The Tapeworm user manual

This is the whole product on one page. Each section says what a screen is for, what is on it and how to read it. For the two big screens there are longer walk-throughs: the Tape and Blackbox. If you only want one answer, ask Moneyness in the app instead.

1. Getting set up

• Sign in at tapeworm.app with your email. You get a sign-in link, no password.
• Add an account. Pick your prop firm and plan, or “own account” for a personal broker account. Altimeter loads the firm’s rules; for your own account you type the limits you want held to.
• Label it. Two accounts of the same kind need different labels. You can rename one any time in Settings.
• Import your fills (section 4). Everything that grades you starts there.

2. The Tape

The screen you read before the open and glance at during the session. Read it top to bottom; it takes about a minute.

Markets

Nine tabs: ES, NQ and RTY futures, SPY, QQQ and IWM, crude (CL), gold (GC) and the S&P 500 cash index (SPX). Futures and SPX read in points, the ETFs in dollars. SPX has no overnight session, so its chart shows regular hours only. The page remembers the last tab you used.

Freshness and outages

The header says when the numbers were read and when the next read is due (“AS OF … · 2 min ago · next ~10:27 ET”). It turns amber if a read is late. If our feed falls behind, the chip reads DOWN and a banner says what is affected. If one outside source is down, an amber banner names it and everything else stays live. Values that change on a refresh light up briefly.

The six key numbers

• Spot, with the session range.
• Expected move (EM), from the at-the-money straddle on the nearest expiry.
• Price vs band, where spot sits in the session band.
• EM / ATR, the priced move against the real one. Tight (under 1 ATR) tends to be a band-tag day; wide tends to be a range day.
• Dealer gamma regime: above the flip reads positive (moves tend to pin), below it negative (moves tend to run).
• Distance to the 240m EMA, in ATR, with its slope.

The chart

Five-minute candles with the day’s levels drawn over them.

• Call wall, put wall and flip are drawn as step lines from the session open, so when a wall moves you still see where it was. Wall jumps are dotted. The current values also run across the chart with their own tags on the price axis.
• Max Pain is the violet dashed line.
• The EM band: top, bottom and anchor, plus faint lines halfway to each edge (“50% TO EM TOP / BOT”). The chart says when today’s band will lock until it does.
• The 240m EMA.
• Set-up markers: an arrow on the bar where a set-up armed today, with its name and time. Hover for the price.
• Zoom and pan: the mouse wheel zooms, a drag pans, and dragging the price axis stretches it. RESET VIEW puts it back. Live refreshes keep your view.

The EM band gauge

A ring showing where price sits inside the move the options market priced. 50% is the anchor, 0 and 100% are the edges, and past them is beyond the priced move. Overnight it uses the 5 PM PT band on the next expiry, with the thinner 3 PM read alongside. In the session it switches to the frozen session band. A faint mark keeps the session high, and a tag of an edge that reverted is flagged.

Positioning

• Call wall and put wall: the strikes where dealers carry the most gamma above and below price. Each shows its distance and its reach odds (how often price reached a level that far away).
• Flip: the zero-gamma cross nearest price. “Beyond range” means gamma keeps one sign across every strike we read.
• Max Pain: the strike where option holders as a group would collect the least at the nearest expiry, and how far it is from price. It’s a map of open interest, not a price target.
• Also on the card: net gamma, its change through the day, the put/call ratio and the open-interest date.

Key expirations

The walls above add up the front six expirations. This card reads four expirations one at a time: the nearest, this week’s, the monthly (third Friday) and the quarterly. Crude and gold have no quarterly. Each row shows that expiry’s own call wall, put wall, flip, Max Pain and ATM IV.

• Click an expiry for its GEX by strike, with a strike range picker: 5 strikes either side, near the money, 20, 50 or all.
• Max Pain by expiry: a small chart of each expiry’s Max Pain over the next 45 days, against the current price.
• Live reads only, on the Trader and Pro plans.

GEX by Strike and options volume flow

The ladder of the biggest gamma strikes, with price marked between them. Green bars are positive dealer gamma, red are negative. Under it is today’s options volume flow:

• Call and put volume, and the net.
• Where the volume traded: in, at or out of the money.
• Per strike, its volume and how many times its open interest traded today (“P 8.9×”). Strikes at 5× or more are highlighted, which is where new positioning shows up.

Equity options volume resets at the 6:30 AM PT open. Index and futures options build overnight.

The other cards

• Structure and anchors: the frozen session band, the prior day’s high, low and close, and the gap.
• Volatility: the straddle, implied vol, the shape of the vol curve, and range expansion.
• Pattern and momentum: the daily pattern (NR7, inside or outside day), Pinball, rate-of-change divergence, the 240m 3/10 with its cross and oscillator, and vehicle strength (RMI, with today’s live price).
• Calendar: the next high-impact release with a countdown.
• Liquidity: net liquidity from the Fed balance sheet, the Treasury account and reverse repo, with the 4-week Treasury-account flow.
• Cross-market rail.
• Trader: whether your records are up to date, and trades against your own norm.
• Set-up lights on ES, NQ and RTY. Their records were measured on ES, and the card says so.

3. Blackbox

The record. Each imported trade is stamped with what the Tape showed when you entered. Blackbox then grades you against your own history:

• The scorecard and score.
• The equity curve.
• The calendar.
• By condition: your results cut by dealer gamma, session, EM/ATR, distance from the 240m and more.
• Distributions.
• The trades table.
• The trade drawer, with MAE, MFE, R and your notes.

In By condition, the day picker opens any day you traded: its chart with your entries and exits, and one line per trade saying what was true when you entered. Results need 30 trades before they are reported. Full walk-through: How to use Blackbox.

4. Importing fills

On the Import page, drop the CSV from your platform. These are read automatically:

• TopstepX
• Tradovate (and NinjaTrader web)
• NinjaTrader 8
• Rithmic R|Trader (Apex and other Rithmic firms)
• Quantower
• Tradervue

Files with one row per buy or sell are paired into trades. You see every trade and its P&L before anything is saved. For any other file, match the columns once and Tapeworm remembers them. Didn’t trade today? Mark the day as no trades so your records light stays green.

5. Moneyness

The assistant on every app page. Ask her what a card means (“what does a red bar in GEX by Strike mean?”, “why does the flip say beyond range?”), how to do something in the app, or, once you’ve imported, about your own trades (“how do I do in negative gamma?”).

6. Altimeter

Your firm’s rules, live. Balance now (including open P&L), the daily loss limit and max drawdown with how far you are from each, the contract cap, the flat-by time, and “if you take one more trade”: what one more loss would do. For accounts on a payout cycle there’s also the payout path: net profit this cycle, consistency, and how much more profit, and on how many days, the next payout needs. A bar under the header says when its numbers are older than the last trading day.

7. Settings and plans

Settings holds your accounts and labels, alerts, your watch export for sleep and fitness reads, and data export and delete. Plans are Free, Trader and Pro (see pricing); during the beta the app is free. What changed recently is under What’s new at the top right of the app and on the changelog.

A day with Tapeworm

Questions people search for

Is Tapeworm a signal service?
No. The Tape measures the day: where dealers carry gamma, what the options market prices for the move, where price sits inside that. The set-up lights say when a ratified set-up is armed and what its written plan is. Nothing places a trade and nothing tells you to click.

Where does the data come from?
Prices, option chains, greeks and open interest come from our market-data feed, read every five minutes. Net liquidity comes from the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the NY Fed. When a source is down the page says so in a banner instead of showing a stale or made-up number.

I have a single question, not a manual to read. Where do I ask?
Ask Moneyness, the assistant in the corner of every app page. She knows the screens and, once you import, your own trades.

Sources

• How to read the Tape (the deep dive)
• How to use Blackbox (the deep dive)
• What's new: every release
• Pricing

More guides

• How to read the Tape: one screen before the open
• How to use Blackbox: your fills, graded against you
• Topstep’s trailing drawdown, explained with the actual numbers