading, and are not indicative of future results.

06

Market research surface

Live charts, watchlists, a screener, an economic calendar and session awareness, plus news and SEC filings. Market data comes from Massive, news from Benzinga, and filings from SEC EDGAR. These are inputs for your own research, not recommendations.

07

A unified journal

Practice, live and backtest activity land on one timeline with the rationale that produced each entry. Filter by source, review what happened, and refine. Deleting a strategy does not remove the trades it produced from the record.

08

Safety systems

A per-strategy switch and an account-wide master switch, both enforced by the execution engine. A hard daily ceiling on AI spend that refuses calls rather than degrading quietly. Trading-hours gating so a strategy only runs in the session you chose.

Not offered

What Tape does not do

This list is as important as the one above, and it is not going to change quietly.

  • Tape does not manage money or trade a discretionary account on your behalf.
  • Tape does not hold, receive, or take custody of customer funds or securities.
  • Tape does not provide investment advice, recommend securities, or issue buy or sell directives.
  • Tape does not offer retirement accounts, cash management, deposits, withdrawals or transfers.
  • Tape does not offer bonds, money-market funds, or any managed-portfolio or automated-advice product.
  • Tape does not guarantee, project, or protect any trading outcome, and publishes no trading returns.
  • Tape does not take a share of your trades and earns nothing from how your orders are routed.

Tape is software. It is not a broker-dealer, not an investment adviser, and not registered with the SEC or FINRA in any capacity. Live orders are executed by your own regulated brokerage — Alpaca directly, or another brokerage connected through SnapTrade — on instructions generated by rules you configured yourself.

What it costs

A free tier at $0, and a Pro tier at $20 a month that adds the autonomous engine, the full backtest engine, multi-brokerage support and advanced scheduling. That subscription is the whole of what Tape charges. Your brokerage’s own costs — spreads, commissions, fees, margin interest — are set by your brokerage and remain between you and them. Cancel any time.

Start on the practice ledger.

No brokerage account, no card, no real money.

Requires iPhone. Trading involves risk of loss.