Trade Ideas Review 2024: The Ultimate Day Trading Platform

In this Trade Ideas review, you’re going to see how I used its real-time scanners to generate a 37% return within the space of an hour!

Along the way, we’ll cover everything that makes it one of the most popular stock scanners for retail traders, including how to use Trade Ideas to its full potential.

Scans, Backtesting, Stock Racing, Charts, Auto Trading, and state-of-the-art AI algorithms. You name it, it’s here.

So without further ado, let’s dig in…

Before we do though, you should know that Trade Ideas are offering a 10-day trial of their premium service from August 16th – 26th. This also includes a 3-day simulated trading competition with $49,000 in prizes up for grabs.

Don’t hang around though, as these “Test Drives” only come around a few times a year. To claim this offer while it lasts, simply follow the link below. Or, for more details, keep reading…

Trade Ideas Review Highlights

What is Trade Ideas?

Trade Ideas is a revolutionary stock scanner designed for active traders in the US & Canadian stock markets.

Established in 2003 as a real-time stock scanning platform, Trade Ideas has evolved into an industry-leader through constant innovation.

This includes its cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, which use statistical analysis to sift through millions of hypothetical trading strategies each day – identifying those with the highest probability of generating a profit.

Trade Ideas Test Drive August 2024

Unlike most other platforms that offer free trials “on-demand”, Trade Ideas only offer trials a few times a year for a small fee of $7.77. The next “Test Drive” just so happens to be coming up this month, from August 16th – 26th.

This gives you full access to Trade Ideas’ premium features, including its AI trading bot, “Holly”.

In addition, Trade Ideas are running the “CenterPoint Battle of the Bears” contest from August 21st – 23rd, which is a 3-day simulated trading competition with $49,000 in prizes up for grabs.

The signup deadline for both the Test Drive and contest is August 21st. However, in order to make the most of the full 10-day trial and get some practice in before the contest, I would sign up as early as you can.

As mentioned, these Test Drives only come around a few times a year, so you really need to make the most of them while you can. To take advantage of this time-limited offer before it runs out, simply follow the link below.

Trade Ideas Pricing

Trade Ideas offers a standard and premium version of its software, which can be purchased as a monthly or annual subscription. Note, the annual subscription gives you a 25% discount compared to purchasing the monthly subscription.

Trade Ideas are constantly offering discounts and promotions for their products, so be sure to click this link to get the most up-to-date prices currently available.

Trade Ideas Discount (15% Off!)

As a partner of Trade Ideas, we are currently offering a 15% discount on your first order! This amounts to hundreds of dollars in savings if you choose the annual plan.

Simply follow the link below to bag this offer while it lasts.

Trade Ideas Standard vs. Premium

The standard version of Trade Ideas comes with scanning, charting, trading, and a live trading room; while the premium version includes precise AI trading signals, backtesting, and auto trading on top.

Trade Ideas Standard

The standard version of Trade Ideas gives you everything you need to perform customized, real-time scans, including more than 40 pre-programmed scans and over 500 price alerts & filters from Trade Ideas.

In addition, it allows you to display 10 simultaneous charts which you can directly trade from through your broker.

It also includes a live, daily trading room where you can connect with other traders via a chat room, and learn from day trading veterans like Barrie Einarson.

Trade Ideas Pro (AI)

The premium version of Trade Ideas is called Trade Ideas Pro, which includes everything in the standard plan as well as the following features:

• “Holly” AI Stock Scanning Engine – 3 AI algorithms that provide entry and exit signals with varying risk profiles
• AI Smart Levels – See AI-generated stop and profit target levels on charts
• Backtesting – Test the profitability of any trading strategy using up to 65 days of historical data
• Autotrading – Automate your trading strategies with Brokerage Plus

Trade Ideas Software Overview

Trade Ideas’ stock scanner can be run from your desktop or as a slimmed-down web version. Both versions are connected via the cloud, which means all of your settings, layouts, and alerts transfer between the 2. This ensures effortless access to your Trade Ideas account wherever you are in the world.

While the web version includes most functionality, it excludes certain things like trading, multi-screen layouts, as well as some of the “channels” (e.g. Penny Stock Channel).

Therefore, if you like organizing your windows across multiple monitors, plan to trade within the platform, and want access to the full range of “channels”, the desktop version is the way to go.

When you first open Trade Ideas you will be met with a selection of windows, charts, and flashing colours.

This barrage of information can seem overwhelming at first, but you should get used to it after for a few hours.

Besides, access to information is what you want as active traders. Just be sure to streamline it to your preferences and avoid overkill. Otherwise, you run the risk of “analysis paralysis”.

On this note, the important thing to remember is that everything you see is fully customizable. The layout, the strategies, the charts, you name it.

This allows you to curate the information that’s important to you. Develop a trading style, display the relevant scans, and off you go.

This does require some drag & dropping, resizing, and “right-clicking” to get your ideal settings, which can feel a bit user-unfriendly and “clunky” to begin with (an area Trade Ideas could improve).

However, as mentioned, it’s nothing that a bit of perseverance can’t solve.

Trade Ideas Features

Everything you need to get started with Trade Ideas is found in the top toolbar.

The “File” and “New” menus are where you access the most important features.

“File” is where you save and load layouts and scans to the cloud, while “New” is where you open the different analytical tools covered below.

The “Brokerage Plus” icon opens the trade execution panel. Here is where you enter trades and monitor open positions, in both your live, and simulated, trading accounts.

Now let’s drill down into the individual tools.

Channel Bar

Unsure how to configure your Trade Ideas layout?

No worries.

The Channel Bar includes 48 pre-configured layouts that target specific themes, sectors, and trading opportunities.

Not only is this a great starting point for beginners, but it also lets you effortlessly transition across themes that most day traders target anyway. This saves you tons of time developing these layouts yourself.

Some of the most popular channels include:

• Pre-Market: See the stocks making big moves in the pre-market
• Short Squeeze: The place to find short squeeze stocks
• MOMO-Mentum: Locate insane momentum in the stock market
• Explosive Winners: See which stocks are up the most over the past day or week
• Penny Movers: A dedicated penny stock scanner that finds the most active penny stocks

If you like using pre-configured strategies as templates, ChartMill has a library of over 200 screens for you to experiment with. However, they tend to focus on longer-term opportunities rather than intraday.

Real-Time Scanner Alerts

Alert windows stream real-time trading signals as and when they occur throughout the day.

By clicking “New” –> “Alert Window”, the following “Alert Configuration Window” appears.

This is the central nervous system of Trade Ideas, because it’s where you configure all of your scanner settings.

As you can see, there are already some pre-configured strategies (more than 40), ranging from bullish, to bearish, to neutral.

Importantly, you can leave them as they are, modify them, or create your own scans completely from scratch.

Below shows just a small snippet of the alerts available.

Some of the most popular include:

• New Highs
• Crossed Above Moving Average
• High Relative Volume
• Halt/Resume
• Pattern Recognition (Triangles, Head & Shoulders etc)
• Fibonacci signals
• Candlestick Patterns (Doji, Hammers etc)
• Technical Indicators (MACD & Stochastic Crossovers)

If you’re curious to see the full list of alerts and their definitions, then follow this link.

Honestly, the list is endless, which is great if you like granularity in your scans. However, while I encourage you to play around with the different alerts, don’t go crazy and include so many that you end up with zero stocks meeting all your criteria. Sometimes the best scans are the most simple, because they produce understandable trading signals.

In addition to alerts, you can also impose specific filters. These give you even more control over the stocks you’re alerted to.

For example, you can impose thresholds on:

• Volume
• Float
• Short Float (%)
• Price Change
• Days to Cover
• Earnings

And much, much more.

Once all your preferred settings are in the “Configuration Window”, click “OK”. This creates a new pop-up window in your main screen like the one below. Now you can see all the stocks meeting your scanning criteria in real-time.

“Breaking out on Volume” is a pre-configured scan that’s great for finding breakout stocks.

Other settings in the Configuration Window include the exchanges or “symbol lists” (including personal watchlists) you want to focus on, as well as the columns (metrics) you want displayed in the Alert Window.

Top Lists

“Top Lists” are another key pillar of the Trade Ideas toolkit.

Instead of streaming real-time alerts in chronological order, Top Lists rank stocks from best to worse (or vice versa) based on a variable of your choice.

For example, you can see which stocks have:

• Gapped up the most from yesterday’s close
• Risen or fallen the most during the day
• Have the highest relative volume
• The biggest daily trading range
• Or the most short interest

There’s around 260 metrics that you can sort and rank on.

Again, you can impose as many constraints as you want on these metrics, say, if you want to filter out certain stocks.

For example, in the configuration window below, I’m looking for stocks with:

• A maximum float of 50,000,000 shares
• A share price between $0.5 and $10
• A “gap” of at least 2% from yesterday’s close
• Volume of at least 200,000 shares today

And I want to sort by “Gap (%)” to see the biggest “up gappers” at the top of the list.

This produced the following list in the pre-market on September 7th.

Interestingly, IMRA went on to make a 200% gain from that point in just over a month. It’s no wonder that Trade Ideas won my pick for the best premarket scanner.

Real-Time Stock Racing

The Stock Racing feature is the latest addition to the Trade Ideas arsenal. It’s an innovative way of visualizing which stocks deserve the most attention in your scans.

I have to admit, I was sceptical at first. Seeing cars race across my screen seemed like a bit of a gimmick and a distraction initially.

However, after experimenting with it I started to see the benefits.

Essentially, the aim of Stock Racing is to do away with the manual process of flicking through multiple charts to find interesting price action.

Instead, it replaces this task with an intuitive, one-window solution that cuts straight through the noise and focuses your attention where it needs to be.

While Top Lists give you a static picture of a stock’s ranking at a point-in-time, it’s hard to visualize this changing throughout the day. Stock Racing, on the other hand, gives you a much more dynamic picture of how a stock’s price action changes in real-time.

For example, a stock might start the day with a massive gap up, but then fade later on. Similarly, a stock with a less explosive open might subsequently rally throughout the day. As this second stock keeps “winning” races and climbing the rankings, this is where we want our attention to turn.

The upshot, is that it improves your ability to find the most volatile stocks and capture short-term trading opportunities. With stock racing, you no longer have to worry about being in the “right place at the right time”.

How to Use Trade Ideas Stock Racing

This is how it works…

1. Select a group of stocks that you’re interested in monitoring. These can be from any Top List of your choice.
   
   Let’s take the “Small Cap Up Gappers” list from earlier. Right-click and select “Launch Real-Time Stock Race”

2. Next, we need to define the race parameters:

The key settings for a time-based race are the following:

• Race Lanes – Number of stocks
• Minutes – Length of race
• Based On – The metric for winning the race (% change, volume, float, gap, etc.)
• Replace Cars – Allow new stocks to enter race
• Auto Re-Run – Restart race as soon as it finishes

3. Monitor the race results.
   
   Keep track of the stocks that keep winning races. For example, in the image below you can see that SONN had won 3 out of 5 races based on “Change From Close (%)”, and was also leading the current race. This piqued my interest.

I particularly liked its low float (4.15m shares), high relative volume (272!), and the fact that today’s volume (14.43m) was more than 3x its float. I also liked how it was breaking out of a consolidation pattern on the 5-minute chart.

It paid off, because within an hour I was selling for a 37% profit! These trades are timestamped below.

Read this article to see how I made similar profits in other low float stocks. You will soon see why I recommend Trade Ideas as the best TradingView alternatives for day traders.

This is the power of Stock Racing. Without it, my attention might have been elsewhere for that short space of time.

Instead, it took me right to where the action was and allowed me to lock in a healthy profit.

You can find out more about Stock Racing here.

Holly AI

Now we come onto the most unique feature of Trade Ideas: its Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot.

The AI is called “Holly”, and there are 3 different variations of it: Holly, Holly 2.0, and Holly Neo. Note, Holly only comes with the premium subscription (TI Pro).

Holly (“Holly Grail”)

Holly, or “Holly Grail”, was the first iteration of their artificial intelligence assistant. It backtests around 60 different strategies on all US stocks, amounting to millions of backtests each day.

It then applies this data to next day’s trading conditions, to find stocks with the highest probability of making a profit. Only trades with a backtested win rate of at least 60% and a 2:1 estimated risk/reward ratio are suggested.

Holly 2.0

Holly 2.0 is similar to Holly, except it is slightly more aggressive in its approach. Its main focus is on finding aggressive, intraday opportunities for day traders to capitalize on e.g. bull traps.

Holly Neo

Holly Neo is the latest version Holly and specifically targets real-time chart patterns:

• Pullback Long – Stocks moving up after a temporary retracement
• Breakout Long – Stocks breaking through resistance levels or to new highs.
• Pullback Short – A short strategy capturing stocks moving back down after a rally
• Breakdown Short – Stocks breaking through support levels

Click here to see the full list of AI strategies that Holly utilizes.

Trade Ideas Holly Review

Holly recommends about 3-10 trades every day (long & short), with each lasting anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours.

As such, you need to be an active day trader with a reasonably large account size (approx. $25k) that can go both long and short.

This long trade on RENT is just one example of a recent success story. As of writing, the trade is up about 95% in the space of 1 day, having issued a Buy Signal at $11.28.

Of course, you can trade every AI signal in a systematic way if you wish to. Auto trading through Brokerage Plus makes that process even easier.

However, personally, I wouldn’t do this.

Principally, because I don’t believe there’s a “silver bullet” trading strategy, this AI included.

This doesn’t mean I would completely exclude it from my workflow, however. I still found its trade suggestions extremely useful to cross-reference with my own scans.

For example, ATNM was a stock on my radar due to the wedge pattern it had formed on the daily chart. A few days later, the AI triggered a buy signal, which only added to my conviction.

As you can see, while Holly highlights intraday trading opportunities, some of the signals go on to be profitable over longer time frames aswell.

This is why I suggest using Holly with your own discretion, rather than systematically.

Charts & News

Trade Ideas is first and foremost a stock screener, not a charting platform.

Unsurprisingly then, the charting features are pretty basic compared to a full-blown technical analysis software like TrendSpider or MetaStock.

This is one of the disappointing aspects of Trade Ideas, as it means you can’t perform detailed technical analysis.

The key features include:

• Basic Candlestick Charts
• Real-Time Data (pre and post-market)
• Multiple Time Frames (minutes, hours, days, weeks, & months)
• RSI
• MACD
• Volume
• VWAP
• Moving Averages
• Annotation Tools (Trendlines, Text, etc.)

Essentially, the charts in Trade Ideas are fine for performing simple tasks, such as quickly eye-balling chart setups and setting price alerts.

TI Pro also includes AI-generated profit and stop-loss “Smart Levels”, which is sometimes quite helpful. However, I still like to use a dedicated charting platform to understand the full trading picture.

In general, day traders like news catalysts, because they can lead to explosive moves. This is where the news feature comes in handy.

“Single Stock Windows” show recent news headlines for any stock, and come from a wide range of sources, like Benzinga and The Motley Fool. However, there is no way to filter for different news events and keywords like you can with Koyfin.

Note, this is not a news scanner, like Scanz, so you can’t set alerts based on different news events. Nevertheless, convenient news access is vital to see what might be causing a stock to move.

For a more in-depth comparison between Trade Ideas and Scanz, read my Scanz vs Trade Ideas review. Alternatively, you can check out these other Trade Ideas alternatives.

Backtesting

Trade Ideas has a backtester called “OddsMaker”, which lets traders test the performance of their scans on historical data.

This is a seriously advanced tool, usually reserved for sophisticated quant funds. Having said that, it is also incredibly simple and intuitive to use, making it suitable for retail traders.

By right-clicking any Alert Window and selecting “Backtest Strategy”, the OddsMaker window appears.

Here is where you define the parameters of your test, such as:

• Entry Time
• Exit Time
• Risk Management (profit taking and stop losses)
• Length of Backtest (up to 65 days)

Once the backtest is complete, you can measure the effectiveness of your strategy with metrics such as:

• Profit Factor
• Average Gain/Loss
• Buying Power Required
• Win Rate
• Projected Annual Return

Essentially, it lets you see how much money you could have made if you followed this strategy over the specified time frame. This is a great way to test out your scans before you commit real capital towards them.

You can also optimize certain elements of the backtest, which lets you finesse your strategy even further.

If you’re looking to backtest over a longer period of time, Finviz provides backtesting on more than 100 technical indicators for the last 24 years. TradingView also lets you backtest thousands of community-built strategies over a long time period as well. In fact, you should check out my Trade Ideas vs TradingView review to see how both platforms stack up against each other.

Brokerage Plus

Brokerage plus allows you to integrate Trade Ideas with your broker, providing seamless trade executions directly from its platform.

This lets you quickly pull the trigger on trade opportunities, rather than having to flick across different platforms.

Unfortunately, this is only applies to stocks. If you want a platform for options analysis and trading, you should check out TC2000 instead.

Trade Ideas integrates with E*Trade, eSignal and Interactive Brokers for in-platform trading. However, note that auto trading is only available with Interactive Brokers.

Auto trading lets you automate any trading strategy. These could be any of the pre-configured scans in Trade Ideas, a strategy from Holly AI, or one your backtested strategies. Simply define the buy and sell rules and let Brokerage Plus handle the rest.

Live Trading Room

The live trading room runs daily and is hosted by in-house pro trader, Barrie Einarson. He talks you through his trading process and the stocks catching his eye – in the pre-market and throughout the day.

Having attended these sessions multiple times, I found it a great way to broaden my knowledge about the Trade Ideas platform. It was also a great way to connect with other traders through the chat room and hear about stocks that weren’t necessarily on my radar.

For beginners, it’s also an opportunity to see how experienced traders think about stock selection and put trading strategies into action.

Some people pay more than the whole Trade Ideas subscription for trading rooms half this quality, so you really get a “bang for your buck” here.

Education & Training

Trade Ideas offers a wide range of educational resources that caters for all.

There are endless videos on their website and YouTube channel showing you how to navigate their platform, and learn the basics of trading.

In addition, you can pay for 1-on-1 training sessions with one of their seasoned experts to accelerate your learning further.

And, of course, there is the free, live trading room as already mentioned.

FAQs

Trade Ideas Review Summary

So now you know why Trade Ideas is the go-to stock scanner for so many traders.

The speed of the platform is unrivalled, and no other scanner comes close in terms of flexibility. In addition, it’s hard to find many scanners with such a broad range of features.

Apart from serious charting tools, it essentially has everything you could ever need as a trader.

Backtesting, screening, trading, news, and not to mention their unique stock racing and AI trading features.

And, while there is a bit of a learning curve initially, the community, education, and training resources, mean you’ll be hitting the ground running in no time.

As a partner of Trade Ideas, we are currently offering a 15% discount on your first month or year with Trade Ideas! However, you will have to act quick, as this offer expires on June 19th.