Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider – Which Platform Is Better?

Advanced traders rely on tools like backtesting and scanning to develop fast-paced trading strategies and find profitable setups. Two of the most popular platforms to help traders build strategies are Trade Ideas and TrendSpider.

Both trading platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) to find opportunities and speed up trading decisions. Both also offer powerful tools for strategy testing, autotrading, and more. However, the two services are fundamentally different—Trade Ideas is first and foremost a stock scanner, while TrendSpider is primarily a charting platform.

In our Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider comparison, we’ll take a closer look at these two trading platforms to help you decide which is better for you.

About Trade Ideas and TrendSpider

Trade Ideas was founded in 2003. At the time, it was one of the only real-time stock scanners built for day traders. The platform has continued to innovate, incorporating AI into its scans and building dozens of ready-made stock screens that traders can jump into in seconds. Trade Ideas is widely popular among traders, although the service doesn’t reveal how many users it has.

TrendSpider launched in 2018. It stands out for using machine learning algorithms to automatically plot trendlines, candlestick patterns, and other indicators on technical charts. Since launching, TrendSpider has added features for scanning, autotrading, backtesting, and more. The service has more than 10,000 users.

Similarities

Trade Ideas and TrendSpider share many central features. Both platforms enable you to design custom trading strategies and backtest them using historical market data. Both platforms also include stock scanners and technical charts. Both platforms support brokerage integrations and let you automate your trading strategy.

However, there are important differences in how these features work in practice between the two services. Let’s take a closer look. 

Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider: Markets

One important difference between Trade Ideas and TrendSpider right away is that they offer data for different markets. Trade Ideas only covers stocks, while TrendSpider supports stocks, forex, cryptocurrencies, and futures. So, you can use TrendSpider to develop and backtest strategies for forex trading, while that isn’t possible in Trade Ideas.

Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider: Strategy Development

Trade Ideas and TrendSpider both offer comprehensive lists of technical parameters to help you build custom trading strategies.

In Trade Ideas, you can choose from a list of parameters that include price and volume changes, technical indicator events, trendline crosses, and much more to define a strategy. It’s fairly easy to choose the parameters that matter to you and assign them as triggers in the context of your strategy.

The process for building a strategy in TrendSpider is similar, but slightly more flexible. TrendSpider enables you to group combinations of parameters and logicals as “scripts,” which you can then use as building blocks within a trading strategy. You also get a wider range of strategy entry and exit controls for managing your risk. For example, you can exit a trade in TrendSpider if your profit is less than a certain amount after a certain number of candles has passed.

Another key advantage of TrendSpider is that there are many parameters based on the platform’s AI technical analysis capabilities. We’ll cover these in more detail below, but TrendSpider’s auto-analysis enables you to build strategies around, for example, a stock’s price crossing a trendline or the formation of a specific candlestick pattern.

Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider: Strategy Backtesting

Both Trade Ideas and TrendSpider enable you to backtest your custom strategies using historical data. Backtesting is very fast in both platforms and a lot of the strategy performance data you get is similar.

However, Trade Ideas stands out for its strategy optimization view. You can see how sensitive your profitability is to each parameter in your strategy and quickly optimize your strategy to achieve maximum profitability. TrendSpider lets you directly compare profitability for two versions of your strategy, but it doesn’t offer a similar sensitivity analysis to help you decide which parameters to tweak. You have to experiment by trial and error.

One advantage TrendSpider has is that you can view your strategy’s entry and exit points on a technical chart. This makes it a lot easier to see what’s happening and ensure your strategy works like you expect it to. Trade Ideas doesn’t give you a way to visualize your strategy in action.

Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider: Scanners

Trade Ideas is primarily a stock scanner, so it excels at this purpose. You can use any of your strategies as scans and the platform is set up so that you can monitor many scans at once. You can also set up an alerts feed to notify you about new hits from multiple scans running in the background.

Trade Ideas also comes with dozens of built-in scans and dashboards, which it calls “channels.” The channels include ready-made layouts with scans, momentum visualizations, and more for specific strategies and market sectors.

Scanning feels like a secondary feature in TrendSpider. The scanner is designed to serve as a sidebar next to your technical charts and doesn’t include color-coding or accompanying visualizations like in Trade Ideas. You can also only run up to six scanners at once. There are dozens of built-in scans, but they’re generally simpler than the ones that Trade Ideas comes with.

Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider: AI Features

Trade Ideas and TrendSpider both incorporate AI, but in very different ways.

Trade Ideas has an AI nicknamed “Holly” that scans the market each night using more than 60 different trading strategies. It uses backtesting to identify the most profitable strategies for the current market conditions, then identifies several dozen trade ideas based on those strategies. During the next trading day, these ideas are presented in the form of actionable trade signals complete with entry, exit, and stop loss conditions.

TrendSpider uses AI to automatically identify patterns on technical charts. You can automatically plot trendlines, Fibonacci retracements, candlestick patterns, and more. Helpfully, you have a fair amount of control over how sensitive the algorithm is. You can also plot trendlines across multiple timeframes and view them all on a single chart.

TrendSpider’s automatic pattern recognition comes in especially handy when developing strategies and scans. As an example, you can build a strategy based on a stock’s price crossing an automatically plotted trendline.

Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider: Brokerage Integrations and Autotrading

Trade Ideas and TrendSpider both enable you to automate your strategy to execute trades. Trade Ideas offers integrations with Interactive Brokers and TradeZero. TrendSpider has a sister software, SignalStack, that you can use to turn your strategies into bots and connect to most major brokers. SignalStack requires a separate subscription starting at $27 per month for 50 monthly executions.

Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider: Pricing

Trade Ideas costs $84 per month (paid annually) for its scanning features. If you want AI-generated trade signals or brokerage integrations, you’ll need to purchase a Premium subscription for $167 per month.

TrendSpider starts at $20.80 per month (paid annually), but this limits you to scanning on daily timeframes and only lets you view up to 25 scan results. Most traders will need the Elite plan, which costs $24.70 per month.

Which Platform Is Better?

Trade Ideas and TrendSpider are both outstanding platforms with a ton of features to offer traders. Which is better comes down to what you need in a trading platform.

If you primarily want a stock scanner, we recommend Trade Ideas. The pre-built scans are extremely actionable and the platform is clearly built to help you find ideas across multiple strategies in a fast-paced market environment.

Trade Ideas is also a great option if you want ready-to-trade ideas from the Holly AI algorithm. While access to Holly is expensive, these trade ideas can help you spot profitable opportunities beyond those you find using your own custom strategies.

TrendSpider is the better choice for traders who want an all-in-one charting platform, strategy development software, and scanner. The main focus is on charting and technical analysis rather than scanning, although TrendSpider also does an excellent job of helping you build and test custom strategies.

TrendSpider is significantly cheaper than Trade Ideas, which is a major plus for traders who have limited capital. Keep in mind that you’ll need to pay for SignalStack as well if you want to automate your trades.

Alternatives to Trade Ideas and TrendSpider

One of the best alternatives to Trade Ideas and TrendSpider is TradingView. TradingView is an extremely powerful and customizable charting platform that also includes a stock scanner and strategy backtesting tool. It lacks the AI features of either Trade Ideas or TrendSpider, but it’s also much cheaper—plans start at only $12.95 per month.

Another option to consider is Scanz, formerly known as EquityFeed. This is a real-time stock scanner built for traders in the same vein as Trade Ideas. It’s somewhat easier to use than Trade Ideas and offers a built-in news scanner as well as Level 2 stock data. Scanz costs $169 per month.

Conclusion: Trade Ideas vs. TrendSpider

Trade Ideas and TrendSpider are powerful trading platforms that leverage AI to help you find profitable opportunities in the market. Trade Ideas is primarily focused on stock scanning, while TrendSpider covers a wider range of assets and offers automated technical analysis in addition to scanning.

Check out our full Trade Ideas review and our full TrendSpider review to learn more about these platforms.