L2TS

L2TS is a reading and reaction trainer for low-float momentum stocks. Every print, candle, volume bar and Level 2 quote comes from one simulated tape — it is not real data and not investment advice.

There are two live modes plus a Learn area. Tape Only drills raw reaction speed: the tape sits quiet, then bursts, and you react. Full Sim is the real thing — read the setup, time your entry, size it, and manage the exit, all graded. The Learn tab holds Practice (Full Sim with the difficulty turned down — cleaner setups, gentler moves, and nothing counted against your record) alongside candle and pattern references, a naming quiz, and a support/resistance chart drill.

Trade in percent or shares (with dollar P&L and its own account), and bind your own hotkeys — including a sized buy with an auto-trailing stop and a two-tier scale-out — to build the same muscle memory you use on your platform. Your Account tab keeps the record: win rate, profit-to-loss ratio, best and worst, hold times, screen time, an equity curve, and achievements.

This is L2TS Lite. The Learn library, Practice and Tape Only are unlimited; Full Sim is limited to three stocks every 24 hours, with unlimited trades on each. Short selling, a one-life Hardcore account, leverage, the advanced order and stop hotkeys and the full Account analytics are part of the Elite edition — you will see them mentioned in places below, and marked Elite in the app. Right-click the chart any time to copy or save it, or to copy the whole session.

The sections below go deeper on each part.

L2TS simulates the order flow of a low-float momentum stock. Every print on the tape, every candle, every volume bar and every Level 2 quote comes from one engine, so they always agree with each other.

Price only moves when liquidity gets taken

Price is not a random walk. There is resting size at the inside bid and offer. A buy print eats into the offer; a sell print eats into the bid. Price only ticks when that resting size is exhausted. When flow is two-sided the book refills as fast as it is consumed and price sits still — exactly like a real quiet tape. When one side takes over, the refill cannot keep up, levels break, and price runs.

Reading the tape

• Green — the print hit the ask. A buyer lifted the offer.
• Red — the print hit the bid. A seller hit it.
• Grey — traded between the spread, shown with sub-penny pricing.

The colour mix is not decoration. In a base it is roughly balanced; on a real trigger it runs around 85% green. The tape tells you what is happening before the candle finishes.

The modes

Tape Only drills raw reaction speed. The tape sits quiet, then lights up and rips the offer — hit your key the instant it does. It tracks your reaction time, early presses and misses.

Full Sim is the whole picture: 1-minute chart, volume, VWAP, the 9 EMA and high-of-day, a live Level 2 book and the tape. You buy and sell with your hotkeys and every trade gets graded, and it is honest about dead tape — sometimes the right move is to skip.

How activity builds and fades

The tape runs on a wide range. A quiet stretch ticks over at around a dozen prints a second, an ordinary one at about twenty, and a stock in full flight at thirty-five or more. The speed is information in its own right: the same pattern means far more when the tape behind it is accelerating.

It expands quickly when a move starts and bleeds off over several bars rather than collapsing in one. While a stock is still in play the tape never goes dead — even its quiet stretches run about ten prints a second. It only slows further once a stock has popped, failed and lost the crowd, which is itself something to read.

Sweeps — when price simply gaps

Occasionally a single order is large enough to run through several price levels at once. Price does not walk up, it pops — 10, 20, 30 cents or more in an instant, printed as one big trade on the tape with nothing in between to buy at. This is why an obvious setup can be impossible to get filled on at the price you wanted.

They are rare, on roughly 1% of bars, and the large majority land on confirmed triggers, news spikes and blow-offs — the moments when they really happen. They run in both directions, and anything resting in the path, including an iceberg, is simply run over.

Full Sim only. Practice never produces them, so you can learn the patterns without being gapped over while you are still finding the entry.

Every symbol has a day, not just a price

Real day-traded stocks mostly give their move back. They run early, then bleed much of it away as the crowd leaves. Each symbol gets a trajectory — most are faders, some chop, a minority are genuine runners — with a front side where setups work and a back side where they mostly do not.

Across a full session, measured from where the stock loads: the median stock pops to about +27% and closes only about +5% — it gives back most of its move — and more than half close in the bottom half of their range. What it rarely does is collapse: there is support near the starting price, and below it the stock tends to chop sideways rather than slide. Breakouts follow through about 60% of the time on the front side and only about 25% on the back side.

For a short seller that shapes the whole day: the pops are the trade, and shorting a stock at the start, before it has run, rarely pays.

This is why Skip matters. A good part of any session is not worth trading, and recognising a stock that has already had its move is as valuable as spotting a setup.

Practice is the same market engine with the difficulty taken out. There is always a setup building, so you can drill the patterns themselves instead of waiting for one. Concretely:

• A trigger fires roughly every 17 bars instead of every 32 — about twice as often — and names rotate sooner, so a move always costs about the same.
• No traps. Parabolic exhaustion and VWAP breakdowns never appear, and neither does the news spike, whose whole lesson is "do not chase".
• Setups follow through about 93% of the time rather than about 60%, and the hidden quality grade is almost always A, so levels are clean and well defined.
• The mix is weighted toward the obvious plays. ABCD and Pullback Buy are the most common, then Flat-Top and Flag, then the level breaks — high of day, half and whole dollar, descending resistance. Cup, inverse head and shoulders and the VWAP plays are rare here.
• The tape rarely runs more than four green candles in a row before a pullback — after three it leans hard the other way, a dip rarely runs more than about 2% below the recent high, and greens outnumber reds — so a name steadily climbs with frequent small dips to buy, while still able to fade or go sideways. The shape is the lesson, not the size of it.
• Every symbol starts between $4 and $9, so a normal move covers enough cents for the stop distances in the advanced hotkeys to actually be reachable.
• Calmer candles. Practice charts the mid rather than the last print. Trades alternate between the bid and the offer, so on a wide spread a candle swings by the whole spread even when price has not moved — that bounce was most of the jumpiness. The Level 2 and tape still show every print exactly at the bid and the offer, and you still buy the ask and sell the bid. Practice bars end up moving about a third as far as Full Sim ones.
• Spreads still matter. They widen exactly as they do in Full Sim, so what you pay to get in and out is real — you just do not have to read the shape through the bounce.
• The setup is not named for you while you trade. Reading the shape off the chart is the skill, so calling it out would do the work for you. You still get the full review and grade after the trade closes, naming the setup that had actually formed — so what you learn to call a shape is what it really was.
• Two readouts Full Sim does not give you: a running % buy figure — the share of prints lifting the offer — on the tape and Level 2, and the spread width in cents in the Level 2 header. Useful crutches while you are still learning to read colour.
• Each stock has its own character that lasts the session, same as Full Sim — a choppy one keeps printing rejection bars, a clean one stays clean — so it is worth reading how a symbol trades rather than treating every bar fresh. Practice keeps this lighter than Full Sim.
• There is one button to move on: Skip (it is Reset in Full Sim, which also has a separate Skip Stock). It loads a new stock and rates the skip the same way Full Sim does, though nothing is recorded to your Account.
• No sweeps. Full Sim occasionally gaps 10-30+ cents in an instant when a large order runs through the book. Practice never does that, so price always walks and you can actually get in where you intended.
• Go Back rewinds the market three bars so you can re-take a botched entry. It is a true replay: the price action that follows is identical every time, because the random sequence is rewound along with the market. Quote, resting sizes, the Level 2 book, the tape, any levels and the setup all return to exactly where they were. Your open position is cleared, the trade you just made is removed from the log, and the trigger clock restarts so your reaction time is still measured fairly.

Practice trades still get the full grade and written critique, but they are deliberately not recorded to your Account. Only Full Sim counts toward your record, so drilling here can never flatter your stats.

Controls

• Fast-forward cycles 1x / 2x / 4x. Everything scales together.
• Go Back (Practice only) rewinds three bars so you can retry an entry.
• Reset (labelled Skip in Practice) loads a fresh random stock. Any open position is closed at the market and recorded first.
• Skip Stock passes on the current name and tells you whether passing was the right call.
• In Hardcore there is no Skip or Reset: End stock finishes the name you were dealt, then Next stock.
• Right-click the chart to copy or save what you see, or to copy the whole session with a crop step. Shift + right-click gives the browser's own menu.
• Drag the handles under the Level 2 and Time & Sales panels to show more rows or fewer.
• Tap any candle to read its open, high, low, close and volume.
• Full screen (desktop, or F11) gives the chart the whole window — and a wider pane shows more bars rather than fatter ones, so you get more history rather than the same candles stretched out.
• Scroll wheel over the chart zooms in and out horizontally (pinch on a phone). There is a limit on how far you can zoom in, so a fast choppy tape can never be magnified enough to make the chart rescale rapidly.
• Drag sideways to move through the session: drag right to pull earlier bars in from the left, drag left to come forward to the newest bar and then into open space, so the action can play out nearer the middle of the screen.
• Candles are drawn tall by default — roughly five typical bars fill the pane — and only shrink when something genuinely needs the room. Older bars that no longer fit clip off the edge rather than squashing everything else.
• When a big candle appears the chart zooms out for you — vertically, and a little horizontally — so a spike sits in proportion rather than dominating or running off the top. It eases back once the move scrolls away.
• Drag the grip beneath the chart to make the whole chart taller or shorter, like resizing a window. The size is remembered. Everything scales with it — the auto-follow, the buffer and the big-candle zoom-out all work the same at any height.
• The Height slider stretches the price axis over a wide range — from compressing the chart right down to blowing a few cents up to fill the whole pane — so you can size the candles however you like without changing how many are on screen. It sits on the right of the chart on desktop and under it on a phone. Drag the chart up or down to move the view — useful when a big momentum bar runs off the top of the pane and you want to see where it reached.
• There is no mode to toggle — the chart always follows the candles and keeps live price on screen with a buffer, whatever your zoom. Inside a tight range it holds completely still and only re-fits when price genuinely leaves the band, so it never jitters on a choppy tape. The axis is sized from the typical bar rather than the biggest one, so a single 20% momentum candle does not squash the consolidation beside it — that bar simply runs off the pane instead.
• Trade markers show every fill on the chart — a cyan triangle pointing up where you bought, an amber one pointing down where you sold — placed at the exact fill price inside the candle, so you can see where in the bar you got filled. A short is opened with an amber marker and covered with a cyan one. Toggle them in Settings.
• Buy up to three times to size into a position (in Hardcore there is no limit beyond your buying power). Each add is graded separately.
• Settings rebinds your hotkeys — including add, close out, speed and share-size keys, with keymap import/export to mirror a DAS layout — and switches the Level 2 colours between Classic and DAS.

Every closed trade gets a score out of 100, built from five parts.

Pattern is the heaviest for a reason

• Buying the trigger bar scores about 92.
• Buying a still-forming base scores about 20.
• Buying a blow-off scores about 12.
• Buying late decays the longer you wait after the trigger.

Buying visible momentum

If the tape is genuinely ripping — heavy prints, buyers lifting nearly every one — that is confirmation, whatever phase the setup is technically in. Taking a whole or half dollar break with the tape screaming is a real strategy and scores like one, around 78, rather than being marked down for being early.

The single exception is exhaustion. On a parabolic blow-off the tape looks identical but means the opposite, so the same conditions still score around 18 there. Dead tape and late, fading entries stay low as well.

Reaction scale

Sizing in

Each add is its own position with its own cost basis, and the trade's return is the sum of every leg. Buying three times at $10.00, $10.15 and $10.35 and exiting at $10.70 is +15.8%, not the +5.9% a blended average cost would show. Sizing in is meant to make a good read pay more, and the sum of the legs is what reflects that.

The grade still uses the average leg, so three legs is not an automatic A — size multiplies your return, not your score.

The adds themselves are graded on the position's P&L at the moment of each add. Never adding is neutral at 70 — you are not punished for a single clean entry.

What the review tells you

Each trade lists its worst one or two problems, ranked. The most common verdict is No clear signal — and that is the point. Most entries are not clearly right or wrong; they simply have nothing behind them. It appears on roughly a third of random entries, while Clean read appears on about 8%.

Other calls include large red volume, buying into a resting seller, chasing the news spike candle, and averaging down into a loser.

In the log, P pattern, V volume, R reaction, S sizing, O outcome.

Achievements

Twenty of them on the Account page, each with four tiers — Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond — worth 1, 3, 6 and 12 points. They cover time on the tape (Screen Time, which counts real hours with a Full Sim stock actually running, plus Round Trips, Marathon, Rep Counter), quality of read (Clean Read, Chart Eye, Tape Reader), execution (Quick Draw, Reflex Master, Pyramid), judgement (Discipline, Sharpshooter, Let It Run — holding winners longer than losers) and range (Pattern Library, Hot Streak, Big Fish, In The Green), with three more for the Learn tab (Flash Cards, Chart Sense, Book Reader).

Diamond is deliberately a long haul — a few hundred trades will get you mostly Gold. Only Full Sim counts. Practice never touches them, and they ride along in your Export file.

Hardcore has twelve achievements of its own, shown on the Account page while it is on. They reset with the Hardcore account and are not part of an export.

Seventeen setups appear at random — fifteen you can trade and two traps. Each runs through hidden phases — base, impulse, flag, trigger, resolve — with a hidden A/B/C quality grade shifting how likely it is to follow through. Base continuation odds run between 52% and 70%, and far lower on the back side of a move.

Support and resistance

Levels are real resting orders, not lines drawn on the chart. Resistance is a seller sitting on the offer; support is a buyer sitting on the bid. Either one has to be exhausted before price can trade through it, and you watch the size count down in the Level 2.

Levels form at the running high or low of day and at whole and half dollars, on any symbol — not only when a setup happens to name them, so there is often something meaningful overhead or underneath.

Broken levels flip. Resistance that gets cleared leaves buyers defending it from underneath, and support that breaks leaves sellers above it. The flipped level holds for a while, then fades as price moves away.

A buyer resting on the bid holds about three quarters of the time under moderate selling, and about a third under heavy selling. Levels matter, but enough flow still breaks them.

A level is not a hard ceiling either. Price regularly pokes a few ticks through, prints up there briefly, then gets leaned on and pushed back under — which is what leaves a wick rather than a dead flat top. You only get a genuinely flat top when a large seller is parked and refusing to move.

When a level does give way, everything queued behind it is released: the tape speeds up sharply and the breakout bar carries several times the volume of a normal bar.

False breakouts and shakeouts

On half-dollar, whole-dollar, previous-high, high-of-day and flat-top breaks, the route matters as much as the result. A failing break often fakes: it pokes above the level just long enough to pull breakout buyers in, then snaps back under it on a long upper wick — roughly a third of failed level breaks go that way. A working break can shake out first: about a third of them flush back under the level, run the stops parked just beneath it, then reclaim it and carry on — and nearly all of those go on to new highs. If you were stopped out in one, the review says so once the level is actually reclaimed.

Where a fade stops

Every stock has support at the price it loaded at, and two more roughly 12% and 22% below it. They hold on the great majority of touches, each test leaving them a little weaker, and a hold stalls the selling rather than launching a rally. Once price is under the starting price, buying and selling both lose conviction, so a faded stock tends to chop sideways instead of sliding toward zero.

Where a run stops

Past about 80% above the day's open, pushing higher gets progressively harder: more sellers arrive, fewer buyers chase, the spread widens and the tape thins. Round numbers from $10 upward add a wall of their own. It builds gradually rather than as a hard ceiling — big runs still happen — but a stock cannot climb forever.

Rejection bars

Some names simply do not trade cleanly, and each symbol gets a hidden cleanliness rating. On a messy one, price will sometimes push hard off the open and get sold straight back, closing near the low of the bar. These are uncommon — never on a clean name, up to around 7% of bars on a bad one — and they get more likely when price is testing a level that is holding. If you bought the push, that is what the review means by a topping tail.

How your trade gets named

The label on your review is the setup the market was genuinely running when you bought — but only once that shape had actually formed on the chart (all three troughs of an inverse head & shoulders, the level really giving way on a break). A setup that was planned but never completed is not called by name.

If you bought before any structure had formed, the review says so and describes what was there instead — "No clean setup — extended well above VWAP", "chopping mid-range". And if the candles read as exhaustion, that verdict stands whatever the engine intended: "Parabolic Exhaustion" is the most important thing a review can tell you.

Your pattern score is graded separately, off the chart itself — where in the setup you bought, the state of any block on the book, whether the tape was ripping. A well-timed entry at a formed trigger scores in the high 80s; buying mid-chop with no structure caps it, though visible momentum still earns partial credit.

When several patterns fit at once

Charts are often more than one thing. A pullback can be breaking the high of day at the same moment. The app resolves this by specificity: a structure that describes how price got here beats a level that only describes where it happens to be. So a pullback breaking the highs is called a Pullback Buy, not a High-of-Day Breakout.

Most contested cases resolve to the structure rather than the bare level break.

Disagree? Change it

The label on every closed trade is a dropdown. If the app read the chart differently to you, set it to what you actually traded — the critique rewrites itself and your By setup table moves the trade to the right bucket.

Plays you correct to are marked with a star and float to the top of the list, so the setups you actually trade are the ones you reach first. Corrected labels show in green.

What the detector weighs

Beyond the candle geometry, three further things move the call:

• Volume. A break without volume behind it is a drift, not a break. With volume expanding, a breakout is named far more readily than when volume is drying up.
• The order book. A level with a real seller resting on it — or one that has only just given way — is far stronger evidence than equal highs alone, and a bid sitting under a dip is what makes it a support trade rather than a guess.
• Your corrections. Every time you relabel a trade, the app shifts a little toward how you read a chart and away from what it guessed. This works in both modes — a correction in Practice teaches the app exactly the same as one in Full Sim, even though practice trades never touch your Account. The steps are small, so one stray click cannot skew it, and the Account page shows what it has learned with a link to reset.

When a pattern does not actually form

A setup gets chosen and then has to build itself out of real order flow, and sometimes it breaks down before it completes — the pullback erases the impulse, or the level never gives way. It happens often enough that you will meet it regularly.

When that happens the review says so rather than handing you a pattern name that was not on the chart, and the entry is not graded as a clean read of a setup that never existed. If you took a trade and the critique tells you the structure never completed, that is the app agreeing with you.

The spread

The spread is not fixed. It reflects how thin the book is and how fast it is trading: around 2 cents when a stock is basing, blowing out to 8-11 cents on a trigger, spike or blow-off. Wide spreads are the cost of trading a fast tape.

When it snaps back tight after being wide, that is buyers and sellers agreeing on price again — often the last thing that happens before a level goes. It counts toward your entry read, lifts a coiling entry out of "too early", and gets called out in the review.

In Practice the Level 2 header also spells it out — the spread in cents, marked tight in green when it is meaningfully inside its own recent norm. Full Sim leaves that off, the same as the buy-percentage readout: there you read it off the quote yourself.

Reading the other side — the big buyer

Resistance gets the attention, but a large resting bid under price is just as readable, and it is highlighted green in the book. Buying above real size is a defined-risk entry: you know where you are wrong. When you take a trade with a big buyer holding underneath, the review says so and your entry is credited for it.

Reading the iceberg

On level-break setups a block sits on the offer and you watch it deplete in the Level 2, for example 213 → 188 → 128 → 69 → breaks. A true iceberg behaves differently — it reloads its displayed size instead of stepping away: 48 → 59, 44 → 64, 2 → 25. That reload is the tell.

• Buying as a block is getting cleaned out fast scores around 74, and counts as a good entry even before the official trigger — because that is the real signal.
• Buying a block that is not lifting scores around 44.

If an iceberg holds through the level, the setup is forced to fail. The read has real consequences.

Tap a question to see the answer, or search below.

Skip Stock passes on the current name and moves to a fresh one (not available in Hardcore, where you trade the stock you were dealt). Every skip is judged and a running tally is kept.

Questionable skip

• A trigger bar was firing on screen — that was the entry, not the moment to pass.
• The block was nearly cleared and lifting fast — it was about to break.
• Momentum was expanding with volume behind it.

Good skip

• Price was parabolic and extended — nothing worth buying up there.
• The move was already well past its trigger.
• A big seller was resting and not moving.
• Sellers had control of the tape.
• Dead tape with no setup formed.
• Volume had dried up.

Neutral skip

The setup was still building — fair to pass, but there was a pattern forming.

Most random skips come back good, because most moments genuinely are not tradeable — a high good-skip rate is expected. The questionable ones are the valuable ones.

L2TS was built by a DTSM user. The simulator itself is original work — the order-flow engine, the Level 2 and tape model, the grading and the drills were all built from scratch. What is not original is the trading knowledge inside it. Everything on the Psychology and Stock selection pages, and most of what the app teaches about reading a tape, came from the people below. It would not have been possible to build this without them, and a summary here is no substitute for going to the source.

DTSM — and Brendan Hogan

The community this app grew out of, and its owner. The reason a simulator like this exists at all is a room full of people arguing about tape, levels and why a trade worked.

Everyone else, alphabetically

• Ross Cameron — his YouTube channel and How to Day Trade: The Plain Truth. Decades of trading and teaching, and arguably the best teacher out there: float, relative volume, catalysts, momentum patterns, entries and risk, explained more clearly than anyone. Where the stock-selection page comes from.
• Mark Douglas — Trading in the Zone. The book that reframes trading as probability rather than prediction. The five things to accept on the Psychology page are his ideas, in our words.
• Annie Duke — Thinking in Bets and Quit. Judging decisions separately from outcomes, and treating knowing when to stop as a skill rather than a failure. Both run right through the Psychology page.
• Steven Goldstein — Mastering the Mental Game of Trading. A performance coach on what actually happens inside a trader facing uncertainty, and how to work on it deliberately.
• Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow. Where the fast and slow minds, loss aversion and most of the biases on the Psychology page come from. Not a trading book, and one of the most useful books a trader can read.
• George Mumford — The Mindful Athlete, with a foreword by Phil Jackson. Mindfulness written for people performing under pressure rather than sitting on a cushion, which is what responding instead of reacting is built on.

Every one of them is worth reading in full — a summary on a Learn page is a pointer, not a substitute. Each of these books is years of someone’s working life compressed into a few hundred pages, and it costs less than a single bad trade. Set against what people pay for courses, mentorships or tuition, it is not a close comparison. They are all available as audiobooks too, so a commute is enough to get through them.