33 rules
of the tape.
The operating doctrine of TAPE 33. Each rule is a maxim. Each maxim was earned the hard way. Click any rule to expand the field-note that motivates it.
01.Read the tape, not the news.▾
The headline arrives after the print. The print is the truth.
02.The float is the constraint.▾
Market cap can be huge while the tradable float is microscopic. Always check both — short interest and days-to-cover only make sense against the float, not the share count.
03.Settled short interest beats daily short volume.▾
Daily short volume includes intraday market-maker flow that's flat by the close. Settled SI is T+2 reality. Use settled for the read; use daily as a proxy when settled is stale.
04.The 13F is two months stale. Use it anyway.▾
Statutory filing window is 45 days post-quarter-end. Funds have moved by the time you read it. But the quarterly delta still tells you who was committed at the close of the period — and that is what compounds.
05.Insider transactions speak in clusters, not solos.▾
One sale is housekeeping. Three sales from three executives in two weeks is a signal. Cluster within 30 days, on the same side, before reading anything into it.
06.Material events live in 8-K item codes. Memorize them.▾
Item 1.01 is a definitive agreement. Item 2.02 is earnings. Item 5.02 is a departure. Item 8.01 is a discretionary disclosure. The code tells you what happened before you read a single sentence.
07.Catalysts within 30 days are tradable. Beyond, they are stories.▾
The catalyst calendar gets noisy past a month — too many things move. Inside 30 days, the variance is bounded enough to size against.
08.Foreign ADRs report ordinary shares. Divide by the deposit ratio.▾
A foreign issuer reports its share count in the ordinary (foreign-listed) units. The US-listed ADR represents N ordinaries per receipt. To compute the correct ADS-equivalent market cap, divide the ordinary share count by N before multiplying by the ADR price. The deposit ratio is published in the corresponding deposit-agreement filing on the regulatory registry.
09.Primary real-time, secondary fallback, tertiary backfill.▾
CHANNEL Δ002 (real-time quote stream) is primary. When it caps mid-window, fall through to a secondary public source. Tertiary fallback is for backfill only — never trust the tertiary feed on the last one to two trading days.
10.The synthesis must cite. Without citation, it is fabrication.▾
An AI sentence with no link is a guess. An AI sentence with a link is research. The link is the load-bearing element. The prose is decoration.
11.RAG over chat. The chunks are the truth, the model is the voice.▾
Retrieve relevant chunks first. Condition the generation on those chunks. The model's job is to translate, not to invent. Anything that contradicts the chunks is hallucination.
12.Throttle the registry at the documented ceiling minus margin.▾
CHANNEL Δ001 has a documented rate ceiling. Stay below it. Exceeding the ceiling triggers a silent IP block — no error code, just an empty response window for several minutes. Always operate with a margin.
13.Float can be stale. Settled SI cannot lie.▾
Float is updated quarterly at best, often slower. Settled SI is reported twice a month. The pct_of_float ratio is only as fresh as the slower number — and that's almost always float.
14.Congressional trades disclose on a 45-day lag. Treat them as anchors, not signals.▾
The STOCK Act gives Congress 45 days to disclose a transaction. By the time you see Pelosi's NVDA buy, the stock has moved. Use the disclosure as a sentiment anchor — it tells you what conviction was being placed two months ago.
15.Press dispatches front-run filings by minutes, not hours.▾
CHANNEL Δ008 publishes press releases before the corresponding regulatory filing is accepted by the registry. Watch the dispatch wire for material-event headlines on biotech + small-cap pharma — they're the first signal.
16.The biotech catalyst calendar is biotech-only. Don't query it on Microsoft.▾
FDA AdComm and PDUFA dates exist for pharma + biotech. Querying them for an operating company returns noise — usually false negatives that look like empty calendars but are actually irrelevant calendars.
17.Cash + ST investments is the runway numerator. Quarterly OCF is the denominator.▾
Runway = (cash + short-term investments) / |quarterly operating cash flow|. If OCF is positive, the company is profitable and runway is infinite — don't render a number, render PROFITABLE.
18.PEG can be null. P/E can be negative. Both are signals.▾
PEG requires forward earnings estimates; for unprofitable names there is no PEG. P/E flips negative when earnings flip negative. Neither is a bug. Render the null with a tooltip that explains why.
19.Days-to-cover is short volume ÷ ADV. % of float is short interest ÷ float. Don't confuse them.▾
These measure different things. Days-to-cover is liquidity (how many trading days for shorts to exit). % of float is conviction (how much of the tradable supply is short). Surface both, label them differently, never let the user mistake one for the other.
20.Capped responses look like successful empty responses. Sniff the body first.▾
Some real-time sources return 200 with a body that says 'quota exceeded.' Parsing JSON blindly turns the cap into a silent degradation — a malformed-but-successful read with no error to investigate. Sniff the body for cap markers before parse.
21.Persistent stores have exactly one writer.▾
Two processes cannot safely write the same file-backed store. The architecture must enforce a single-writer process per persistent store — anything else is a corruption story waiting to happen.
22.Cross-process data contracts are undocumented wire formats.▾
When two languages share a file-backed store, the schema is the wire format. Changing a column in one language without updating the reader in the other is a silent break — no compiler catches it.
23.ETFs do not have float shares. They have AUM.▾
Free-float metrics don't apply to ETFs because the unit is created and redeemed by authorized participants against the underlying basket. Asking the fund-metrics relay for an ETF's float returns null — and that null is correct. Render the metric as N/A, not as a missing value.
24.Some sources gate behind cookie + crumb auth flows.▾
A public source can require a consent cookie + a session crumb before it will return data. Writing that dance from scratch is a maintenance trap — use a maintained client library if one exists; reverse-engineering the auth flow is not worth the recurring breakage.
25.Persistent stores must checkpoint on shutdown.▾
Some embedded databases replay their write-ahead log on next open. If your process exits without a checkpoint, recent inserts can be rolled back. Register a shutdown handler that checkpoints and closes the connection. Not optional.
26.Registry concept tie-breakers must be explicit, not implicit.▾
When a regulatory registry reports the same value under multiple concept names with identical timestamps, iteration order silently decides the winner. For foreign-issuer market caps, the wrong tie-break gives you a ten-fold understatement on the largest names in the universe. Always name the precedence; never inherit it from list order.
27.The dev cache desyncs without warning. Restart it.▾
The dev-server cache can get into a state where every route returns 500 with a build-manifest miss. There is no graceful recovery — kill the process, wipe the dev cache directory, restart.
28.Deploys-on-push are not finishes-on-push. Verify the build, then the URL.▾
A pushed commit is not a shipped commit. Wait for the build pipeline to report Ready, then probe the production URL, then declare done. Asynchronous infrastructure does not wait for your celebration.
29.Trust but verify: an agent's summary describes intent, not outcome.▾
When a subagent reports 'I added X', read the diff. The summary is what the agent intended; the diff is what actually happened. These are not always the same.
30.The 33rd degree does not tolerate ALBINO BUGS.▾
A page that flashes white on mobile overscroll is a bug, not a quirk. The browser's default background must be painted by the document, not left to the operating system. Honor every pixel.
31.The source of truth is the tape.▾
Headlines are commentary. Filings are commentary. Analyst notes are commentary. The tape — the print — is the only thing that cannot lie. Read it first.
32.Every datum has a source.▾
A claim without a citation is an opinion. An opinion sized as a position is a gamble. The discipline is to render only what can be cited, and to size only what can be defended.
33.If it cannot be cited, it cannot be said.▾
The final maxim. Synthesis silence is preferable to synthesis fabrication. When the chunks do not support the claim, the model must hold its tongue. The 33rd degree.