What to use instead of Trade Ideas

The product

We list Trade Ideas ourselves, and its card is the full account of it: plans, coverage, broker connections and limits, verified in September 2026. Its prices were re-read on the vendor's pricing page on 9 October 2026 and had not moved. This page does not replace the card. It answers the narrower question a Trade Ideas user asks once the bill or one of its limits starts to bite: what else does this job, and what does the switch cost.

Trade Ideas is a real-time scanner for US stocks and ETFs, built around alerts that fire the moment a condition triggers rather than a screen you re-run. Scans are composed from more than 500 data points and stream into alert windows, with charting and order entry in the same layout. TI Standard, which the pricing page also calls Core, is 127 dollars a month or 1,068 a year and is the scanner: real-time data, ten charts, scans and screeners, price alerts, paper trading, in-app trading and the TI Wave overlay. TI Premium, also called Apex, is 254 a month or 2,136 a year and adds the Holly AI signals, the OddsMaker backtester, smart risk levels and auto trading.

The reasons a holder looks elsewhere are the same few every time:

• The price, with no free way in. Both plans are paid, there is no functional free trial, and the vendor's way in is a paid Test Drive of one or two weeks at Premium level.
• Testing a scan costs double. At 127 you have the full scanner and no way to check whether a scan you built ever worked. The backtester is on the 254 tier.
• The full product is Windows. The vendor's advice for a Mac is Parallels or a cloud Windows machine; the browser build exists but is not the whole platform.
• US stocks and ETFs only. No non-US listings, no futures, forex or crypto, and no options chain or greeks behind the options orders it can route.
• Nothing gets out. No API, no webhooks, no scripting language. Alerts live inside the application.

About Holly. Holly is the part of Trade Ideas that issues named trades, and this catalogue does not judge signals. What can be said is what it is built on: by the vendor's account, it reselects its strategy set every night against simulated backtests of past US equity data, then issues buy and sell alerts with suggested entry, stop, target and exit levels during the session. No pick on this page replaces that module, and none is offered as a substitute for it. The picks replace the scanner.

What to use instead

For the same two products head to head, Trade Ideas vs TrendSpider goes further than this page, and ends on which wins for which bar size.

If what you use is the live scan. TrendSpider is the nearest in shape — real-time scanning, alerts and charts in a browser, with phone apps — but it is priced by bar size: Standard at 82 scans only on two-hour bars and up, five minutes needs Premium at 137, one minute Enhanced at 183. TC2000 gives real-time EasyScan scans with PCF formulas and 100 alerts at 49.99 a month, on a Windows client with paper trading; auto-refreshing sorts are its 99.99 tier.

If a refreshing screen will do. Finviz Elite at 39.50 a month is real-time US screening with a 10-second refresh, screener alerts by email and browser push, and CSV export. It is a filter grid rather than a stream of triggered conditions, which for swing trading is often enough and for the open is not. StockCharts runs saved scans on a schedule from 29.95, which suits end-of-day work.

If what you need is to test the scan. TrendSpider backtests the conditions it scans on, which is the cheapest route here to a tested intraday scan. For fundamental screens rather than tape conditions, Uncle Stock backtests a screen over decades from 35 a month, and Portfolio123 does point-in-time ranked backtests at higher prices.

If the scan was really about the company, or not about the US. Stock Rover screens US and Canadian stocks on 400 to 800 metrics with portfolio analytics; Uncle Stock covers listings in 79 countries at end-of-day speed. TradingView has a built-in screener over 50-plus countries' listings on the way to its charts — the one pick here that is both intraday and outside the US, with non-US exchange data bought separately.

The rest of the category is on the charting platforms and screeners page, and the screeners alone in the stock screeners collection.

What you give up

Alerts that stream from 500-plus conditions. That is the product, and nothing here matches it one to one. TrendSpider streams scans but floors them by bar size by plan; TC2000 scans in real time but with its own criteria and PCF; Finviz Elite and StockCharts refresh a screen. If your edge was a particular combination of Trade Ideas alert types, check that each condition exists on the other side before cancelling.

Paper trading and broker routing in one window. Trade Ideas Standard includes real-time paper trading and sends orders to Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, E*TRADE and Alpaca by API. TrendSpider offers no paper trading, and its broker connections run through SignalStack, with five free orders a month and SignalStack's own pricing after that; TC2000 routes only to its own affiliated brokerage; Finviz Elite is not an order ticket at all, and StockCharts connects one broker, Tradier.

The signals, if you used them. Nothing on this page issues named trades, and none of it is offered as a replacement for Holly. If the Premium tier was bought for Holly rather than for the scanner, this page has no answer for you, by design.

The price comparison is closer than it looks. Annual billing takes Standard to an effective 89 a month. Against that figure Finviz Elite and TC2000 Premium are cheaper, but TrendSpider's one-minute plan at 183 is not, and that is the plan an intraday Trade Ideas user would need.

Migration notes

Rebuild scans from the condition list, not from memory. Nothing exports from Trade Ideas — no API, and alerts live inside the application — so write down every scan's conditions and thresholds while you still have the platform open.

Condition names do not travel. A Trade Ideas alert type is the vendor's own definition of "running up" or "new high". The nearest built-in on the other side can trigger on different bars. Run the old and new scans side by side for a session and diff the symbols before trusting the replacement.

Check the bar-size floor before you pay. On TrendSpider the plan decides the smallest bar a scan or backtest can use. A scan that worked on one-minute bars in Trade Ideas needs Enhanced at 183, not Standard at 82.

Real-time is included on most picks, but not all of it is the same tape. TrendSpider and Finviz Elite include real-time US equity data; StockCharts' included real-time is one exchange's prints, without usable volume — wrong for a volume-based intraday scan.