Why we score 2,500 tickers, not 5,000.
A third-party market-data feed covers thousands of US tickers. We actively score ~2,500 by daily dollar-volume — here's why that cutoff exists, what we do with the rest, and why bigger isn't better.
The data feed (a third-party market-data feed) gives us coverage of every listed US security — the full liquid US universe, after filtering out OTC. We actively score the top ~2,500 by daily dollar-volume. Roughly half the new-user feedback is "why isn't $XYZ scored?" — so here's the reasoning, written once.
The filter is liquidity
The 2,500 are picked by daily dollar-volume — price × volume — and the cutoff lands well below the S&P MidCap 400, deep into small-cap territory. Everything below has bid-ask spreads wide enough that the "score" stops representing anything actionable. A 90 score on a $0.15 stock that trades 80,000 shares a day is a fiction; you can't get in or out at that price without moving the tape against yourself.
The factors aren't equally available below the cutoff
Trend, momentum, and macro work fine on any ticker with a year of bars. Fundamentals and insider Form 4 are sparse for sub-$200M caps — small companies just file less often, and analyst coverage thins out. Forcing a score across the entire liquid US universe would mean thousands of confidence values landing under 40%. That's noise, not signal — exactly the experience we're trying to replace.
What we do with the rest
The full universe table is auto-populated weekly from a third-party market-data feed's reference API. We use it for: watchlist tracking (you can watch any ticker, scored or not), per-ticker pages with price and 1-day change, news feeds with sentiment tagging, and ranking — so when liquidity grows on a name, it gets promoted into the active 2,500 automatically on the next refresh cycle.
Why not just score the whole universe?
Two reasons. First, the noise above. Second, a third-party data feed's free tier is 60 calls/minute — enough for the fundamentals refresh on ~2,500 names but not the full universe. A bigger universe means a bigger a third-party data feed bill, not a better product. We'll only expand if customer behaviour says the marginal names are actually being scanned.
The 2,500 covers basically every US name a retail trader is plausibly considering: every S&P 500 + every NASDAQ-100 + every Russell 1000 component, plus the most actively-traded sector and commodity ETFs. If your watchlist already lives in that range — which most do — Tapeline scores everything you care about.
See it live.
14-day Premium trial. No credit card. The scoring formula above runs on every US ticker every minute.