Why we built Tapeboard
Bloomberg costs $24k/year. Traders end up juggling six browser tabs for free. Tapeboard is the version we wanted to use.
Every active market participant I know runs roughly the same workflow:
- FinViz for screening.
- TradingView for charts.
- Yahoo Finance for company fundamentals.
- FRED for economic data.
- SEC EDGAR for filings.
- CoinGecko for crypto.
Six tabs, six different auth sessions, six different keyboard paradigms. Every time you need to correlate something across tools — "was that spike in the VIX also when the 2-year hit its peak?" — you're copy-pasting between products that were never designed to talk to each other.
The alternative is Bloomberg Terminal, which is designed exactly right: everything in one workspace with a consistent command surface. It also costs ~$24,000 per year per seat. That's a price tag built for hedge funds, not retail.
What we actually need
Bloomberg is overkill for most use cases, but the *shape* is right:
- One workspace, twelve modules.
- Everything streams live.
- Consistent hotkeys across every surface.
- A command prompt that can jump to any ticker, any filter, any view.
We built Tapeboard around exactly that shape, stripped to what an individual investor or independent analyst actually touches:
- Real-time scanner with gap-ups, unusual volume, premarket movers, and natural-language queries.
- Candlestick charts with 50+ indicators (RSI, MACD, Bollinger, VWAP, volume profile).
- Fundamentals + insider activity pulled from Schwab and FMP, including Form 4 transactions.
- 800,000+ FRED series with full charting.
- SEC EDGAR filings search with AI summaries of 10-K/10-Q/8-K.
- Crypto order books and forex / commodities / bonds live feeds.
- Paper trading simulator with L2-walked fills, options, shorts, LULD halts, and SSR — closer to a real execution environment than any free sim out there.
All 12 modules share the same layout grid, the same keyboard shortcuts, and the same palette. You navigate by typing, not by hunting through menus.
Why browser-first
Bloomberg is a dedicated Windows app. TradingView Pro is hybrid. Most pro-grade tools assume a Windows desktop and a pre-installed suite.
Tapeboard runs entirely in a browser tab. That was a constraint that felt harder than it actually was:
- Modern browsers handle WebSocket streaming at thousands of messages per second without breaking a sweat.
- Cloudflare Workers put our backend at every ISP on Earth — latency is a rounding error.
- D1 gives us a Postgres-shaped database that replicates regionally.
- React with
lightweight-chartsdoes 60fps on real-time data without the Electron bloat.
The result: no install, no download, no Windows dependency. Log in, the terminal is there. Log in from your partner's laptop, the terminal is there too.
Who it's for
If you're actively managing your own account — or you're an analyst who's tired of paying for TradingView + FinViz + Koyfin to get what Bloomberg gives Goldman for $24k — you're the person we built this for.
It's not for algorithmic funds. It's not for hedge fund desks. It's for self-directed investors, independent traders, and the growing cohort of people who want professional-grade tooling without the professional-grade price tag.
What's next
The foundation is shipped: all 12 modules, the sim is feature-complete through options and spreads, AI research is wired end-to-end.
This blog is where we'll write about the market (a daily AI-generated pulse starts tomorrow), the product (new feature walkthroughs), and the building of it (what we're learning building a broker-adjacent tool in 2026).
Free tier, 10-minute setup, no credit card. Try it.