TradeUP Review – Is This Investing Platform Right For You?

About TradeUP

TradeUP is a mobile-friendly investment platform that offers commission-free trading on US stocks, ETFs, and options. The platform offers a number of tools to help you stay on top of the market, including technical charts, a news feed, and an earnings report calendar. TradeUP doesn’t have many unique features, but it’s easy to use and offers rewards for new traders.

In our TradeUP review, we’ll cover everything you need to know to decide if this brokerage is right for you.

TradeUP Pricing Options

TradeUP is free to use and doesn’t charge commissions for trading stocks, ETFs, or options. New traders can receive $20 in cash for opening a new live trading account. Plus, you can receive bonuses based on the size of your initial deposit:

• A $100 deposit will earn you a share of Nokia stock
• A $1,000 deposit will earn you $50 in cash
• A $10,000 deposit will earn you $100 in cash
• A $200,000 deposit will earn you a share of Amazon stock

All new TradeUP users also receive 30 days of Level 2 quote data for free. Helpfully, TradeUP offers paper trading accounts so you can test out the platform before signing up for a live trading account.

TradeUP Features

Commission-Free Trading

One of the main draws to TradeUP is that it offers commission-free trading on US stocks, ETFs, and options, plus a selection of more than 250 Chinese American Depositary Receipts (ADRs). There are no OTC or international stocks available, but you can short stocks. For options trading, the only strategies available are to buy long put and call options.

The broker offers a wide variety of order types, including one-triggers-the-other, trailing stop, and good-till-canceled orders.

Technical Charts

TradeUP offers basic candlestick charts for price analysis. The charting software includes 22 technical indicators, including common indicators like MACD, RSI, and Bollinger Bands. Indicator parameters such as timeframe or key variables can’t be customized, and you can only overlay one indicator at a time on candlestick charts (for example, you can view either Bollinger Bands or a moving average, but not both simultaneously). There are also some drawing tools available, but TradeUP doesn’t offer tools for Fibonacci pattern analysis.

Overall, the platform’s technical charting capabilities are less than impressive. You get more tools than with a competing commission-free mobile brokerage like Robinhood, but fewer than with a competitor like Webull. The fact that you cannot customize the indicators or apply your own strategy is particularly limiting for day and swing traders.

Stock Analysis

Stock pages on TradeUP come with a lot of information, including financial data, SEC filings, a stock-specific news feed, and Level 2 market data.

The financial data is displayed as charts rather than in a table, which makes it easy to see how a company’s cash flow and income have changed over time. What’s especially nice is that TradeUP also displays a graph of return on assets and return on capital over time. This is data that most platforms make you search for, and which can be extremely helpful in comparing companies on fundamental grounds. TradeUP also breaks down companies’ income into its constituent business lines, so you can see what areas a company is growing in at a glance.

The way TradeUP handles SEC filings could be improved. You can sort filings by categories like ‘Major Issues,’ ‘Financial Reports,’ and ‘Security Reports,’ but not by SEC form type. In addition, there’s no way to search filings for specific keywords.

That said, TradeUP’s overall analysis can be very useful. The platform displays a graph of short interest over time, as well as provides information about how much of a company’s shares is held by financial institutions. 

Market Overview

TradeUP offers several ways to take a broader look at the market. First, there’s a heatmap display that breaks down stocks from the major indices by sector and uses coloring to show how each sector is performing. You can look just at the past day, or create a heatmap for the last week, month, quarter, 6 months, or year.

TradeUP also lets you dive into each index with a table that shows all of the constituent stocks. This is loaded with data, including percent change, volume, market cap, dividend yield, P/E ratio, and more. All of the columns are sortable, which makes this a nice tool for discovering hot stocks. Notably, there’s also a data table for ‘popular stocks’ separate from the tables for each major index.

Finally, TradeUP breaks down the market into top gainers, top losers, top volume stocks, and stocks hitting new 52-week highs and lows.

News Feed & Calendar

TradeUP also offers a market news feed and a calendar of upcoming earnings reports and IPOs. The news feed is largely made up of stories from Reuters and CNBC, and it isn’t searchable or customized for the stocks in your watchlist. So, it can be useful, but it isn’t much better than simply checking CNBC’s homepage. The calendar can be helpful for checking what earnings reports are coming up, but you can’t filter it to a specific industry or index. 

Customization and Layout

TradeUP is available as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices, as a Windows app, and as a web app for Google Chrome. You can set up an unlimited number of watchlists within your trading account. The platform also supports alerts for any individual stock based on a specific price level, percentage gain or loss, or trading volume.

TradeUP Platform Differentiators

TradeUP’s features, taken individually, aren’t particularly unique. After all, many brokers offer price alerts, charting, a news feed, and basic fundamental analysis tools. What makes TradeUP unique is that it puts all of these tools together in a user-friendly interface that’s available across all devices. On top of that, the platform offers commission-free trading for US stocks, ETFs, and options.

What Type of Trader is TradeUP Best For?

TradeUP seems to be designed for short-term traders, but its toolset is better suited for medium- and long-term investors who use both fundamental and technical analysis. The platform’s charting tools leave a lot to be desired – in fact, there are several commission-free, mobile-friendly brokerage apps that offer more serious technical analysis features. However, TradeUP does a nice job visualizing financial information and making fundamental data available to traders, even if it doesn’t have many tools for in-depth financial analysis.

Overall, the platform’s access to financial data, its detailed market overview, and its offer of commission-free trading make for an attractive combination for medium-term traders and investors. 

Pros

• Commission-free trading on US stocks, ETFs, and options
• Available on iOS, Android, Windows, and Chrome
• Excellent visualizations of financial data
• Supports unlimited watchlists and price alerts
• Data tables for stocks in major indices

Cons

• Limited technical charting capabilities
• Only offers long put and call options strategies