FinViz Elite vs. Trade Ideas – Which Scanner is Better?

If you’re looking for a powerful stock scanner to push your trading to the next level, it’s worth taking a closer look at FinViz Elite and Trade Ideas. Both of these trading platforms offer a wealth of tools, including comprehensive stock screeners, backtesting, alerts, and extensive customization.

So, which one is better suited for your trading needs? In this review, we’ll compare FinViz Elite vs. Trade Ideas to see how they stack up and help you decide which is right for you.

About FinViz Elite and Trade Ideas

FinViz has been around since 2007. This trading platform focuses on visualizing complex financial data and screener results. It features beautiful graphs that offer a different spin on the tables of financial data and stock lists you’ll find on most other platforms. FinViz is entirely browser-based and a surprising number of the platform’s features are free to use.

Trade Ideas was created in 2002 as a trading platform for professional traders and hedge funds. This software has made a name for itself as one of the most customizable and in-depth stock screening tools on the market. However, its focus on professionals can also make Trade Ideas daunting to use. The software can feel overwhelming and essentially requires that you have multiple screens to use it properly.

How Are FinViz Elite and Trade Ideas Similiar?

FinViz and Trade Ideas have a fair amount in common. For the most part, these platforms are aimed at the same traders and offer competing features.

Stock Screeners

Stock screening is at the heart of both FinViz and Trade Ideas. There are some critical differences in how the screeners look and feel and how flexible they are. But for the most part, they each include a combination of fundamental and technical criteria and they are each extremely comprehensive. 

Charts

Both FinViz and Trade Ideas include charting capabilities, but this is one of the areas where both platforms fall short. Ultimately, neither software is designed for technical charting. So, while you have access to customizable charts, it’s hard to recommend using either FinViz or Trade Ideas for the bulk of your technical analysis.

Backtesting

Each of these platforms enables traders to backtest new trading strategies. However, the functionality for going about this is important in different ways that we’ll cover below.

How Are FinViz Elite and Trade Ideas Different?

For each of the core features that FinViz and Trade Ideas share, the two platforms go about presentation and execution in vastly different ways.

Stock Screeners

The FinViz and Trade Ideas stock screeners are the foundations of these two software packages, so it’s important to understand how they differ.

To start, the FinViz stock screener is significantly easier to use. It offers a simple set of drop-down menus and text entry boxes to help you create a custom scan over hundreds of different fundamental and technical metrics. Plus, you can easily save up to 50 scans as presets with your account.

The Trade Ideas screener is much more complex. It comes with a massive trove of pre-made stock scanners, but sorting through them and finding the ones that work for you can be time-consuming. That said, the stock screener is also more comprehensive and more customizable. You can develop custom technical or fundamental parameters to include in your stock screens, as well as customize the type of data that is presented when you load a pre-made stock screen.

Visualization of results is also a key difference between FinViz and Trade Ideas. FinViz puts a lot of emphasis on making stock screener results accessible and easily interpretable. For example, you can turn screener results into a heatmap or bubble plot in just a click to quickly see the spread of stocks in terms of price, revenue, or other factors. While this might not provide quite as much detail as a color-coded table, it’s a lot easier to look at.

Trade Ideas goes almost entirely in the opposite direction. Most of the data displayed in this software comes in tabular form. While color-coding helps, the sheer amount of data pulled up across multiple windows can be overwhelming. However, for day trading, the speed of Trade Ideas and the ease of reading data tables is a lot better for making quick trading decisions than trying to interpret a series of graphs.

Backtesting

The way that FinViz and Trade Ideas differ in their backtesting capabilities is also important for advanced traders. Not to play down FinViz’s backtesting options, but Trade Ideas simply blows it out of the water. FinViz lets traders set a few basic parameters around a strategy and view results in terms of total profit and loss over time.

Trade Ideas, on the other hand, gives traders insight into the probability of a strategy profiting over time based on historical data. The Trade Ideas backtesting tool also makes it simple to adjust entry and exit parameters to quickly see how these change the probability of a strategy succeeding. These strategy optimization features can be really powerful for traders who want to adapt to changing market conditions.

Artificial Intelligence

Another major advantage to using Trade Ideas is that it makes significant use of artificial intelligence. Holly, Trade Idea’s AI bot, simulates several million trades per night to create active trading strategies for traders to use the following day. These strategies are then applied to surface trade ideas in dedicated screen channels. It’s up to you to decide which signals fit into your broader trading strategy.

While a lot of AI tools have mixed performance records, Holly has seen an extremely high degree of success. The bot beat the S&P 500 by a factor of five after it was introduced in 2016. Trade Ideas has since introduced two new, modified versions of Holly that traders can take advantage of.

At least for now, FinViz does not have any comparable AI tools available to stock traders.

FinViz Elite vs. Trade Ideas: Pricing

Perhaps the biggest difference between Trade Ideas and FinViz is in how much they cost. FinViz comes in at a reasonable $39.50 per month or $299.50 per year to access all of its features. Traders who are looking at multi-week swings rather than intraday trades can use FinViz’s free account. The main advantage you get with a paid subscription is access to real-time data.

A Trade Ideas subscription is significantly more expensive. The Standard plan starts out at $118 per month or $999 per year, and at that price you don’t get access to the backtesting module or AI trading alerts. If you want access to the features that really set Trade Ideas apart, the software will cost a whopping $228 per month or $1,999 per year.

Is FinViz or Trade Ideas Better?

In terms of raw data power and flexibility, there’s little question that Trade Ideas is the superior software. It’s arguably the single best stock market screener available today, and there’s really not even a close second. Trade Ideas is the only screener to use AI technology on such a significant scale with overwhelming success. Its backtesting tool is also far more comprehensive than what you get with FinViz or most other platforms. 

That said, FinViz is a good stock screener at a much lower price point. It also has a much less steep learning curve, which is especially nice if you don’t need all of Trade Ideas’ advanced features. This stock screener is easy to get started with and can help you find trading opportunities if you already have a strategy in place. The backtesting tool – while not as comprehensive as what Trade Ideas offers – is also useful for improving existing strategies. For intermediate traders who balk at Trade Ideas’ $1,999 per year price tag, FinViz is one of the best stock screeners on a budget.

Alternatives to FinViz Elite and Trade Ideas

There are few stock screeners that come close to Trade Ideas in breadth and depth of features. It really is the best stock scanner on the market, although that alone doesn’t make it right for everyone. For traders leaning towards FinViz because of ease of use or price, it’s worth considering TradingView as an alternative.

This software includes significantly more powerful technical charts than either FinViz or Trade Ideas. It also has a relatively comprehensive scanner with more than 100 parameters and a decent backtesting tool that more or less matches the capabilities of FinViz’s backtesting module. Most notably, TradingView allows you to create custom parameters by applying one indicator (for example, a moving average) on another. TradingView starts at $14.95 per month, so it can be cheaper than FinViz depending on what plan tier you opt for.

Notably, neither FinViz Elite or Trade Ideas offer much in the way of fundamental stock research, even though they include fundamental screening parameters. Long-term investors who care more about fundamental analysis may prefer Stock Rover. Stock Rover lets you build custom valuation models, offers in-depth research reports, and has one of the best fundamental-focused stock screeners around.

There’s also the Zacks free stock screener. For stock investors on a tight budget, this is an impressively powerful fundamental screener.

Final Thoughts

FinViz and Trade Ideas are two popular and well-designed stock screeners that can help take your trading to the next level. FinViz is best suited for traders who need a comprehensive stock scanner at a reasonable price. Trade Ideas is for advanced day traders who want to take advantage of custom strategies and artificial intelligence, and who are willing to pay a premium for the software’s unique tools.