StocksToTrade Review – How Does This Platform Compare?

About StocksToTrade

StocksTotrade.com is a desktop-based charting and stock screening software that offers, level 2 data, market news, paper trading, trader education, and more. It was designed by traders, for traders, and does a nice job of surfacing opportunities for day trading and swing trading.

Is StocksToTrade the right trading platform for you? Keep reading our StocksToTrade review to find out.

StocksToTrade Pricing

StocksToTrade is available as a monthly subscription for $179.95 per month or an annual subscription for $1,899.50 per year. You can try out the platform for two weeks for $7.

StocksToTrade Features

Stock Charts

StocksToTrade offers built-in stock charts with an array of customization options and technical studies. You can choose candlestick charts, Heikin-Ashi charts, line charts, and bar charts.

Timeframes range from one minute to one day, but the options are somewhat limited. For example, there’s no option to look at 2-hour or 4-hour bars like you can in other charting platforms.

The selection of technical indicators includes popular studies like moving averages, RSI, MACD, Fibonacci retracements, pivot points, stochastics, VWAP, and more. The studies aren’t especially customizable, however. You’re limited to preset intervals for moving averages, for example.

StocksToTrade also doesn’t let you display multiple charts in a single window. If you want to look at two different timeframes or monitor charts for two stocks, you’ll have to toggle between tabs.

For serious day and swing traders, Thinkorswim charts and TradingView charts offer a lot more customization options. But StocksToTrade charts get the job done for most standard technical analysis.

One nice thing about StocksToTrade’s charting window is that you can add modules for Level 2 data and time and sales data to the same screen. This can be very helpful for day traders looking for large orders or action around support and resistance levels.

Overall, the charting component is sufficient for an “all-in-one” platform, especially considering most traders are using StocksToTrade as a scanner first and a charting platform second.

Stock News

StocksToTrade also offers a news feed for each stock, which you can pull up in the charting window. The news feed displays headlines from Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, Wall Street Journal, Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool, InvestorPlace, and Finviz.

Alongside the news feed, you can monitor new SEC filings. However, this feature is pretty limited and doesn’t offer a detailed document search like FlashSEC or BamSEC.

There’s also a stock market-wide news feed that you can filter by symbol or stocks in your watchlist.

While the news scanners aren’t as comprehensive as a standalone news platform like Benzinga Pro or TradetheNews, they get the job done (especially if you just want to read the latest headlines that may be moving a stock).

Stock Scanner

Now, let’s get to the star feature of the StocksToTrade platform – the stock scanners.

StocksToTrade is an extremely powerful stock scanning platform that gives you multiple ways to find opportunities for day and swing trading.

First, traders can take advantage of the platform’s built-in scans. These are relatively basic, showing you the biggest gainers and losers over one day, three days, and five days. What’s nice is that you can filter these scans by stock price or exchange, including OTC exchanges. That’s a huge plus for penny stock traders.

There are also built-in scans for stocks with earnings in the past 24 or 72 hours experiencing price changes of more than 5%. This is great for finding swing trading candidates around earnings beats or misses.

The customizable screener gives you even more ways to find opportunities. You can filter based on price change over a wide variety of timeframes or based on any of the technical studies that StocksToTrade supports. Even better, you can create filters based on whether there’s a catalyst around a stock, such as earnings or news headlines.

The screener lets you string together as many criteria as you want with “and/or” criteria. The interface is a little confusing at first, but it’s easy to get used to. You can save an unlimited number of screens, which is great for running your favorites at the start of the trading day or whenever you need ideas.

Oracle

Oracle is a unique tool from StocksToTrade that automatically creates a daily watchlist of 15 stocks that are likely to experience high volatility. The picks are typically based on stocks that experienced strong bullish or bearish momentum going into the previous day’s close.

Color-coded indicators show you whether each stock is a long or short pick, and a table displays the entry price and a profit target. A timeline-style display highlights support and resistance levels, making it easy to set your own additional price targets or stop losses.

Oracle mainly focuses on penny stocks, and the trade signals are typically closed within the same day. However, swing traders can hold positions overnight and sell at open the next morning to get around the Pattern Day Trader rule.

Alerts

StocksToTrade enables you to set alerts on individual tickers based on price, trading volume, VWAP, or breaking news headlines. It’s pretty easy to set up alerts, and they’ll make a sound or display a pop-up when triggered. However, the alerts aren’t overly customizable, especially compared with the technical pattern-based alerts available in TradingView and TrendSpider.

StocksToTrade University

StocksToTrade University is like a cross between a helpdesk and a trader education service. It offers dozens of videos that walk you through all of StocksToTrade’s features and how to use them. The instructor, Tim Bohen, goes beyond the basics to give you actionable advice about how to put the tools to work and integrate them with your trading strategy.

The University portal also includes downloadable scans, a basic trading journal, and worksheets for calculating the risk and return of every potential trade. There’s a guide to trading terms and technical studies, plus recorded webinars led by traders on the StocksToTrade team.

Experienced traders probably won’t need the content in StocksToTrade University, but it adds to the platform’s value for beginners.

Compatible Brokerages

StocksTotrade integrates with several popular stock brokers, including:

• E*Trade
• Tradier
• Interactive Brokers
• TD Ameritrade
• Robinhood

A partnership between StocksToTrade and Tradier offers unlimited commission-free stock trades with a $500 minimum deposit.

StocksToTrade used to offer its own paper trading simulator, but that feature is no longer available. However, traders can still connect a paper trading account with a broker integration.

Customization and Saved Layouts

StocksToTrade is only available as a desktop platform for Windows and Mac. StocksToTrade University is available online, but you can’t access any of the analysis or trading features in the cloud.

You can set up an unlimited number of watchlists on StocksToTrade and group them into categories. You can sort or screen each watchlist based on price, percent change, volume, and more. The watchlist module is in a sidebar, so it’s easy to keep an eye on it while analyzing charts.

Overall, there are a lot of great customization features that allow you to tweak the platform to your day trading needs.

StocksToTrade Differentiators

While there are many trading platforms on the market, very few include such a wide range of features in a single platform. This is where StocksToTrade stands out as a viable option for day traders. StocksToTrade provides all the tools you need to find opportunities, analyze setups, and execute trades. The platform includes level 2 quotes, charting, scanners, watchlists, and alerts, all in a single screen.

The platform’s charting capabilities are good, but not outstanding. However, there’s a ton of value in pairing these charts with StocksToTrade’s built-in OTC market scans, its robust stock screener, and the Oracle trading signals. These three tools are extremely actionable for identifying trade ideas, and you can quickly dig into setups using StocksToTrade’s charts.

What Type of Trader Is StocksToTrade Best For?

StocksToTrade.com is an all-in-one stock trading platform that’s ideal for day traders and swing traders. All of the platform’s tools are geared towards helping you find trades in real time and focus on trades with a time horizon of a few minutes to a few days.

The platform has a slight bent towards penny stock trading. Specifically, it comes with pre-made OTC market scans, and the Oracle signals typically focus on penny or small-cap stocks. However, you don’t have to trade penny stocks to take advantage of StocksToTrade – the custom watchlists, alerts, and stock screener can be used to find opportunities in any stocks.

One nice thing about StocksToTrade that sets it apart from competing platforms like Thinkorswim is that it’s relatively beginner-friendly. The platform offers a lot of customization options without being overwhelming. The StocksToTrade University videos also make it easy to learn how to trade with the platform.

StocksToTrade is most likely to appeal to newer traders who haven’t chosen their tools and platforms yet. The true value of the platform is the “all-in-one” component. In order to justify the price, you would need to use StocksToTrade for all of your trading needs (charts, news, level 2, scanners, etc.). Traders who already use other trading platforms or scanners may be less likely to make the switch.

StocksToTrade Alternatives

There are a few potential alternatives to the StocksToTrade platform.

StocksToTrade vs. Scanz

First, there’s Scanz, formerly known as EquityFeed. StocksToTrade was initially created as a white-labeled version of the EquityFeed platform, so the two platforms have a lot in common. Scanz includes stock scanners, news scanners, charting, level 2 data, integrated trading, and more.

The platforms are very similar, so it’s worth trying both to see which you prefer. We prefer the way that Scanz goes about creating custom scans and displaying results, but other traders might prefer StocksToTrade.

StocksToTrade vs. Trade Ideas

Another alternative is Trade Ideas. If you’re using StocksToTrade solely for the scanning functionality, it’s definitely worth exploring Trade Ideas. The platform has some great built-in scanners and has been leading the industry in incorporating AI into its scans. However, Trade Ideas isn’t our top pick for charting and doesn’t include level 2 quotes.

StocksToTrade vs. Thinkorswim

Finally, Thinkorswim is a free trading platform that matches most of StocksToTrade’s features. In fact, it offers even more customizability and more powerful charting tools. The drawback is that Thinkorswim has a steep learning curve, so it’s not beginner-friendly. Even experienced traders will need to spend some time learning their way around and setting up basic scans.