Tape speed EMA Indicator: Formula, Settings and How to Read It
Tape Speed EMA is an exponential moving average of the number of trades per bar, with a default period of 10. It keeps the unit in trades per bar with no conversion to a time rate, so it smooths raw print activity rather than normalising it.
Senzoukria · Indicators · Updated September 2026
Tape speed EMA ships with the Senzoukria desktop app, in the Tape & flow group of the indicator catalogue. It is drawn in its own panel below the chart.
What Tape speed EMA measures
The input is the trade count of each bar — how many prints the bar contains, regardless of their size. The average is the standard exponential form: it is seeded with the simple average of the first N samples and then updated with a smoothing factor of 2 divided by N plus 1, which matches the convention used by TradingView and ATAS. No value is plotted during warm-up, before N bars are available. The absence of time normalisation is the deliberate difference from the Tape Speed indicator, which divides trade counts by measured bar durations to produce trades per minute.
The formula, as implemented
This is not a description of how the indicator is usually defined elsewhere — it is what the shipped code computes, documented next to the implementation:
Vitesse du tape LISSÉE : EMA_N du tradeCount par barre (défaut N=10). Variante EMA standard (`emaSeries`) : graine = SMA des N premiers échantillons, α = 2/(N+1) — parité TradingView/ATAS. Warm-up (< N barres) → null. DIFFÈRE de `speed-of-tape` (tape.ts) qui normalise en trades/MINUTE sur une fenêtre glissante : ici pas de normalisation temporelle, l'unité reste « trades par barre » (compagnon lissé de trade-intensity).
How to read it
- Read the level relative to its own recent range on the same chart. Trades per bar depends on the timeframe, so there is no meaningful absolute scale.
- A steady rise describes the tape thickening over several bars, filtered of the bar-to-bar noise that the raw count shows.
- A sharp single bar of activity barely moves the line, which is the point of the smoothing — use the unsmoothed count when you need to see the spike itself.
- Compare the line's level between comparable periods of the session rather than across the whole day, since print activity follows its own intraday shape.
- When this line is flat while volume rises, the same number of prints carried more size, which the volume series will confirm.
Parameters and defaults
Period defaults to 10 bars. A shorter period tracks changes in activity more closely and leaves more of the original noise; a longer one produces a cleaner curve, a longer warm-up with no plotted values, and a longer delay before a change in the tape shows up in the line. Line colour is the only other setting.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Period | number | 10 | 2 – 200 |
What it does not show
Every moving average lags, so a turn in the line always arrives after the turn in the underlying count, by an amount that grows with the period. Values are not comparable between timeframes or between bar types, because trades per bar depends directly on how much market a bar covers — use the time-normalised Tape Speed for that comparison. The count treats all prints equally regardless of size, and it reflects how the venue and the feed aggregate fills, so two data sources for the same market can produce different levels.
Using it in Senzoukria
Add it from the Indicators panel of any footprint chart or candle chart. It runs on futures data from Rithmic or Databento and on crypto pairs from Binance and Bybit, on the same engine — the calculation does not change with the venue, only the data feeding it does. Market data subscriptions are billed by the provider, separately from the app.
Related indicators
- Unfinished Auctions — Tape & flow
- Effort vs Result — Tape & flow
- POC Drift (ticks) — Tape & flow
- Cumulative buy volume — Tape & flow
- Cumulative sell volume — Tape & flow
- Buy/sell ratio — Tape & flow
See the full indicator library, or start with the order flow guide if you are new to reading aggression, delta and absorption.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between Tape Speed and Tape Speed EMA?
- Tape Speed converts trade counts into a rate, trades per minute, by dividing by the measured duration of the bars in its window. Tape Speed EMA applies an exponential moving average to the raw trade count per bar and keeps that unit. The first is comparable across timeframes; the second is a smoothed view of print activity on the chart you are looking at.
- What period should I use for tape speed smoothing?
- The default of 10 bars is a general-purpose setting that removes most bar-to-bar noise while still responding within a few bars. Shorter periods suit faster charts where you want the line to react quickly; longer periods suit slower charts or a reading of overall session activity, at the cost of a longer delay and a longer warm-up.
- Does the trade count include order size?
- No. Each print counts as one, whatever quantity it carried, so a single 500-lot and a single 1-lot contribute the same amount. To weight by size, read a volume series alongside it; the divergence between the two is itself informative about the average size of the prints.