Time and Sales

Time and sales is the running record of executed trades — each print showing price, share size, timestamp, and venue. Traders call it the tape, and it is the ground truth of a session: quotes are intentions, prints are facts.

The information is in the texture. Prints hitting the offer in rapid succession signal aggressive buyers; repeated large prints at one price with no upward movement suggest a big seller absorbing demand. Print size distribution matters too — a stream of 100-share lots reads differently from sporadic 10,000-share blocks, which usually indicate institutional participation.