Frege’s judgement stroke gives rise to three questions: What is its meaning or function? How does it fit with Frege’s anti-psychologism? Are we unjustly ignoring it in logic? This paper presents a novel attempt to answer these questions. It discusses the main interpretations currently available in the literature, i.e. the operator (Black, Greiman), the index (Geach, Smith), the epistemic (Green) and the performative (Künne) account, and finds them all wanting. The main problem is traced back to the ambiguity in Frege’s own characterisation of the judgement stroke as both embodying and representing the assertion, and to the fact that while an assertion is something we do with a sign, the sign does not do the assertion. A tentative, non-psychologistic solution to the problem is given, offering an interpretation of the judgement stroke as a kind of metalinguistic device registering (putative) truths relevant for the establishment of proofs.