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StockstoTrade vs. Trade Ideas – Which Platform is Better?

By Dave

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StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas

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StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas compete closely for the title of best analysis platform for professional traders. Both of these software packages offer highly advanced charting and stock screening tools, as well as plenty of room for customization. More important, StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas have each taken advantage of artificial intelligence to develop powerful features for getting a jump on the market.

StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas are pricey platforms that represent a significant investment in your trading. So, which one is the better software for your needs? We’ll compare these two trading platforms to help you decide.

About StockstoTrade And Trade Ideas

StockstoTrade was created by famed investor Timothy Sykes and launched in 2009. Sykes brought on Tim Bohen to develop StockstoTrade’s capabilities, which has led it to being one of the most capable tools for stock trading available. The platform recently introduced broker integrations and can now be coupled for live trading to accounts at E*TRADE, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and more.

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - StockstoTrade

Trade Ideas has been around quite a bit longer than StockstoTrade. The platform was launched in 2002 as an early digital stock scanner for professional traders. Over the past 18 years, Trade Ideas has come into its own as one of the most customizable stock scanners on the market today. It has also added powerful artificial intelligence features, which we’ll dive into below. 

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - Trade Ideas

Assets, Data, And Integrations

Both Trade Ideas and StockstoTrade focus primarily on US stocks and offer Level I and II price data. StockstoTrade goes a bit further by offering a real-time news feed that alerts you to stock tweets, SEC filings, earnings announcements, and more. However, it’s still not a full-fledged market news platform like Benzinga Pro, so the news features are extra rather than the main feature.

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - StockstoTrade News

Notably, Trade Ideas and StockstoTrade each integrate with brokerage accounts for live trading. Trade Ideas only integrates with Interactive Brokers, which has a somewhat pricey commission structure. StockstoTrade integrates with Interactive Brokers as well as commission-free brokerages like Robinhood and E*TRADE.  

Stock Screeners

Stock screeners are at the heart of both StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas. These screeners are immensely powerful and customizable, allowing traders to define fully custom strategies and then find stocks that are ripe for trading. 

Unfortunately, while both screeners are powerful, neither is particularly easy to use. StockstoTrade’s stock screener requires you to scroll through multiple menus to add each parameter. Parameters are then displayed in a somewhat odd box format. Some traders might like this layout since its highly visual and allows for organizing parameters within highly complex screens. But it’s also cumbersome, and you cannot easily view charts while designing a new screen.

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - StockstoTrade Screener

The Trade Ideas screener is slightly more traditional in that you can add parameters to a list to build your screens. There’s no coding involved, but you will have to spend a significant amount of time setting up logical operators and equations. Most parameters can be modified to create custom indicators, as is the case for StockstoTrade. Thankfully, both platforms come with a wide variety of premade screens to help you get started. 

Charting And Analysis

Both Trade Ideas and StockstoTrade offer technical charts, although the quality differs quite a bit. The charts in Trade Ideas are somewhat disappointing. You can use them to sort ideas that are surfaced by your stock screens, but there isn’t the level of customization we’d like to see from a mature analysis software. Drawing tools and technical overlays are surprisingly minimal, for example, which makes it difficult to dive deep into analyzing a single stock compared to working at the strategy level.

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - Trade Ideas Chart

The charts in StockstoTrade come with a lot more flexibility. You can choose from a wide range of popular technical overlays and drawing tools. In addition, it’s easy to set up your screen to monitor multiple charts for the same stock over different timeframes or to overlay Level II price data. That said, StockstoTrade still isn’t as flexible as many dedicated charting platforms – it’s difficult to overlay custom indicators, among other setbacks.  

Artificial Intelligence

The features that most set StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas apart from the rest of the field of trading platforms are based on artificial intelligence. StockstoTrade has a smart scanner it calls Oracle, while Trade Ideas has an AI-based assistant called Holly.

Both of these AI-based tools are immensely useful for trading. Oracle automatically identifies stocks that are poised for a breakout by looking for trading patterns that have yielded breakouts in the past. So, it can be used to alert you to potential breakouts that aren’t signaled by more common chart patterns like flags and triangles.

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - Oracle

Trade Ideas’ Holly takes a different tack. Instead of just looking for promising patterns, this AI system simulates several million trades after market close to identify active trading strategies that are likely to be profitable the next day. Before market open, these profitable strategies are used to identify specific stocks to trade, which are grouped into so-called channels for you to analyze further. Holly’s trade ideas have been extremely successful, outperforming the S&P 500 by more than five times over the past several years. 

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - Holly

StockstoTrade And Trade Ideas Pricing

StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas are each very expensive. StockstoTrade costs $179.95 per month or $1,899.50 per year, and even trying it out for a week will cost you $7. Trade Ideas starts at $118 per month or $1,068 per year, but that doesn’t include access to the Holly AI algorithm. If you want that along with strategy backtesting capabilities, you’ll need a Premium subscription for 4228 per month or $2,268 per year.

StockstoTrade vs Trade Ideas - StockstoTrade Pricing

Which Service Is Better?

Both StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas are extremely powerful tools for monitoring the market and finding price movements that fit into your trading strategy. That said, we would recommend Trade Ideas over StockstoTrade for most traders.

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Trade Ideas offers a much more powerful AI algorithm, which can enable you to see the market through a new lens in addition to relying on your own screens. We also prefer the interface for Trade Idea’s screener tool, although it’s largely comparable in flexibility to StockstoTrade’s screener. 

Trade Ideas has also proven to be more stable. We’ve received a handful of feedback about the bugs in StockstoTrade.

Conclusion: StockstoTrade Vs. Trade Ideas

StockstoTrade and Trade Ideas are both highly capable trading platforms built with professional traders in mind. Each platform has taken advantage of artificial intelligence to give traders a competitive edge. Ultimately, Trade Ideas has gone further with the development of its AI algorithm, making it the platform of choice for the majority of traders.

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Dave

Dave has been a part-time day trader and swing trader since 2011 when he first became obsessed with the markets. He focuses primarily on technical setups and will hold positions anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. Over his trading career, Dave has tried numerous day trading products, brokers, services, and courses. He continues to test and review new day trading services to this day.

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