Trade-Ideas Review – Is It Worth The High Price?

Trade Ideas Scanning Platform

Trade Ideas is a powerful intra-day stock scanner with a ton of pre-formatted built-in scans that provide numerous opportunities for active intra-day traders. The platform is flexible, configurable and customizable with additional add-on options. An artificial intelligence (AI) powered robo-advisor engine named “Holly Grail” is an amazing addition to this platform analyzes set-ups through millions of simulated scenarios nightly to derive trading suggestions. While the platform can be intimidating at first for new users, it eventually becomes an essential tool that fits like an exoskeleton once acclimated.

Originally launched in 2002, the scanning platform has evolved and re-invented itself through the years at a tepid pace to become one of, if not, the best stock market scanner publicly available. Co-founder Dan Mirkin is been exceptionally active on social media throughout the years even sharing his trades to build up a loyal community of customers and traders.

Keep reading our Trade Ideas review to see if this stock scanner is worth paying for.

Pricing Options

Trade-Ideas (TI) has two pricing plans in addition to a free limited option. The Free Trade-Ideas is launched through the web and allows access to their live moderated trading chatroom and curated workspaces in the channel with 15-20 minute delayed price quotes.

The Standard Plan is the standalone platform that includes the free TI features (chatroom and channel bar) with real-time streaming quotes, 10 simultaneous charts, chart-based visual trade assistance and 10 price alerts. This plan costs $118 per month or $1,068 for the annual pre-pay option.

The Premium Plan includes everything in the Standard Plan plus 20 simultaneous charts, A.I.-powered trading assistant Holly, entry and exit signals, risk assessment and build/backtesting functionality. The premium package also provides access to Brokerage Plus as well as the innovative artificial intelligence tools. This plan costs $228 per month or $2,268 for the annual pre-pay option.

Both of the paid plans come with real-time market data, as would be expected from any stock scanning tool designed for active traders.

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Trade Ideas Platform Features

The sheer quantity of available scans can be a bit overwhelming and tempting for newbies to jump headfirst, but caution must be taken. As with any powerful weapon, backfiring is just as deadly and traders must get acclimated to avoid this. Users can build out a workspace window by selecting various scan windows using the various illustrated tiles on the left side. The channel bar visually illustrates the themes and types of tools and scans that users can select by the image tiles.

We will take a closer look at the scanner functionality later in the review.

Charts:

TI enables up to 10 or 20 chart windows depending on the subscription plan. This makes it more convenient to pull up a chart directly on the platform, rather than using a separate charting platform to analyze candidates. Users can also add price alerts directly on selected charts. TI is not a charting platform, so the limited number of chart indicators is expected. They are just for the convenience of referencing stocks that pop up on scans. Personally, I still pull up the most compelling candidates on my own trading platform to confirm the set-up.

The charts are good, but not good enough to replace a standalone charting platform like TradingView or the platform you use through your broker.

Scanner: Pre-Built Scans:

If you are paying for a Trade Ideas subscription, you are paying for the stock scanners. Trade Ideas is one of the most powerful, innovative, and versatile scanners on the market right now. The platform features both-pre-built scans and customizable scans.

With a few configurations set to your preferences (i.e. minimum and maximum price ranges, average volume, exchanges), the pre-built scans are solid enough to literally plug-n-play right out of the box. Some of my favorites scans are the 1-2-3 Patterns, Social Media Stream and Extreme Up/Down Move Greater than 3% in First Fifteen Minutes. While these may seem a bit complex, they are some of the best set-ups for my momentum trading style.

Newbies can start with basic New High/Low scans first and work up to segmented scans like 50% Pullback from Two-Day High/Low to find pullback or reversal entry opportunities on trending stocks.

There is also a list of channels which are scans that fall under a certain theme. There are channels for pre-market trading, after-hours trading, abnormal volume, and more.

The pre-configured scans are one of the most useful tools offered in this platform. You can easily find great trade setups in real-time every single day with minimal effort. Of course, you still need to have a day trading strategy to actually trade these, but the scans keep you in the loop. They can help you get a pulse of the market and better understand where the real action is.

Scanner: Customizable Scans:

For seasoned traders that need to tweak pre-built scans or create their own scans, TI has easy to use filters and parameter configuration windows that flow nicely. TI enables users to build their own Franken-scans using mini-widget tiles representing strategies or conditions (IE: MA Crossover, New High, New Low) on them to link together like a Scrabble word.

The customizable scans are nice, but I much prefer the pre-built scans. I still use both FinViz and EquityFeed for my customized scans. The customizable scans remind me a bit of the ETRADE Strategy Scanner, which is a great scanner for a brokerage trading platform, but not as user-friendly as other standalone stock screeners.

The Oddsmaker Tool:

In addition to creating and running your personalized strategy scans, Premium subscribers can backtest their strategies (or any pre-built scans) with the Oddsmaker tool. This amazing tool visually quantifies the probabilities of any strategy enabling you to adjust parameters incrementally to refine your methodology.  It provides statistics (IE: win/loss, number of trades, commissions, strategy return %, projected annual returns and profit factor. Visual charts depicting the equity curve are insightful. I love the calendar that users can refer to see which days triggered strategy trades and which didn’t qualify.

Brokerage Plus

Once you’ve tested some strategies in the Oddsmaker Tool, you can actually automate them using a feature called Brokerage Plus. This innovative feature allows traders to build scans, define trading strategies, and trade automatically.

For example, you may create a scan for stock breaking above their 52-week high with a strategy to buy 100 shares on the ask with a $0.50 stop. You could then connect Trade Ideas to your broker to place trades on auto-pilot or semi-auto-pilot (auto order setup, manual entry). As of now, Brokerage Plus is only available for Interactive Brokers accounts.

This is one of the most innovative and exciting features of the Trade Ideas software. Of course, it should be used with caution, especially as you familiarize yourself with it.

Trade Ideas Chat Room

The TI chatroom is free for registered TI users and non-users. The live trading room is open from 9:00 am EST to 3:00 pm EST most weekdays with post-market recaps after the close. The live trading room is very informative as moderators share patterns, set-ups, and trades throughout the day. There are regularly over 400 attendees daily.

For a free trading room, it is pretty solid. It won’t replace premium chat rooms like Investors Underground, but it’s nice to have as a free option.

TI University:

TI offers subscribers a growing library of instructional videos on using the Trade-Ideas platform with archived events, tutorials and events to accommodate every level. Users can choose to go the self-paced route or attend daily live seminars Monday through Thursday. For more detailed help, customers can schedule one-on-one training sessions. Topics range from basic starting scans to complex back testing routines. The depth of education is simply amazing. The length that TI goes to support subscribers is very impressive, which is how they’ve grown to a customer base of over 8,000 users in 65 countries.

News:

TI has clickable news headlines but doesn’t stream newsfeeds (because it’s a scanner). The news is a nice additional feature if you want to quickly see why a stock may be running, but Trade Ideas is not a news scanner that can replace Benzinga Pro or Equityfeed.

Compatible Brokers:

TI has partnered to include their scanning tools and technology directly into or as an add-on for a growing list of online broker and research platforms including: Scottrade, E*Trade, eSignal and RealTick. Trade Ideas Brokerage Plus (Beta) works with Interactive Brokers accounts for users wishing to automate their trading strategies within the TI platform.

Additional Features

The artificial intelligence engine, Holly, is unique for retail scanners. Holly is an AI-powered robo-trader/advisor/portfolio manager that automates trade positions that trigger from any one or combination of 35 strategies. Holly runs millions of simulations overnight to create a buy and sell list of stocks with triggers that qualify. Users can opt to track Holly’s performance and/or piggy back the trades (at their own risk). The performance results are quite impressive.

While the Holly AI is a cool feature, I don’t really use it too much. The idea of incorporating artificial intelligence into your trading sounds good but it’s hard to apply in practice.

Platform Differentiators

The Trade-Ideas scanner may arguably be the most powerful scanner on the market, but the educational support through TI University training content pushes it over the edge as the best scanning platform. Subscribers get well more than their money’s worth with just the educational content alone.

Ultimately, Trade Ideas stands out as one of the most effective scanners for day traders. While the platform features a lot of exciting tools, the scanners are the most effective tools in the platform. Through a combination of pre-configured scans and custom scans, you can find excellent trading opportunities throughout the day.

What Type of Trader Is Trade-Ideas Best For

Active intra-day, swing and seasoned momentum traders are best suited for this platform. It provides so many trade opportunities throughout the day, but requires quick reaction times and prudence. Timeliness is an issue as traders quickly validate alerts and act. Newbies will have a learning curve to overcome, but well worth it.

Trade Ideas is a great fit for active day traders. The platform can be used for just about any trading strategy. This is easily one of the best scanners available for active day traders.

While you could use Trade Ideas for swing trading, it probably wouldn’t justify the monthly subscription. The real-time scans are the selling point.

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