Despite being a relatively new kid on the block, TrendSpider has quickly made a name for itself as a pioneer of automated technical analysis tools. In this TrendSpider review, we will take a close look at how they utilize AI machine learning algorithms to remove the manual labour from technical analysis – not to mention human error!
From automated trendline, candlestick, and chart pattern recognition, to screening, backtesting and dynamic alerts, it’s all here in this review.
I will also take you through the different payment tiers and tell you all about the free trials and discounts available.
TrendSpider Review Highlights
| Features | Charts, Automated Pattern Recognition, Screening, Backtesting |
| Operating System | Web Browser |
| Subscription | Monthly, Yearly |
| Regions | US |
| Exchanges | NYSE, Nasdaq, AMEX |
| Designed For | US Stock, ETF, Crypto & FX Traders |
| Discount | -20% Discount With Code "SOV20" |
| Free Trial | 7-day Free Trial |
What is TrendSpider?
TrendSpider is a revolutionary charting software that specializes in automated technical analysis. Its patented AI algorithms automatically plot trendlines, candlestick patterns, chart patterns, and Fibonacci retracements on charts, helping remove the guesswork from technical analysis.
In addition, multi time frame analysis allows you to plot chart drawings and technical indicators from higher time frames onto a single chart, giving you a whole new perspective about support and resistance levels.
It’s real-time market scanner is packed full of technical filters and pre-bulit screens, while its backtester is extremely versatile.
With over 55,000 assets spanning stocks, ETFs, indices, futures, commodities, FX, and crypto available, TrendSpider is the ultimate playground for technical traders and a melting pot of trading opportunities.
Pros
- Automated Trendline Analysis
- Candlestick & Chart Pattern Recognition
- Multi Timeframe Analysis
- Dynamic & Multi Factor Alerts
- Automatic Fibonacci Retracements
- Real Time Data Included in Price
- Powerful Stock Screener
- Robust Historical Backtesting
Cons
- No Integrated Trading Platform
- No Fundamental Screening
TrendSpider Pricing
TrendSpider offers 3 different payment plans with increasing levels of functionality. To help you find the right package for you, there is a 7-day free trial available on all tiers, so you can try before you buy.
Once the free trial ends, you can either choose to pay on a monthly or annual basis, however note that there is a 17% discount when you pay up-front for the annual plan.
Real-time data is included in the price of all payment plans, which makes TrendSpider super competitive compared to other platforms that charge additional fees for this data.
To see the latest prices for each payment tier, follow the link below.
Now, let’s see what features you get for each subscription level.
Essential
The Essential plan is the most basic of the 3 packages. It comes with real-time data for US stocks, ETFs, currencies, crypto, and futures ($7.50 monthly exchange fee), as well as delayed data for indices and OTC/Pink Sheets stocks. And just for good order, they throw in pre and post-market data too. As such, TrendSpider makes a great premarket scanner.
In addition, you have access to most of the platform’s core capabilities, such as:
- Charting
- Over 190 built-in indicators
- Automated trendline detection
- Candlestick pattern recognition
- Chart pattern recognition
- Automatic Fibonacci retracements
- Real-time scanning
- Multi timeframe analysis
- Backtesting
- Dynamic price alerts
If you think this is too good to be true, you wouldn’t be totally wrong. While all of these features are available to Essential subscribers, they come with certain limitations.
For example, you are limited to:
- 3000 candle backtest length
- Daily minimum scanning timeframe
- 25 results per scan
- 2 simultaneous workspaces
- 25 alerts (14-day lifetime)
- No alternative data
- E-mail and chat support
Elite
The Elite plan includes everything in Essential, but with higher limits on certain features, including:
- 5000 candle backtest length
- 1-minute minimum scanning timeframe
- 100 results per scan
- 4 simultaneous workspaces
- Alternative data (dark pool volume, unusual options flow, insider trading, etc.)
- 100 alerts (30-day lifetime)
- Phone support & priority customer service
Elite Plus
Elite plus expands on these limitations even further with:
- 7000 candle backtest length
- Unlimited results per scan
- 8 simultaneous workspaces
- 300 alerts (180-day lifetime)
- Free 1-on-1 training
Therefore, if you want robust backtesting, alternative data, and no restrictions on scanning and alerts, Elite plus is the way to go. Longer-term traders will also like the 180-day lifetime on alerts, since you won’t be constantly resetting them.
As a partner of TrendSpider, we are currently offering a 20% discount on all subscriptions to TrendSpider. So be sure to grab it while it lasts!
Note, if you plan on using TrendSpider as a penny stock scanner, be aware that OTC data is slightly delayed. For real-time penny stock scanning, I would recommend Scanz or Trade Ideas instead.
TrendSpider Features
Ok, now we know about the different payment plans, it’s time for a deep dive into TrendSpider’s main features…
TrendSpider Charts Review
There are a few key things I look for when reviewing charts.
Firstly, do they look good? There is nothing worse than staring at ugly charts all day, after all.
Following my in depth TrendSpider review, the simple answer to this is… yes.
Indeed, not only does TrendSpider have crisp, high-resolution charts, but the entire portal has 3 different colour theme options:
- Light
- Dark
- Good Ol’ Days/High Contrast
Therefore, whether you prefer a clean white background, a slick black look, or a good old retro feel, you will feel right at home in TrendSpider. If none of these suit you, you can also choose your own settings completely from scratch.
You also have the option to display your charts in any of the following 6 formats, from 1-minute bars all the way up to yearly bars:
- Candlestick
- Line
- Bar
- Hollow Candles
- Heikin Ashi
- Raindrop
Raindrop Charts are a proprietary concept from the team at TrendSpider, in an attempt to help traders visualize both VWAP and price data in a single candle.
This is just one of many innovations that has catapulted TrendSpider into one of the leading pioneers in the industry. As you will see throughout this TrendSpider review, there is a burgeoning list of unique features that makes this platform so exciting, and a testament to the fact that it has clearly been built by traders, for traders.
The second thing I look at when reviewing charts is the user experience.
Is it smooth?
By this, I mean how easy is it to navigate and analyse your charts with zoom functions and drawing tools. It’s easy to dismiss these small details, but with so much competition out there, it’s vital you get the basics right.
Again, TrendSpider passes this test with flying colours.
Zooming is made easy with a simple scroll of the mouse, which puts you in full control of your charts at your fingertips.
Moreover, there are more than 20 annotation tools conveniently located in the left sidebar, ranging from trendlines, Fibonacci retracements, to ABCD lines. If you are looking for more drawing tools than this like Gann fans, Fibonacci arcs, standard error channels, and Andrews’ pitchfork, I would recommend MetaStock instead.
Technical indicators are also easy to add from the top toolbar, and there is even a customizable widget sidebar that displays things like watchlists, news, analyst estimates, and more.
Within the indicator menu, you can modify any settings you can think of, from time frames, price sources, colours, and more.
I thought the price source option was pretty cool, as it gives you an extra dimension of flexibility that few other platforms offer.
As well as basing your indicators off the standard “Close/Right” data point, you can also choose to base it off the open, high, low, or some combination of those (arithmetic average).
The last thing I look for in charts, is whether they have any unique features that you can’t get anywhere else. It is on this last point that TrendSpider truly shines, so let’s get into them…
Automated Trendline Analysis
What’s the one thing we spend most of our time doing as technical analysts?
Drawing support and resistance lines, right?
Not only is this time-consuming, but there is also no guarantee that you are drawing them in the right places to begin with. Drawing trendlines is subjective after all, and the human eye has a tendency to deceive us. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve traded false breakouts from trendlines that were figments of my imagination.
Thankfully, TrendSpider has an innovative solution for this: automated trendlines.
Essentially, automated trendlines use machine learning algorithms to automatically identify and plot trendlines on charts.
The benefits of this are two-fold.
Firstly, it saves you time conducting this analysis yourself, which gives you more time to spend on the important things, like picking winners! The more time spent doing this, the more money you can potentially make.
Secondly, it identifies support and resistance levels that may not be obvious to the human eye. This will put you leagues ahead of your competition.
To employ this feature, you simply click the “Trends” icon in the top toolbar. Straight away, you are presented with a selection of trendlines, like below. What struck me, is how accurate they are in pinpointing support and resistance lines that I wouldn’t have noticed myself – at least not at the same laser-fast speed.
Another great aspect about this feature is the level of flexibility it affords you. In particular, by adjusting your trend analysis preferences, you can control the number of trendlines you see until it suits your trading style.
There are 4 settings that you can fine-tune:
- Analysis Type: Choose between Original, Enhanced, and Standard. Original is the least sensitive and only shows a handful of longer-term trends. Enhanced is the most sensitive, showing short and long-term trends (including pivot points that cut through price data). Standard is a hybrid approach that represents the TrendSpider team’s preferred formulas
- Drawing Input: Decide whether you want trendlines to connect highs and lows or opens and closes
- Islands (Gaps): Allows you to draw trendlines through gaps or not
- Quality: Choose between Most Relevant (top 1%), More Lines, and All (Unfiltered) to decide how many possible trendlines you want to see.
Therefore, if you’re someone who likes to see every possible trendline, your best bet is to choose “Enhanced” and either “More Lines” or “All”. However, be warned that your chart will become very cluttered, like below, and increase the risk of “analysis paralysis”. I think the trick here is to lock your preferred trendlines in place by double-clicking them, before returning to the “Standard/Most Relevant” combo for a much cleaner view.
On the other hand, if you only want to see the highest conviction trendlines (like me), you are better off choosing “Standard” and “Most Relevant”.
If that wasn’t enough, you can also modify the trendline formulas and sensitivities in advanced settings and highlight all of their breakout points on the chart.
The important thing to remember with all this, is that you can remove any trendline you disagree with or add any new ones manually. In other words, you are always fully in control of your charts.
Multi Timeframe Analysis
The next chart feature I want to cover in this TrendSpider review is multi timeframe analysis.
All good traders know that you shouldn’t base your technical analysis on one time frame. This can lead to tunnel vision and missing the forest for the trees.
Sometimes, you need to take a step back and look at a chart from different perspectives. For example, many day traders get into trouble when they focus too much on intraday price action; often missing important technical levels on higher timeframe charts.
So… what do we do?
Well, before TrendSpider came along, it meant manually flicking across different time frames, plotting our indicators on each one, and in most cases losing these annotations anytime we switched time frame.
Needless to say, this is a frustrating and time-consuming process.
Thankfully, TrendSpider makes our lives much easier in this respect. Essentially, multi time frame charts consolidate all of your trendlines and indicators from two different time frames onto one chart, which lets you see a broader trading picture at a glance.
For example, you can overlay a 50-week moving average on a daily chart, trendlines from a monthly chart on a weekly chart, and a daily MACD onto an hourly chart.
By clicking the multi timeframe analysis button (MTFA) in the top-left corner, you can automatically see all of the higher time frame trendlines and indicators. These are helpfully displayed as dashed lines to avoid confusion.
Now, our eyes are in two places at once and we can have much more confidence in our trading strategies. In other words, you can see the forest for the trees! Naturally, this gives you a serious edge over other traders.
If you want to check out another platform that offers multi timeframe charts, then read my TradingView review for a closer look. To see how they stack up against each other, you will also want to read my TrendSpider vs TradingView comparison.
Candlestick Pattern Recognition
Any automated charting software wouldn’t be quite complete without reliable candlestick pattern recognition, would it?
TrendSpider does… and it’s good.
With this feature, you can choose from a long list of more than 200 candlestick patterns to automatically display on your charts.
From dojis, hammers, to spinning tops, you name it it’s here. It even recognizes multi-candle patterns like the evening doji star and morning doji star.
Simply select the patterns you want TrendSpider to identify for you and watch them instantly appear on your charts.
What’s more, you can switch to MTFA mode and see candlestick patterns from higher time frames too. For instance, the shaded boxes in the chart below highlight weekly candlestick patterns on a daily chart.
Once again, TrendSpider does the heavy lifting for you by delivering actionable trading signals with little to no effort on your part.
For those interested, Finviz also offers a free candlestick recognition screener, however it isn’t as comprehensive as TrendSpider. This article also sheds light on some other TrendSpider alternatives.
Automated Fibonacci Retracements
If you thought automated trendlines were cool, wait till you hear about this next feature.
Automated Fibonacci retracements do exactly what they say on the tin. Essentially, TrendSpider uses its AI algorithms to identify the most relevant peaks and troughs in a trend to automatically plot Fibonacci retracement levels.
Again, not only does this save you time, but it removes the guesswork in identifying the best highs and lows to use for drawing your Fibs.
Simply click the “Auto-Fibs” button in the top toolbar and watch the algorithms do their magic. As you will have guessed by now, clicking the MTFA button will also show you higher time frame Fibs.
Chart Pattern Recognition
Chart pattern recognition is one of the latest additions to the TrendSpider toolkit.
Just like the automated trendline and candlestick tools, it automatically identifies 10 different chart patterns, including:
- Channels (Ascending, Descending, Horizontal)
- Double Bottoms/Tops
- Triangles (Ascending, Descending, Symmetrical)
- Wedges (Falling, Rising)
As you can see in the chart below, Apple is currently testing the top of a rising wedge, which makes it a potential breakout stock.
Of course, you can switch to MTFA mode to add an extra layer of analysis from higher time frames. For example, in the chart below, the dashed green lines represent a descending channel on the weekly chart, while the dashed navy lines represent a symmetrical triangle.
Again, I was seriously impressed with the accuracy of these drawings. When I combined them with the automated trendlines, I honestly felt like I could see every major support and resistance level. In fact, they’re so good, it rates as my favourite TradingView alternative for automated technical analysis.
However, while I like what I see from this function so far, it would be nice to see some more chart patterns like head & shoulders and cup and handles added in the future.
Multi Symbol View
The Multi Symbol View is another recent addition to TrendSpider, released in the summer of 2022. It builds on the multi time frame feature mentioned above, which only allowed users to display 4 different time frames of the same security.
With the community demanding more from this function, TrendSpider developed the Multi Symbol View, which now allows 16 different charts to be shown at the same time. Importantly, each chart can show different symbols, chart types, time frames, and indicators, giving you endless customization.
Needless to say, this is a great way of seeing a birds-eye view of your favourite stocks in one place. This is especially pertinent for active traders who need to stay on top of the action at all times.
TrendSpider Market Scanner Review
Ok, so we’ve established that TrendSpider has amazing chart analysis tools.
But how do we find securities worth analysing in the first place?
This is where the Market Scanner comes in – the name given to TrendSpider’s real-time stock scanning module.
Use any one of the pre-built systems or create your own from scratch with hundreds of price, indicator, candlestick pattern, earnings, and news conditions.
The pre-built scanners list is packed full of candlestick and chart pattern screens. For example, the screenshot below shows you how to run an “Ascending Triangle Break Up” scan. Switch on the automated chart pattern analyzer to see the underlying pattern, and see which charts catch your eye from the scan results.
The great thing about this screener is that you can create conditions across 4 different time frames.
For example, let’s say you want to find stocks with the following characteristics:
- Trading above 50-week moving average
- Bullish daily MACD crossover
- Current 5-minute candle above previous 5-minute candle by at least 2%
The screenshot below shows you how easy it is to input this criteria into the TrendSpider market scanner.
I don’t know many other screeners that can do this. Usually, you are constrained to one specific time frame across all of your conditions.
However, TrendSpider lets you do this with a few simple clicks. Just simply point and click your way through the script actions box.
When you have your scanning criteria ready, you can apply them to hundreds of watchlists spanning indices, sectors, industries, and market cap groups.
The major criticism I have is that there are limits on the number of scan results you get in the Essential (25 results per scan) and Elite (100 results per scan) plans. Scan results also take some time to load, which might frustrate some day traders. In addition, fundamental screening isn’t really an option. For that, you should check out Koyfin instead.
TrendSpider Backtesting Review
I’m always sceptical when a platform claims to have backtesting capabilities. Many times, their so-called “backtester” is nothing more than a portfolio tracker – only capable of showing the historical performance of a group of stocks. In other words, there is no option to simulate buy and sell orders based on pre-defined criteria, which means you can’t really test whether a certain strategy works or not.
Having experimented with TrendSpider’s backtester for some time now, I am happy to report that it doesn’t fall into this category.
True strategy backtesting is achievable across multiple time frames, ranging from intraday 1-minute intervals all the way to yearly intervals.
Entry and exit rules are extremely flexible, too. For example, you can build trading systems using any of the following parameters:
- Price
- Technical Indicators
- Candlestick Patterns
- Earnings/Dividends Dates
- Splits
- Analyst Estimates
As well as these, exit rules can also be based off the following conditions:
- Number of Candles Passed
- Take Profit %
- Stop Loss
- Rolling Stop Loss
And what’s more, no coding is required on your part. While you have the option to code more complex strategies if you want to, it generally follows a “point-and-click” model that even beginners can navigate.
For example, I ran a simple MACD crossover strategy by using one of their 69 pre-set templates.
I particularly like how you can see all of the trades on the chart so you can visualize the efficacy of the strategy.
In addition, you also get the following information:
- Net Profit
- Strategy Performance vs. “Buy-and-Hold” Performance
- Number of Positions
- Win/Loss Ratio
- Max Drawdown
- Average Win/Loss %
- Risk/Reward Ratio
While this is certainly one of the best backtesters that I’ve come across, there are a few things that let it down.
Firstly, you can only test strategies on one security at a time, as opposed to an entire watchlist. In addition, you can only backtest long-only or short-only strategies, not long and short strategies. This is ultimately why I prefer MetaStock for backtesting.
Price Alerts
The last feature I want to cover in this TrendSpider review is Price Alerts.
To demonstrate, I want you to imagine a scenario that I know all traders will have encountered at some point.
Let’s say we’ve identified a stock that looks interesting, but we’re not sure about the timing yet. Perhaps you have a certain price level in mind, or some other technical condition you want to see before making a decision.
Well, price alerts inform you when this condition is triggered so that you don’t have to constantly monitor the chart.
Like any charting platform, TrendSpider can send an alert to your phone or email when a stock hits a pre-determined price level.
However, as you will have guessed by now, TrendSpider has some other tricks up its sleeve that puts it in a league of its own.
Dynamic Price Alerts
One of the main problems with standard price alerts is that they are static. In other words, they only trigger when a rigid condition is met, like an exact price target.
However, sometimes you want a bit more flexibility in your alerts, like information about price action.
Luckily, the automated dynamic price alerts in TrendSpider give you 3 different trigger conditions:
- Break Through
- Touch
- Bounce
This lets you customize your alerts based on your trading style. For example, momentum traders might only want alerts for stocks breaking through a trendline. Similarly, swing traders may be more interested in stocks touching or bouncing off a trendline, so that they can time their pivot points.
The dynamic alerts go further than this though…
As mentioned earlier, drawing trendlines isn’t an exact science. Instead, it is subjective and open to many different interpretations. As such, setting alerts at exact price levels is a folly in most cases.
TrendSpider fixes this by allowing you to adjust the sensitivity of your alerts. For example, you can set a margin of error band around your trendlines, which triggers an alert any time prices drift into it.
By adjusting the sensitivity slider, you can decide how wide you want this band to be.
This is great if you tend to think in terms of support or resistance zones rather than levels, or if you like getting your alerts slightly early. Ultimately, this gives you more time to analyze price action and plot out a trading strategy.
Multi Factor Alerts
Dynamic price alerts aren’t the only alert feature that TrendSpider offers. They also offer multi factor alerts, which as the name suggests, lets you set alerts using multiple indicators.
For example, let’s say you only want an alert sent to you if all of the following conditions are met:
- Price breaks through 10-day moving average
- RSI below 40
- Increasing volume
Simply input the criteria, like below, choose an expiration method (days passed or number of triggers), and decide whether to include extended hours price data.
As you can see, there are endless possibilities with TrendSpider alerts. Whether you like simple or complex alerts, TrendSpider will almost certainly cater to your needs.
FAQs
- Candlestick
- Line
- Bar
- Hollow Candles
- Heikin Ashi
- Raindrop
TrendSpider Review Summary
The main thing I took away from my TrendSpider review, was the sheer number of ways it makes your life easier as a trader. With such a broad range of automated analysis features, from pattern recognition to Fibonacci retracements, you can tell that TrendSpider was designed by like-minded traders.
Multi time frame analysis and dynamic alerts are two other unique features that help you build a more nuanced trading approach and gain an edge over your competition.
Moreover, the stock screener and backtester are not only seriously advanced, but also extremely user-friendly with their intuitive “point-and-click” approach.
Having said all this, I still think there are some areas for improvement, including faster scan results, fundamental screening, broader chart pattern recognition, and long/short strategy backtesting.
All in all, TrendSpider is a fantastic technical analysis platform suitable for all types of traders and I would highly recommend anybody to take it for a 7-day free trial.