StockHero Review – Are These Automated Trading Tools Worth Using?

StockHero is a trading software that enables you to quickly create bots for automated trading. You can build and backtest your own bots or subscribe to user-generated bots in StockHero’s marketplace. The platform is easy to use, although renting bots from the marketplace can get expensive.

Is trading bot service right for you? Keep reading our StockHero review to find out.

StockHero Pricing Options

StockHero offers three pricing tiers.

The Lite plan costs $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year. It lets you have one active bot and only gives you access to the simple bot builder. The Lite plan also only supports trading with TradeStation and doesn’t include access to StockHero’s marketplace.

The Premium plan costs $49.99 per month or $499.99 per year. It offers 15 active bots and gives you access to all of StockHero’s bot building tools as well as the marketplace. It also adds brokerage support for Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, Tradier, Alpaca, and more.

Bots in the bot marketplace start around $15 per month. Traders can set their own prices for bots they contribute to the marketplace.

The Professional plan costs $99.99 per month or $999.99 per year. You get free access to all bots in the marketplace and can have up to 30 active bots. This plan also supports extended hours trading.

You can try out the Lite plan free for 14 days. However, there’s no way to test out the advanced bot building tools or to explore the full marketplace for free.

StockHero Features

Simple Bot Builder

StockHero offers several bot building modules, including Simple, Advanced, Dollar Cost Averaging, Exit, Price, Sell, and Grid. Only the Simple bot builder is available to Lite users.

With the Simple bot builder, you can choose a stock symbol and decide whether you want to trade long or short. You can set the maximum amount of money to allocate to the bot and how much the bot can use for each trade. You can also specify a trading frequency of 15 minutes, one hour, four hours, or one day. The bot won’t trade more frequently than your specified trade frequency, but it can trade less frequently depending on conditions.

The Simple bot builder is limited to triggering based on five indicators: exponential moving average, Bollinger Bands, stochastics, RSI, and MACD. You can’t set any parameters for when these indicators trigger an entry—StockHero does that automatically. You can set a take-profit and stop-loss level for exiting each trade, or have the bot exit based on any of the five indicators.

You can backtest your new bot to see how it would have performed over timescales ranging from one day to one year. The backtester displays your total return, win/loss ratio, number of trades, average trade duration, and maximum drawdown. You can pull up a table with data about all of the trades executed during the backtest for more information.

Advanced Bot Builders

StockHero’s advanced bot builders give you more control over your trades than the Simple builder.

The Advanced builder lets you set the parameters for the five indicators StockHero offers. For example, you can specify the time interval and standard deviation for calculating Bollinger Bands. You can also better control your trade exits by specifying a minimum profit target above which your trade will exit based on an indicator change.

The Dollar Cost Averaging bot offers similar parameters, but adds a time interval option. So, the bot can open trades on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

The Exit bot lets you open a trade immediately and only set exit conditions. Once the bot exits a trade, it won’t open a new trade. StockHero also has a Sell bot that works very similarly to the Exit bot. The difference is that the Sell bot assumes you already own the stock you want to trade and will only sell a position.

The Price bot lets you base entry and exits on specific price levels. For example, the bot can buy a stock if it dips below a certain entry price and sell it when it reaches a target price.

The Grid bot enables you to automate a grid trading strategy, which involves placing overlapping buy and sell orders. This bot is only available to Professional subscribers and you cannot backtest grid trading strategies.

Bot Marketplace

StockHero’s bot marketplace allows users to contribute bots they’ve created and earn income when other traders subscribe to them. StockHero also has eight of its own bots available in the marketplace (these are available to Lite subscribers).

For bots in the marketplace, you can see their one-year performance, win/loss ratio, subscription price, total trades, and average number of monthly trades. Each bot also comes with a description about what it does.

However, you can’t run a detailed backtest on marketplace bots or view a list of all their trades. This means you won’t know what the drawdown of a bot has been before subscribing.

You can subscribe to a bot on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Traders get to set their own prices for the bots they contribute to the marketplace, so pricing varies widely. Expect to pay at least $15 per month per bot subscription.

Compatible Brokerages

StockHero works with TradeStation, Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, Alpaca, Stake (UK and Australia only), and Tradier. StockHero also offers paper trading with data from TradeStation, so you can use the platform to generate signals if you use a different broker.

StockHero Customization and Layout

StockHero offers a web platform as well as mobile apps for iOS and Android. All are easy to use and allow you to see what your bots are doing at a glance. One table shows all of your open trades, while another shows your bots and whether they are active.

Having mobile apps is especially nice because you can activate or deactivate your bots while on the go. You can also create new bots with the mobile app.

StockHero Platform Differentiators

StockHero is just one of many services that enable you to create stock trading bots. Other options include Composer.trade, Tickeron, and TrendSpider.

Compared to these alternatives, StockHero is a lot simpler. Even the Advanced bot builder lets you create bots based on just five common technical indicators. You can’t use StockHero to automate highly complex trading strategies, but the simplicity of this platform makes it a lot more user-friendly than other trading bot builders.

Another feature that differentiates StockHero is its bot marketplace. While the marketplace can get expensive quickly, it’s nice to have the option to quickly launch a bot with a proven track record. Once again, this makes StockHero more approachable for new traders who want to try out new strategies.

What Type of Trader is StockHero Best For?

StockHero is suitable for traders who want to automate relatively simple stock trading strategies. It’s especially good for beginner and intermediate traders who are new to trading automation and don’t have highly developed strategies of their own. The simple bot builder can help you quickly backtest and launch a trading bot based on several popular indicators.

Advanced traders may find that StockHero has too many limitations to be useful. For example, the platform may or may not work with your existing strategy—if you use indicators other than moving averages, Bollinger Bands, stochastics, RSI, and MACD, then StockHero may require you to adapt your strategy to create a bot.

Traders should also consider StockHero’s brokerage compatibility. The platform works with several popular stock brokers, but doesn’t integrate with many of the largest stock brokers in the US.

Pros

• Multiple bot builder modules for different strategies
• Backtest new bots up to one year
• Very easy for beginners to use
• Marketplace offers access to bots with winning track records

Cons

• Very limited information about marketplace bots’ past trades
• Limited brokerage compatibility
• Bots are limited to trading based on five technical indicators