Tapeboard Blog — daily market pulse & trade breakdowns
Daily US market recaps, weekly and monthly reviews, and notes on building a professional-grade terminal for retail traders. Written from the tape, not the press release. The Tapeboard morning edition collects the day's movers, halts and filings, one issue per trading day.
Stock Market Today: October 12, 2026 — Dow Gains as Tech Slips, FIGS Jumps 12%
On October 12, 2026, the Dow rose 0.38% to 51,850.55 while the S&P 500 slipped 0.06% to 7,807.24 and the Nasdaq fell 0.44% to 27,245.90, as FIGS surged 12.42% to lead gainers and Cerebras dropped 10.69% to lead losers.
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Reverse Split Hell: The MULN to BINI Autopsy, Split by Split
Mullen Automotive ran nine reverse stock splits between May 2023 and September 2025, a cumulative 84,375,000,000,000,000-to-1 ratio, renamed itself Bollinger Innovations (BINI), failed Nasdaq's $35 million listing standard, and now trades over the counter near 4 cents with no SEC periodic filings in over a year.
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Trading Halts Today: October 12, 2026 — 95 Stocks Halted (LULD & T1)
Tapeboard tracked 95 trading halts on October 12, 2026 — 91 LULD/volatility halts, 2 T1 news-pending halts, and 2 other regulatory halts — with YRD's T1 news-pending halt the most notable of the session.
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What is a Convertible Bond? Definition, Formula, and Example
A convertible bond is a corporate bond that the holder can exchange for a fixed number of the issuer's common shares, combining fixed-income downside protection with equity upside participation.
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What is a Stock Float? Definition, Formula, and Example
A stock's float is the number of shares actually available for public trading, equal to shares outstanding minus restricted shares held by insiders, employees, and controlling shareholders.
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What is Momentum? Definition, Formula, and Example
Momentum is the rate of acceleration of a security's price, measuring how quickly price is changing over a defined lookback period rather than the direction of the change alone.
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What is Volatility? Definition, Formula, and Example
Volatility is the statistical measure of how widely an asset's price disperses around its average, expressed as the annualized standard deviation of returns.
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What is Yield to Maturity? Definition, Formula, and Example
Yield to maturity is the total annualized return an investor earns by holding a bond until maturity, assuming all coupons are reinvested at the same rate and the issuer does not default.
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What is a Cash Account? Definition, Rules, and Example
A cash account is a brokerage account in which all securities must be paid for in full with settled cash, with no borrowing against margin permitted.
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What is a Market-Cap-Weighted Index? Definition, Formula, and Example
A market-cap-weighted index assigns each constituent a weight proportional to its market capitalization, so the largest companies drive most of the index's movement.
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What is a Martingale Strategy? Definition, Formula, and Example
A martingale strategy is a position-sizing method that doubles the bet after every loss so that the first win recovers all prior losses plus one unit of profit.
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What is a Trendline? Definition, Formula, and Example
A trendline is a straight line drawn through two or more price pivot points on a chart to define the direction and slope of a trend and to mark dynamic support or resistance.
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What is Position Sizing? Definition, Formula, and Example
Position sizing is the process of determining how many shares or contracts to trade based on account size, acceptable risk per trade, and the distance to the stop loss.
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Squeeze Histogram Study: We Replicated the 87,000-Squeeze Test on 20 Years of Data, 55,198 Fires Later
Replicating the 87,470-squeeze histogram study on Tapeboard's own daily data (55,198 squeeze fires across 609 names, 2006 to 2026), the squeeze histogram read at the last red dot called the fire day's direction 70.0% of the time and the 20-day moving average called it 76.9%, while all 16 signals readable at the fire day landed between 48.3% and 50.5% over the following 10 trading days.
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What is a 10-Q Filing? Definition, Formula, and Example
A 10-Q is the quarterly report public companies file with the SEC containing unaudited financial statements, management discussion, and risk disclosures for the prior three months.
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What is a 52-Week Low? Definition, Formula, and Example
A 52-week low is the lowest price at which a stock has traded during the trailing 52 weeks, a level that signals distress, value, or capitulation depending on context.
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What is Maintenance Margin? Definition, Formula, and Example
Maintenance margin is the minimum equity a trader must keep in a margin account after opening a leveraged position, set at 25% for long stock by FINRA and often higher by brokers.
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What is the Ex-Dividend Date? Definition, Formula, and Example
The ex-dividend date is the first trading day on which a stock trades without the right to its declared dividend, meaning buyers on or after that date do not receive the payout.
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What is the FOMC Dot Plot? Definition, Formula, and Example
The FOMC dot plot is a quarterly chart showing each Fed official's projection for the federal funds rate at year-end, used by traders to price the path of interest rates.
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Stock Market Today: October 9, 2026 — Telecom Craters, Biotech and Towers Rally
On October 9, 2026, the S&P 500 rose 0.59% to 7,811.54 and the Nasdaq added 0.64% to 27,366.17, while telecom stocks collapsed, with T-Mobile down 13.27% and AT&T off 9.81%, as Fastly jumped 15.86% to lead gainers.
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Trading Halts Today: October 9, 2026 — 72 Stocks Halted (LULD & T1)
Tapeboard tracked 72 trading halts on October 9, 2026 — 62 LULD/volatility pauses, 9 T1 news-pending halts, and 1 other regulatory halt — with a cluster of after-hours T1 halts in NIVF, NXGL, MDCX, DFLI, and ZBAO the most notable events of the session.
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Stock Market This Week (October 5–9, 2026): Defensives Lead as Small Caps Slip
The S&P 500 rose 1.15% to close at 7,811.54 in the week ending October 9, 2026, as utilities, consumer staples, and energy led a defensive rotation while the Russell 2000 fell 0.91% and telecom stocks sold off sharply.
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What is a Break-Even Price? Definition, Formula, and Example
The break-even price is the underlying price at which an options position produces exactly zero profit or loss at expiration, calculated by adding or subtracting the premium from the strike price.
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What is a Call Wall? Definition, Formula, and Example
A call wall is the option strike price with the largest concentration of open call contracts, a level that often acts as resistance because dealer hedging flows intensify as price approaches it.
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What is a Death Spiral Financing? Definition, Mechanics, and Example
Death spiral financing is a convertible debt or equity arrangement where the holder converts at a discount to the market price and sells the resulting shares, driving the price down and forcing progressively larger dilutive conversions.