Volume tells you how many shares traded. Large prints tell you who was trading.
What a large print is
A “print” is a completed trade on the tape. A large print is a single trade that prints a big block — typically 10,000 shares or more in one order. On a consumer chart you might see total volume for the minute. Squintz looks at the actual individual trades that made up that volume.
When a 50,000-share block hits the ask, that's not twenty retail traders agreeing to buy at the same millisecond. That's one desk with a mandate, reaching for the offer.
Why it signals conviction
Retail flow is chatty. Thousands of 50-share orders, spread across five exchanges, most of it canceled and re-posted. The tape looks busy but nobody's committing capital.
A 10k+ print is committed capital. Someone signed off on it. Someone is expressing a view with real size. If enough of those prints stack up on the ask side in the same minute, you're watching institutional accumulation happen in real time.
How Squintz detects them
Every top mover gets 15 minutes of trade-tape history pulled from the Alpaca SIP feed. For each trade, we check the share size. Trades ≥ 1,000 shares count toward the large-print share of volume; trades ≥ 10,000 shares flip the whale ratio.
When the whale ratio crosses 0.50 — meaning more than half the recent volume came from 10k+ blocks — you'll see a 🐋 whale badge on the signal card. That's a flag, not a trade trigger.
The honest caveat
Not every large print is informed. A pension fund rebalancing into an index position prints blocks too. So does a market maker unwinding an options hedge. Large prints raise the probability that flow is directional, not the certainty.
That's why it's one input inside GRIPS, not a standalone alert. Combine whale activity with velocity, VWAP position, and a tight spread and you have a setup where the odds shift. Whale activity alone is a clue. Whale activity inside a HC alert is a thesis.
What to do with it
If you see the whale badge on a card with GRIPS 80+ during the 9:30–11:30 window, you're seeing three of the four things institutions leave behind: size, speed, and a clean book. That's a real shot.
If you see the whale badge on an afternoon mover with GRIPS 55 and a wide spread — keep walking. Somebody's closing a position, not opening one.