Ticker Tocker Review – An Education, Research, And Trading Platform

About Ticker Tocker

Ticker Tocker is a trading education and research platform, as well as a platform for automated trading. The site connects beginner traders to advanced traders on a subscription basis to help them learn more about trading. Meanwhile, individual investors who are comfortable trading on their own can use Ticker Tocker’s code-free algorithm generator to design and implement their own automated trading strategies.

While Ticker Tocker does offer a lot for traders, the platform is somewhat expensive since much of the content requires additional monthly subscriptions. Moreover, Ticker Tocker’s features are extremely non-intuitive, forcing traders to invest a significant amount of time in learning how to use the platform.

Pricing Options

Ticker Tocker costs $160 per month for investors and $200 per month for “leaders.” Investors get access to Ticker Tocker’s automated trading strategy designer as well as Tocker Scores for monitoring trading signals. Note that following leaders may require additional subscriptions, since leaders have the option to put a paywall over their trading activity, live videos, and educational courses. Subscriptions range from free for many leaders to up to several hundred dollars per month. Thus, Ticker Tocker can become relatively expensive for traders looking to learn from experts on the platform.

Note that Ticker Tocker offers a 14-day trial for investors and a 30-day trial for leaders.

Ticker Tocker Features

Leaders

The main asset that Ticker Tocker provides is access to leaders – expert traders who share information about their methods for making profitable trades (similar to Profitly). Ticker Tocker is set up so that you can find leaders according to different styles of trading, profitability, or other factors. Every leader has a personalized page, often with an introductory video, a list of their recent, verified trades, and historical performance, so you can decide if they are someone to whom you want to subscribe. Keep in mind that while subscribing to many leaders is free, some leaders require paid monthly subscriptions to access their verified trades or additional tutorial materials.

Leaders offer a number of resources for traders. First, you’ll find their verified trades, which offers a log of the trades they have made through their Ticker Tocker-connected brokerage. Leaders can also post trading ideas, which can take the form of either textual explanations of a trading idea or annotated charts showing entry and exit positions. Finally, leaders can offer live broadcasts of their trading or video courses that cover different aspects of their trading strategies.

The usefulness of these different resources varies widely from leader to leader. While Ticker Tocker has some standard about what is included in trade ideas or course materials, the format of these materials is largely uncontrolled, and some leaders will provide more actionable information than others.

Overall, the leader features of Ticker Tocker are a mixed bag. While there is undoubtedly good information contained within some of the leaders’ pages, the sheer number of leaders and the amount of resources on each leaders’ page – combined with the fact that some of these resources are free and others require paid subscriptions – makes it nearly impossible to sift through the platform efficiently.

Strategies Editor

Another unique feature of Ticker Tocker is the strategies editor. This is a drag-and-drop editor that allows you to create signal- and indicator-based trading strategies, similar to how you would create strategies and scans using code within a program like ThinkorSwim.

However, in contrast to ThinkorSwim, the Strategies editor within Ticker Tocker doesn’t require any coding whatsoever. Instead, you simply choose attributes from a menu on the left side of the screen and drag them into the timeline editor. The editor works like a timeline – you can stack layers on top of one another, nesting if/then and other conditional statements to build a complex strategy that is immediately visible.

The upside to this editor is that it doesn’t require coding. The downside is that it is in some ways more complex than simply using a code editor with a searchable index of commonly used functions. Keeping track of what you’re doing in the editor requires being able to read the timeline-like layout, which is noticeably more difficult than reading linear code line by line. The additional options within each component block added to the timeline serve to make the editing functions even more challenging to use.

Once you have created a new strategy, you can backtest it against a portfolio to see how it would have performed historically. This backtesting is one of the more useful features of Ticker Tocker, since many other charting and strategy generating programs lack the ability to conduct serious backtesting. The backtest results are highly detailed, showing not only the overall performance of your strategy but also giving information about which holdings in your portfolio performed best and worst under the strategy.

Note that strategies are also available through leaders, but these are hard to come by for free. Furthermore, there appear to be relatively few strategies currently published on Ticker Tocker, which makes it difficult to evaluate how well strategies across the platform function.

Charting

Ticker Tocker also offers a built-in charting platform that is relatively customizable, although not to the same degree as dedicated charting software like TradingView. Traders have the option of building custom chart layouts, with most common technical overlays and indicators available to be added to the charts. Helpfully, Ticker Tocker charts make it easy to compare two or more stocks within the same industry on a single chart.

However, the formatting of Ticker Tocker charts leaves much to be desired. The charting window can quickly become crowded when adding more than one indicator beneath the chart itself, such that all of the functionality added to a chart is quickly rendered invisible. This is particularly apparent when applying chart layouts offered by leaders, which are typically adapted from another charting software. Many leaders have charts with numerous indicators applied, which makes them virtually impossible to use.

Tocker Scores

Tocker Scores are another unique aspect of Ticker Tocker, although, like the other features of the platform, they are less than intuitive. Tocker Scores essentially map a trading strategy to a pie chart, with each slice of the pie chart corresponding to a specific indicator or set of parameters.

Based on the weighting of each of these slices and the values of their respective parameters, Ticker Tocker calculates a composite Tocker Score – a percentage – indicating the likely bullishness of a stock. These Tocker Scores – and their underlying indicators – can be mapped onto a chart to provide additional information about potential entry and exit points. 

You can create your own Tocker Score applications based on your existing strategies, or you can import Tocker Scores from leaders to whom you subscribe.

Compatible Brokerages

Ticker Tocker allows traders to connect a handful of brokerages to place trades directly through the platform and to verify their trades to be listed on their accounts. While E*TRADE, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade are included in the list of compatible brokerages, most other major brokerages are not able to connect to Ticker Tocker at this time.

Customization and Layout

The layout of Ticker Tocker seems designed to inspire frustration. Rather than offer a single top-level menu, there are multiple menus that expand from each side of the screen, each offering different options. Some of these options are related to the page you are on – such as indicators to add to a chart – but they are scattered across multiple different menus. This contributes to making Ticker Tocker extremely non-intuitive, which can dissuade many traders who are trying out the platform for the first time.

More troublingly, the difference in content available among leaders and the Ticker Tocker community makes it very difficult to know what’s available at all. Depending on who you are subscribed to, you may or may not have access to any chart layouts or Tocker Scores, and there is often little explanation of what the creator-defined abbreviations mean in any of these custom overlays.

Platform Differentiators

Ticker Tocker is unique in that it incentivizes leaders – expert stock, futures, commodities, and forex traders – to build a following of users by offering valuable content. Traders can use this content to learn more about advanced trading, to build on an existing strategy, or to mimic the trades of a successful investor. Furthermore, Ticker Tocker offers tools such as a drag-and-drop strategy editor with backtesting to empower users to create their own profitable trading strategies.

That said, many of the features of Ticker Tocker are non-intuitive. Using the drag-and-drop strategies editor is actually more difficult than most code-based trading strategy designers, and the charting platform leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, since every leader offers different content, some for free and some at a monthly cost, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out where and how to invest time and money. Ticker Tocker has a strong foundation of tools, but the platform has a long way to go in terms of design if it wants to make itself accessible to the vast majority of traders.

What Type of Trader is Ticker Tocker Best For?

Ticker Tocker is designed for a range of traders, from beginners to seasoned investors looking to develop new strategies. However, the confusing design of Ticker Tocker means that it is primarily best for traders who want to invest the time to develop complex trading strategies and thoroughly backtest them. Beginners will have a hard time even using the materials provided by leaders since there are many unexplained custom indicators and paywalls in front of related blocks of content. Traders should be prepared to invest a significant amount of time in learning how Ticker Tocker works and how they can use the platform to develop a trading system.

Pros

• Trading experts offer live videos, educational material, and trading strategies
• Drag-and-drop trading strategy editor
• Extensive backtesting that allows drilling down into results
• Trade directly from Ticker Tocker with several major brokerages

Cons

• Difficult and non-intuitive to use almost all features of the platform
• Requires a significant time investment by traders to learn Ticker Tocker’s feature set
• Much of the needed content from leaders requires an additional monthly subscription