The Tape opens in 9 daysThursday 29 October · Alpha Insider and above

Nine days out, and today was about making The Tape sharper.

Here's the flash we think matters most, what changed today, and the next feature on its way to you.

The flash to watch: Order book stacked

The Tape reads the order book on five spot exchanges every five minutes and adds up the buy orders and sell orders waiting near price. On the chart, that's the band: green under price when more buyers are waiting, red above when more sellers are.

When the book tips clearly to one side, you get a flash:

  • Order book stacked with buyers: clearly more buy orders than sell orders waiting close to price.
  • Order book stacked with sellers: clearly more sell orders than buy orders waiting close to price.

It only fires when the book has actually shifted. It needs to have been even, or stacked the other way, since the last one. It fires at most once per side every three hours, so you'll see a handful a day, not a stream. Each one tells you which side is stacked and what price has done over the last 12 hours, so you can see whether the book is leaning with the move or against it.

Most tools show you one big order. This shows you which way the whole book near price is leaning across five exchanges, in one line on your phone.

Today: fewer, sharper wall flashes

The wall flashes now focus on five events:

  • New big wall: large orders appear next to price and stay.
  • Wall pulled: price reached it and most of it was taken away, with how much traded and how much vanished.
  • Wall filled: the orders were real and got traded.
  • Wall broken: an hourly candle closed through it.
  • Soaking up: buyers or sellers hit the wall, it took everything and got topped up.

These are the moments that tell you something real happened at a wall: what traded, what was pulled, where price closed. The smaller in-between updates no longer post to Telegram, so the Insider topic carries the events that matter instead of every twitch at a level. You can still see all of them on the page.

Also new today

Futures flashes now name the nearest big wall. When traders open a burst of new long or short bets, the flash shows the nearest big buy or sell wall across the spot and futures order books, so you can see where those positions sit.

Coming next: POC levels

The POC (point of control) is the price where the most volume traded in a period. It's a level a lot of traders watch, so we're adding it to The Tape:

  • Daily, weekly and monthly POCs on the chart, from Binance spot volume, going back to September 2025.
  • Solid line: price hasn't been back to that level since its period closed.
  • Dimmed and dashed: price has already been back and tested it.
  • The value area, where 70% of the volume traded, for the latest day, week and month.

And flashes to go with them:

  1. When a new daily, weekly or monthly POC forms.
  2. When price comes back to an untested POC for the first time, as support from above or resistance from below.
  3. Whether it held or gave way, judged on the close of its own timeframe: daily close for a daily POC, weekly for weekly, monthly for monthly.

Then you can read the POCs alongside the order book bands, the stacked flashes and the wall flashes and see where they line up.

We're putting it through its paces this week, running the rules over 15 months of data before it reaches you.

What you get on the 29th

  • The full Tape page: where Bitcoin buyers and sellers are waiting across five spot exchanges, plus futures positions on Bybit and Binance.
  • Live flashes in the Alpha Insider Telegram topic, including Order book stacked.
  • The morning read, every day.

Next update in a few days. Same countdown, more to show.

Oz

Not on Alpha Insider yet? The Tape is included from 29 October.

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