Trade Ideas Review – Stock Research for Daytraders
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If you’re really into day trading, then Trade Ideas may be the best market research website for you.
8/10
Cost
7/10
Features
9/10
Services
8/10
Ease of use
8/10
I doubt any kid dreams about becoming a day trader when they grow up—sitting alone in a home office, watching multiple computer screens for small changes in the stock market so you can make real-time trades while guzzling Red Bull doesn’t sound fun.
Maybe chugging energy drinks sounds like a good time, at least for a few days. But the rest of it sounds like a tough way to make a living.
The technology boom of the internet in the 1990s birthed online trading brokerages like E*Trade and gave investors easy access to the market, day traders, and the platforms they use, such as Trade Ideas, sprung up and saw their numbers grow.
Few children may be considering careers as day traders, but financial research websites such as Trade Ideas make it easy for adults to try.
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What is Trade Ideas?
Trade Ideas was founded in 2003 by financial technology entrepreneurs who wanted to help people manage their own investments. The company’s name came from how to find good stocks in real-time. According to the company, naming it Trade Ideas distilled that to the essence of investing.
Part of the founders’ business sense comes from what you’d think would be a fundamental part of starting a business but turned out to be a $50 million education. Their previous company, which they don’t name, focused too much on raising money through venture capitalists and having too many meetings instead of focusing on the business.
As they put it, their lesson was: “Make a profitable business, continue to grow that business slowly, and develop a technological advantage.”
That advantage is artificial intelligence, named Holly AI after the Holy Grail, the cup from the Last Supper, and the Arthurian legend that provides eternal youth or sustenance in infinite abundance. The artificial intelligence Trade Ideas owns requires a premium subscription and helps users find the best stocks to make real-time trades elsewhere.
One place for all your investing
Options Trading
- Get up to a $0.18 rebate
- No commission or per-contract fees
High-yield cash
- Earn 5.1% APY*
- No fees. No subscription required.
Bonds
- 6% Yield or more
- Explore thousands of bonds yielding 6%+
How does Trade Ideas work?
Signing up for Trade Ideas is easy. Create an account and pay the subscription fee, and you’re in.
There is no free version of Trade Ideas. You can read about its services on its website, but you can’t use them until you’re a paid member. We’ll review the subscription plans and costs next, but signing up for the service is easy.
Click on the orange “Login” link on the homepage on the upper right.
That will take you to the “Account Management” page, where you can log in if you’re already a member or create or activate an account in the column on the right.
Clicking “Create Account” takes you to the “Pricing” page, where you can start initially from the homepage.
On the Pricing page, you choose a plan, which we’ll review in the next section, and click the orange “Purchase” button at the bottom of each plan’s list of features.
A small popup screen appears. You can enter a coupon code if you have it or proceed to checkout by clicking the orange button at the bottom.
Your name and email address are requested. Your phone number is optional. Your email address will be your login name. Your billing address is needed next. Then, your credit card or PayPal information is requested. The company says that in special situations, it accepts Western Union, wire transfers, or personal checks.
Once you’ve paid, your account is created, and you can download the company’s scanner software, Trade Ideas Pro, to your desktop computer and start researching stocks as a day trader. You can also use the web version of the software.
The stock scanning tool can be separated into multiple windows to move around your computer workspace.
How much does Trade Ideas cost?
These numbers may shock you, so we hope you’re sitting down.
The two plans it sells are:
Basic
Cost: $1,068 annually or $89 monthly.
We’ll detail many of the features of the Basic plan below, but here’s what the plan includes:
- Real-time simulated trading
- Live trading room
- Real-time streaming trade ideas
- 10 simultaneous charts
- Chart-based visual trade assistant
- Price alerts
- Channel bar of curated workspaces
Premium
Cost: $2,136 per year, or $178 monthly.
The Premium plan includes everything in the Basic plan, and Premium subscribers also receive the following:
- Suggested entry and exit signals
- 20 simultaneous charts
- AI virtual trading analyst Holly
- Chart-based AI trade assistance
- Risk assessment
- Build and backtest any trade idea
- Autotrade with Brokerage Plus and AI
Weekly newsletter
Trade Ideas also sells a weekly Strength Alerts newsletter for $17 per month, giving five trade ideas from its model portfolio. The company’s software searches for unique stocks with relative strength outperforming the markets.
One place for all your investing
Options Trading
- Get up to a $0.18 rebate
- No commission or per-contract fees
High-yield cash
- Earn 5.1% APY*
- No fees. No subscription required.
Bonds
- 6% Yield or more
- Explore thousands of bonds yielding 6%+
Trade Ideas features
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is that wow factor behind everything at Trade Ideas, using several dozen investment algorithms to arrive at a subset with the highest probability in the next market session.
Holly AI is the company's artificial intelligence. At night, between market sessions, Holly looks at the previous day’s stock market action and runs millions of trading scenarios to make trading recommendations for the next day.
She analyzes the stock market from several angles, judging assets from short, long, expensive, cheap, fundamental, social, and technical perspectives.
Brokerage Plus
Through an Interactive Brokers account, subscribers can use the Brokerage Plus feature to create scans, identify trading opportunities, build trading strategies, and then automate them and have them executed.
Trade Ideas doesn’t have a trading platform, but users can link to their own brokerage to make trades. Trade Ideas can also connect to a user’s E*TRADE account.
Suggested entry and exit signals
There’s nothing worse than buying stock picks too late and selling too early. Holly AI will give suggested entry signals that are statistically weighted and exit signals based on different risk management for intraday trades. Many of Holly’s entry signals can also be successful multi-day holds.
If you’re interested in swing trading, these signals can help in this speculative trading strategy. Swing traders buy and hold a tradable asset for a day or so to profit from price changes or “swings.”
Various windows
Multiple windows are run through Trade Ideas Pro, the company’s scanning software. The default layout has trade ideas in Windows; others can be added to the Channel Bar. The Channel Bar is a vertical menu with many tiles to choose windows from, such as sector ETFs, penny stock movers, after-hours, social, crypto, and volume.
Other windows include:
- Chart windows. Chart windows allow day traders to instantly see prices and other alerts without leaving the Trade Ideas Pro platform.
- Full quote windows. See all the fundamental data relevant to a stock’s price, including quick visual indicators, to see where it is in its range for the last hour, trading week, and 52 weeks.
- Top list windows. These rank market data every 30 seconds in many ways other than chronologically.
- Alert windows. Alert windows can display real-time events based on alerts and other filters you select, such as time frames.
- Compare count window. This gives a visual comparison of any two strategies. Real-time updates show which competing strategies occur more frequently or less frequently.
Real-time stock racing
In what looks like an attempt to gamify your trading day, Trade Ideas turn a chart of stocks into a car race. This patent-pending race is a real-time data visualization of stocks.
You pick individual stocks or any list of stocks and can use filters to set the length of the race, how many lanes, and whether it’s based on price action or change from the close, among others. If you like your winner, you can trade it.
Backtesting
Backtesting is offered through its proprietary Event-Based backtesting to score how well scans, entry signals, and trading plans have performed over recent history.
Newsfeed
Under the single stock window tab, users can click on a news feed that gives real-time market news. You may have other financial news sites you visit regularly, but this news feed is always on your desktop through Trade Ideas.
Training sessions
Trade Ideas offers training sessions and other educational resources to help experienced day traders or beginners who learn what can be an overwhelming amount of data.
A live trading room hosted daily by Barrie Einarson is a trading community where Einarson shares his screen and chats live with attendees. It’s a chat room but with a trading room moderator to help you learn and discuss trading strategies.
Through its Trade Ideas University courses or TI University, the site offers video tutorials archived on its YouTube channel. The Trade Ideas Pro platform is reviewed on Wednesdays, when anyone can ask questions after new and upcoming features are introduced. A TI University webinar series is also set up for beginners new to the financial markets.
The research platform also has tutorials via videos, ebooks, daily webinars, daily support sessions, and a user guide. It also sells solo training sessions for $129 per hour.
Who is Trade Ideas best for?
- Experienced day traders. It’s probably pretty obvious, but Trade Ideas is best for experienced day traders. This stock scanning tool is complex, though Trade Ideas does a good job of making it as easy to use as possible among stock analysis websites.
- Beginners. Beginners may also be able to benefit from Trade Ideas, but the learning curb may be steep with a ton of metrics to try to understand. Through TI University and the many tutorials, webinars, chat rooms, help from moderators, trade assistance, and other educational resources, beginners are given plenty of help.
Who shouldn’t use Trade Ideas?
- Beginners. Based on the above advice, I know this sounds contradictory, but beginners who aren’t prepared to spend a lot of time learning how Trade Ideas works and how to be a successful day trader may want to use another stock scanning tool. Some parts of Trade Ideas Pro look easy to use, with market data that should be easy to digest and price alerts that can quickly point you to the best stock to buy.
- You don’t want to pay. You can’t use Trade Ideas for free. A basic subscription is $1,068 per year, and a premium subscription is $2,136 per year. That’s a lot of money to throw down to become a day trader and requires making at least that much profit to make a subscription worthwhile. There’s no free trial period, so you can’t try out the service before deciding if you want to put down $1,000 or more, though you could start with a one-month basic subscription for $89 and then cancel if you don’t like it.
- You don’t want to be a day trader. Trade Ideas is aimed at day traders, so potential subscribers should be confident that this is what they want to do. Beginners can become day traders, too, though the learning curve can be steep.
It’s worth remembering that the stock market has had a historical performance for creating wealth for over 30 years or more. Success stories of day traders can appear in your news feed, but they’re not common, and more day traders lose money than profit from it, according to several studies.
One place for all your investing
Options Trading
- Get up to a $0.18 rebate
- No commission or per-contract fees
High-yield cash
- Earn 5.1% APY*
- No fees. No subscription required.
Bonds
- 6% Yield or more
- Explore thousands of bonds yielding 6%+
Pros and cons
Pros
- Artificial intelligence is a key part of Trade Ideas, and users may want to use it to their advantage with daily best stock recommendations.
- A free living trading room is helpful and can help users find trading opportunities.
- Browser and desktop programs are available.
- Pre-defined channels make it easy to view different investment areas.
- Autotrade capabilities.
Cons
- Trade Ideas is expensive, either $1,000 or $2,000 annually, depending on what level of subscription you get.
- The site is mostly aimed at active day traders, and beginners can have a lot to learn.
- No actual trades can be placed through Trade Ideas.
- No mobile app.
Trade Ideas vs. Stock Rover vs. Motley Fool
How does Trade Ideas stock up to investment research companies Stock Rover and The Motley Fool Stock Advisor?
Stock research site | Cost | Best feature |
Trade Ideas | $1,068 or $2,136/year | Artificial intelligence |
Stock Rover | $80, $180, or $280/year | Real-time data comparison tools |
Motley Fool Stock Advisor | $199/year | Two new stock picks monthly |
Stock Rover
Stock Rover users can sync their brokerage account and other investments to Stock Rover and receive in-depth analytics on their dashboard. It doesn’t offer endless, complex data but provides enough data that’s easy to read in a stock screener. It’s advanced enough to provide portfolio and technical analysis with historical data but also gives stock ratings and other information that’s easy to use.
Motley Fool Stock Advisor
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor is best for people doing moderate trading and beginners, and probably not for day traders. Its founders give two monthly stock recommendations that could be worth the annual subscription price since The Motley Fool has a record of outperforming the stock market with its picks.
FAQs
Is Trade Ideas aimed at infrequent traders?
No. As Trade Ideas makes clear on its website, its software is “designed for serious traders with adequate risk capital who are ready and willing to dominate the market.” In other words, serious day traders who know trading involves risk and are willing to take that risk.
What isn’t included in the web version?
The software used to run Trade Ideas can be downloaded to your computer, or you can use the web version. There isn’t a mobile app. Downloading the software to your computer is preferred because the online version isn’t as robust. Some of the features not offered in the web version are: Brokerage Plus for simulation or direct linking with E*TRADE, external linking to all other brokers, Market Explorer windows, and the web version is limited to a maximum of five charts at once.
What success rate should I expect as a day trader?
Answers are all over the map, with a few websites listing anecdotal experience from day traders. One AI trading software company put the success rate at up to 10% if a good mentor helps a day trader learn about the process. Success, as the writer put it, is being consistently profitable for at least a couple of months. A Quora respondent put the success rate at 1%, though many people put it at 5%.
One place for all your investing
Options Trading
- Get up to a $0.18 rebate
- No commission or per-contract fees
High-yield cash
- Earn 5.1% APY*
- No fees. No subscription required.
Bonds
- 6% Yield or more
- Explore thousands of bonds yielding 6%+
The bottom line
If you’re really into day trading, and we mean really into it, then Trade Ideas may be your best market research website. It’s expensive, at $1,000 or $2,000 per year, depending on which subscription level you choose, so you should be sure you’re ready to join other serious day traders in finding the best stock picks that can make you money fast.
Trade Ideas uses artificial intelligence to follow trending market data so you can start the trading day with a good profit target in mind. Beginners may want to start elsewhere.
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Writer
Aaron Crowe is a freelance journalist who specializes in personal finance writing and editing. He has worked at newspapers, where he won a Pulitzer Prize, and has written for numerous online publications. These include AOL, US News & World Report, WiseBread, Bankrate, AARP, and many websites focusing on housing, credit and insurance. He lives in California with his wife and daughter.
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