EquityFeed – Is it the Right Scanner for You?

EquityFeed is a trading platform founded in 2002. The platform is targeted at active traders, mostly day traders and swing traders, and specifically traders of penny stocks. It features all US stocks in addition to OTC and pink sheet stocks. It’s most known for its stock screening capabilities, however, it offers much more in the form of level 2 quotes, time & sales, advanced charting, watchlists, and even trading direct from the platform.

Pricing Options

EquityFeed’s pricing isn’t a traditional tier-based model. Instead, they choose to charge based on which exchange data you use. For example, if you only wanted to trade NASDAQ stocks, it could cost you $135 per month. Here is the cost structure:

• Individual exchange: $135 per month
• Two exchanges: $170 per month
• All U.S. exchanges bundle (all the data offered by EquityFeed): $200 per month
• All microcaps from U.S. exchanges: $150 per month

Adding level 2 data to any plan costs an extra $20 per month

Market View

EquityFeed’s Market View is a scanner that provides a broad view of the stock market. Listing all tickers by default, you can filter down to the type of stocks you want. Here a few of the filters provided:

• Exchange: Select from NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, OTCBB and Pinksheets
• Stock Type: Select between common stock, preferred stock, ADRs, corporate bonds, etc.
• Price, volume, range filters: Enter your parameters. If you want to trade stocks from $1 – $5, stocks with volume between 10,000 – 100,000 shares per day, these are the filters for that.

In addition to a list of stocks, you can screen through sectors, indexes, and ETFs.

News Feed

At a glance, this feature looks like any old market news feed, but there are some key filtering features that are worth their weight in gold to some traders.

Streaming News

When the “Streaming News” screen is first opened, all exchanges and securities are selected, with a seemingly uncurated stream of news. Using the filters at the top, you can filter by exchange, stock type, news type, and stock data (price, volume, range). There are three news filters: “News,” “Filings,” and “Promos.”

The “Promos” filter is of great value to some microcap short sellers. A common indicator of a failing microcap is when management frequently releases hype-riddled promotions. Using this filter, these short sellers can create a watchlist in minutes. Most of the time, a short seller like this would have to subscribe to services like PR Newswire and sift through hundreds of reports to find what they want.

Deal News

This news feature allows you to look at news only related to new deals announcements from companies, effectively getting rid of a majority of the “fluff” news. You can filter for the following types of news:

• Merger
• Financing
• Earnings
• Stock Splits
• Dividends
• Patent Awards
• Partnerships
• Legal
• FDA

Additionally, you can search for specific keywords within the Deal News.

News Search

This feature enables you to a specific piece of news, whether for an individual stock or not, within a specific time horizon.

For example, in the image above, I searched for merger-related news about IBM occurring within 3 months. In the image below, I searched for any FDA related news in the last 3 days, not regarding one individual stock. This type of feature is excellent for a biotech-only trader like John Welsh, making it simple for him to find upcoming catalysts in his sector.

Stock Scanner

Stock scanning is EquityFeed’s bread and butter, and with criteria like “Rebound Action,” which searches for stocks rebounding off today’s low, their scanning criteria is clearly skewed towards active traders, specifically day traders.

Lots of the criteria within the scanner is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff you’d find in any stock scanner, so I’ll only be spotlighting the more unique features that make traders want to shell out around $2,000 a year for this software.

Spread

This a great feature for traders or funds looking to run a market making strategy in the small cap space. You can search for specific bid/ask spreads, in percentages or dollar amounts. Market making strategy is mostly dominated by algorithmic traders in the mega-caps, however the vast majority or program traders wouldn’t dare run their algorithms on the small cap space because the lack of liquidity and heightened risk.

Open Action

This is another unique screen that you’d be hard pressed to find in other stock scanners, it also has application, and isn’t a feature “thrown in” to pad the feature count of the scanner. This scan can be use to apply an opening range breakout strategy, like that outlined in Toby Crabel’s infamous book, Day Trading With Short Term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakout.

Tick Action

Features like this show the power of EquityFeed to analyze the market microstructure on such a short term frame, which is what really makes it stand out as a screener tailor made for day traders.

This feature looks at the percentage of ticks, or micro price movements (every time the stock moves up or down at all is a tick) are upticks or downticks, which gives you a great perspective on which direction the momentum of the stock is going.

Bid/Ask Action

Another great order flow based feature, it allows you to search for stocks where the majority of the volume is being executed on either the bid or the ask price. This displays whether the bulls or bears are in control of the market.

Filter Builder: A Custom Scanner

The Filter Builder allows you to create your own scans based on the vast quantity of criteria from which to choose from. From price data like 52 week highs and average true range to fundamentals like short interest and revenue, to percentage of inside ownership, the capabilities of Filter Builder are vast.

Let’s say that you wanted to scan for stocks that have more debt than cash on their balance sheet, you would simply choose Debt in step 1, “Greater than or equal to” in step 2, and “Cash” as the analytic in step 3, then simply take the equal sign out of the syntax of the screen. See the example below:

One can apply the majority of short term trading strategies using the filters inside Filter Builder.

Additional Features

EquityFeed offers other decent secondary features aside from its main scanning technology. Those include:

Trading Alerts

EquityFeed’s alerts are pretty run-of-the-mill, save for their “block trades” alert. Standard criteria like new highs/lows, and price/volume breakouts are included, but the block trades feature does set it apart.

One can find huge institutional buyers as they’re making their move and choose to piggyback off their momentum, or trade the stock back to it’s “efficient” price, depending on your market philosophy.

Charts

Unsurprisingly, these features are extremely weak. The charts are some of the worst I’ve seen on a trading platform, however, even the most basic chart still helps, so you don’t have to use multiple pieces of software just to quickly glance at a chart.

The chart montage reminds one of an online retail brokerage’s montage from a decade ago.

Compatible Brokers

EquityFeed supports trading directly from their platform, supporting only two brokerages, Interactive Brokers and TD Ameritrade.

What Type of Trader is it Best For?

I could only recommend EquityFeed to active day traders. While swing traders may find some use in it, a bulk of the features focused on in this platform are based on very short term, minute to minute, market movements. That said, EquityFeed and Trade Ideas are probably the two best scanners any day trader an use.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Wealth of proprietary features
• Easy to use
• Tailor made with a specific type of trader (day trader) in mind, rather than trying to cast a wide net, making nobody happy.

Cons

• Of little use to non-day traders
• Very weak charts
• On the expensive side of scanners