Trade Ideas vs TradingView 2024: Which Platform is Best?

So you want to know who wins in a Trade Ideas vs TradingView head-to-head?

Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Before you choose which platform is right for you, it’s important you weigh up each of their key strengths and weaknesses.

This review covers every angle possible, from a former hedge fund manager’s perspective following extensive testing of both services.

So… Join me, as I take you through my analysis and divulge any discounts available…

What is Trade Ideas?

Trade Ideas is a leading stock scanning engine designed for short-term, active traders. It was established in 2003 by a team of fintech entrepreneurs, initially catering for professional traders and hedge funds (a testament to its sophisticated technology).

However, with the growing self-directed investment movement, their focus quickly broadened out to the non-professional retail trading community as well. Impressively, the original technology has only improved since then and their platform is still used by heavy-hitting investment professionals to this day.

Always nice to know you’re in good company!

This elite pedigree makes it one of the few platforms offering retail traders access to institutional-grade trading tools.

Don’t let that intimidate you though.

Over the years, Trade Ideas has made great strides in simplifying its software for the independent investor, without ever sacrificing quality. The result is a user-friendly stock scanner that packs a serious punch.

As well as over almost 50 pre-configured scans, its list of over 500 alerts and filters allows for endless customization. Not to mention that Premium subscribers have access to backtesting, autotrading, and an AI (artificial intelligence) trading assistant, “Holly”.

What is TradingView?

TradingView is a cloud based charting platform released in 2011, combining extensive charting capabilities with an enormous social network of over 50 million global users.

It offers real-time market data across multiple financial markets, including stocks, ETFs, FX, Crypto, and Futures. In fact, its stock market data spans 70+ exchanges in over 50 countries.

What’s more, it has an incredibly comprehensive suite of analytical features, ranging from advanced charting tools, stock screening, backtesting, and fundamental data.

As such, while Trade Ideas specifically targets day traders, TradingView caters for a wider pool of investors.

TradingView vs Trade Ideas Comparison

Feature	Trade Ideas	TradingView
Stock Screening
FX & Crypto Screening
OTC Data
Backtesting
AI Assistant
Fundamental Data
Community
Trading	Interactive Brokers & E*Trade	40+ Stock, FX & Crypto Brokers
Regions	US, Canada	Global
Charts	Basic candlestick charts, handful of technical indicators, basic drawing tools	16 chart styles, 100+ technical indicators, 90+ drawing tools
Free Trial	Sign Up For "Test Drive" Notifications	30-day Free Trial
Discount	-15% Off Your First Purchase	Up to -50% Discount

Trade Ideas vs TradingView Pricing

Both platforms offer multiple payment plans with different levels of functionality. TradingView has 3, ranging from a basic free version to an all-inclusive premium plan.

Trade Ideas, on the other hand, has 2 paid plans and a free web-based dashboard.

For a detailed breakdown of each plan’s features, read my TradingView review and Trade Ideas review, respectively.

As both platforms frequently offer discounts and promotions, you should follow the links below for up-to-date pricing.

Trade Ideas Free Trial & Discounts

Unfortunately, Trade Ideas doesn’t offer a free trial “on demand”. Instead, they run 2-week trials a few times a year for a small fee. These “Test Drives” give you full access to Trade Ideas’ Premium features, including its AI trading bot “Holly”. However, they only come around a few times a year, so you really need to take advantage of them while you can.

That’s why I recommend either signing up to our email list, or Trade Ideas’ own notification system. This way, you won’t miss your next small window of opportunity.

Trade Ideas August “Test Drive”

Lucky for you, however, the next “Test Drive” is taking place this month, from August 16th – 26th.

As mentioned, this gives you full access to Trade Ideas’ premium features, including its AI trading bot, “Holly”, backtesting, and autotrading.

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.

TradingView Free Trial & Discounts

TradingView offers a 30-day free trial for all of its paid plans, without requiring any upfront payment.

There are also several ways to get a discount.

Firstly, by clicking any of the links in this article, you will receive a $15 credit after you purchase any TradingView plan.

Secondly, users who choose to pay annually rather than monthly save 16%, which is equivalent to 2 months free!

And last but not least, users on a 30-day free trial of any paid plan will receive an “Early Bird” offer of up to 50% off.

Trade Ideas vs TradingView Features

Data Feeds

As traders, we know that our analysis is only as good as the data we use.

Thankfully, both Trade ideas and TradingView source their data from the most reputable industry vendors, although their packages differ slightly in terms of availability and pricing.

Firstly, real-time market data is available on both platforms. However, while this is included in the Trade Ideas price, TradingView only includes it when they’re allowed to by the relevant exchange. In some cases, you may have to pay additional fees for live prices.

The good news is that this mainly applies to international exchanges and futures exchanges. In fact, most US stock prices are real-time in TradingView, except for OTC markets which are delayed by 15 minutes.

In terms of geography, Trade Ideas covers the US and Canadian stock markets, while TradingView covers over 70 stock exchanges in more than 50 countries.

The last main difference lies in their asset class coverage. In particular, Trade Ideas covers stocks & ETFs, whereas TradingView covers stocks, ETFs, FX, futures (indices, commodities), and crypto.

Charts

Data is one thing. But our ability to visualize it is just as important.

Thankfully, both platforms offer several charting features. However, there are some important differences to be aware of.

Put simply, TradingView beats Trade Ideas hands down when it comes to charts. Hardly surprising given it’s a dedicated charting platform, but here are the details nonetheless.

TradingView Charts

Firstly, TradingView has over 15 customizable chart formats to choose from, including:

• Bars, Candles, Hollow candles, Columns, Line, Line with markers
• Step line, Area, Baseline, High-low, Heikin Ashi 
• Renko, Line break , Kagi, Point & figure, Range (Pro, Pro+, Premium)

There are also around 17 pre-set time frames ranging from 1 minute bars all the way up to yearly bars. Note, paid subscribers can also set custom time intervals, and Premium members can choose second-based intervals (1/5/15/30 seconds).

In addition, they come with a plethora of technical analysis tools. For instance, you can overlay your charts with more than 100 built-in indicators and over 90 drawing tools, such as trendlines, channels, and Fibonacci retracements. What’s more, you can create your own custom technical indicators using TradingView’s native Pine Script programming language.

And if that wasn’t enough, you can also tap into TradingView’s library of 100,000+ community-built indicators – the largest in the world.

In addition, these are some of its most advanced features:

• Multi Time Frame Charts: Display higher time frame data on a lower time frame chart. For instance, you can superimpose weekly candles on a daily chart, or a 10-day moving average on an hourly chart.
• Candlestick Pattern Recognition: Automatically plot more than 40 candlestick patterns of your choice on any chart. This comes with an explanation of each candlestick pattern as well as a possible trading interpretation.
• Chart Pattern Recognition: A Premium feature that automatically identifies 15 different chart patterns for you. This includes flag patterns, triangles, head and shoulders, and Elliott Waves.
• Fundamental Charts: Plot over 100 fundamental metrics alongside your stock charts to see their evolution over time. Most of this data stretches back 20 years.

Trade Ideas Charts

In comparison, Trade Ideas only offers basic charting tools. This is one of the few areas it falls short on, as it means you can’t perform in-depth technical analysis.

In summary, here are the key charting capabilities in Trade Ideas:

• 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.

Trade Ideas Premium also includes AI-generated profit and stop-loss “Smart Levels”, which are sometimes quite helpful. However, I still prefer to use a dedicated charting platform to understand the full trading picture.

Screener

While it’s all well and good having these charting tools at our disposal, it misses out an important first step.

Namely, idea generation.

We need to know what securities are worth looking at in the first place, after all!

This is where screening comes in.

While both platforms have extensive screening capabilities, they appeal to different types of investors.

As we’ve already established, Trade Ideas is primarily designed for day traders. As such, the screening criteria mainly revolves around technical parameters like price, volume, and pattern recognition. The image below shows just a small handful of these.

Moreover, the focus is on finding intraday opportunities in real-time. Therefore, Trade Ideas can be better described as a stock scanner that is constantly scouring the markets, as a opposed to a stock screener that updates only when prompted.

The point I’m making, is that stock scanning is a cornerstone of the Trade Ideas platform; that’s woven into the fabric of everything you do. There is hardly a moment when your eyes won’t be glued to multiple scans running on your monitor.

In contrast, TradingView’s screener – while still a key pillar – runs more as a separate function alongside the core charting platform. It isn’t something that you will be staring at all day, but rather utilizing on an as-needed basis. Having said that, paid subscribers do have the option to auto-refresh results every 10 seconds if they wish to. Perhaps that’s sufficient for some day traders, but it obviously can’t compete with the instant signals that Trade Ideas gives you.

What’s more, unlike Trade Ideas, TradingView includes a whole host of fundamental filters as well as technical ones. In fact, it has around 220 descriptive, technical, and fundamental metrics to build screening criteria with. This makes it better suited to fundamental investors who are more interested in the operating performance and valuation of a business. This makes TradingView more akin to Finviz, which you can compare in my Finviz vs TradingView review.

Lastly, while Trade Ideas only caters for stock scanning, TradingView includes separate FX and Crypto screeners.

Trade Ideas Stock Scanner

Trade Ideas gives you 3 ways to perform stock scans:

1. Alerts: Alert windows perform real-time scans for particular price/volume “events” (new highs, pattern recognition, volume breakouts, etc). These scans are constantly “on”, giving you a live-stream of trading signals as and when they occur.
2. Top Lists: A Top List window delivers the top 100 stocks based on your custom criteria and dynamically updates every 30 seconds. For example, you can see which stocks have gapped up the most since yesterday, have the highest relative volume, or the lowest float that session.
3. Holly AI: Each day, Holly backtests 60 different strategies on all US stocks, amounting to millions of backtests. It then uses the best-performing strategies to scan the market in real-time the following session, giving you 3-10 trading ideas each day.

There are more than 500 alerts and filters (links for full lists) to help you build your scanning criteria. This is far more than you get in TradingView and shows the limitless possibilities in Trade Ideas.

Here is what a Top List looks like. I called it “Small Cap Up Gappers”, which you can see the exact criteria for in my full Trade Ideas review. Essentially, it shows which stocks under $10 are gapping up the most in the premarket.

As you can see, IMRA gapped up about 37% on 7th September before rallying another 35% intraday to finish at $2. From there, it rallied another 125% in just over a month, equating to a 200% total gain.

The great thing about Trade Ideas, is that it lets you run multiple of these Alert and Top List windows simultaneously and dock them all on one screen. This means you can streamline the information that’s important to you and stay on top of every market-moving event throughout the day.

Admittedly, it 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, it’s nothing that a bit of perseverance can’t solve.

Alternatively, you can use any of the 48 pre-configured templates in the “Channel Bar”. Each channel represents a theme that’s popular with day traders, such as penny stocks, biotech stocks, premarket movers etc. Essentially, they serve as dedicated workstations for that particular “niche”, with relevant scans and layouts already prepared for you. Great for beginners and advanced traders alike!

Backtesting Trading Strategies

Both Trade Ideas and TradingView have backtesting capabilities, which allows you to test the profitability of any trading strategy using historical data.

Trade Ideas’ backtester is called “Oddsmaker“, but it is reserved for premium subscribers only. In contrast, TradingView offers backtesting to all of its users, however your subscription level determines the amount of historical data you can use.

For instance, Basic (free) members can use 5000 historical bars, Pro members can use 10,000, while Premium members can use 20,000. In comparison, Trade Ideas only lets you backtest on up to 65 days of historical data. This is a short amount of time compared to most other backtesters, and means it is really only suitable for short-term trading strategies.

In addition, both platforms give you the option to customize your own strategies. However, with TradingView, this requires knowledge of its Pine Script programming language. While it is very intuitive and easy to learn, Trade Ideas’ “point-and-click” approach makes it more beginner-friendly in my view.

For those not comfortable creating their own trading strategies yet, there are many pre-configured ones to experiment with. Trade Ideas has almost 50 of these, while TradingView has just over 20. However, that ignores the 100,000+ community-built strategies available in TradingView. As I explain later, TradingView is just as much a social network as it is a charting software, giving you access to a whole host of pooled resources.

To ensure that results are realistic, both platforms allow you to incorporate real-world conditions into your backtest. This includes take-profit/stop-loss rules as well as trade commissions. This means you can see the net profit of each strategy after trading costs are taken into account.

However, these are the only real-world variables you can include with Trade Ideas. On the other hand, TradingView lets you incorporate other common trading frictions like slippage and modify other parameters like order size and margin. This greater flexibility means that TradingView’s backtester replicates real-world conditions better than Trade Ideas in my opinion.

One thing I would say in Trade Ideas’ defence though, is that you can optimize your backtests to find the most profitable settings. Unfortunately, automated optimization isn’t available in TradingView.

In terms of output, TradingView’s is far more comprehensive than Trade Ideas’. For instance, it shows you:

• Net Profit
• Number of Trades
• Percent Profitable Trades
• Profit Factor
• Max Run-Up/Drawdown
• Average Trade Profit
• Average Trade Duration (# candles)
• And More

In comparison, Trade Ideas gives you a more limited number of statistics:

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

Trading

Neither Trade Ideas nor TradingView are trading platforms in and of themselves. However, they both integrate with several brokers, which effectively turns them into one.

This allows for in-platform trading, i.e. the ability to trade directly from your charts.

Firstly, Trade Ideas integrates with:

• Interactive Brokers
• E*Trade
• eSignal

However, note that autotrading (more below) is only possible with Interactive Brokers.

Meanwhile, TradingView integrates with more than 40 stock, FX & crypto brokers, including:

• Interactive Brokers
• TradeStation
• FXOpen
• Gemini
• Bitstamp
• And many more

What’s more, both platforms cater for automated trading.

For Trade Ideas, this requires a premium plan and a broker intergration with Interactive Brokers. Simply define the buy and sell rules of your strategy and let the “Brokerage Plus” module handle the rest.

In comparison, TradingView only offers a workaround to full-scale autotrading via webhooks. To do so, you have to connect your account to a bot trading service such as SignalStack and send your trading alerts through there.

Community Features

Now onto the community features.

While both platforms offer something in this department, this is really TradingView’s lane.

Indeed, TradingView represents the biggest trading community in the world with over 50 million users. In fact, as of December 2023, TradingView is officially the most popular investing website in the world, with greater traffic than big-name brands like Nike, TripAdvisor, and Hulu.

Essentially, TradingView provides all of the means to connect, learn, and share trade ideas with experienced traders. This includes the following:

• Trade Ideas: An open forum of other traders’ predictions, market analysis, and general trade setups, presented through advanced charts, videos, playback buttons, and community feedback.
• Educational Ideas: Discuss trading psychology, risk management, and best practices on how to use certain tools and strategies.
• Live Streams: Pick the brains of popular streamers in real time through live trading and chat.
• Scripts: World’s largest curated repository (100,000+) of community-built indicators and strategies.

While Trade Ideas doesn’t offer such comprehensive community resources, there are still plenty of ways to connect with other traders and discuss trading opportunities. For example, in-house trading expert Barrie Einarson runs a live daily trading room, where he shares his market insights and the stocks catching his eye throughout the day.

Having attended these sessions multiple times, I found it a great way of sharing trading ideas with fellow users and hearing about stocks that weren’t necessarily on my radar. For beginners, it is also a fantastic opportunity to see how experienced traders think about stock selection and implement their trading process.

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.

Who is Trade Ideas Best For?

Trade Ideas is best for day traders looking to pinpoint intraday opportunities with speed and precision. The combination of their award winning trading technology and endlessly customizable real-time scans, ensure you have a level playing field to compete with the big dogs. It is also a good choice for those who believe in the power of its AI algorithms, as well as those who want to automate their trades.

Who is TradingView Best For?

TradingView is best for traders looking for an advanced charting platform with global, multi-asset data coverage. It will also appeal to traders who employ both technical and fundamental analysis to generate their trade ideas. Lastly, it will suit anyone who likes the social aspect of trading, as you’ll become part of the largest trading community in the world.

Trade Ideas vs TradingView Summary

In conclusion, TradingView is in a league of its own when it comes to data coverage, advanced charting, backtesting, and community.

However, when it comes to short-term trading, nothing can compete with Trade Ideas.

As such, while TradingView is designed for the “all-round” trader/investor, Trade Ideas is the ultimate home for day traders.