Trade Ideas

What it is

Trade Ideas is a real-time scanner for US equities, built around alerts that fire the moment a condition triggers rather than a screen you re-run. You compose scans from a library of more than 500 data points, watch the results stream into alert windows, and chart or trade a symbol from the same layout. On top of that sits Holly, the AI engine the vendor markets hardest: it reselects its strategy set every night against simulated backtests of past data, then issues named buy and sell alerts during the session with suggested entry, stop, target and exit levels.

That second half is why this card sets ai_features: recommendations. The signals name tickers and price levels, the vendor's own help centre files them under "AI trade recommendations" and calls Holly a robo-advisor engine, and its disclosure page answers that by describing the company as a publisher whose content is impersonal and not tailored to anyone. Treat the scanner as the thing you are buying and the signals as a claim neither we nor you have audited.

Pricing

Two tiers, checked on 13 September 2026. TI Standard is $127/month or $1,068/year and is the scanner — real-time data, ten charts on screen, scans, screeners, 500+ alert and filter conditions, price alerts, in-app trading, real-time paper trading and TI Wave, the chart overlay that draws its own buy and sell marks. TI Premium is $254/month or $2,136/year and adds Holly's AI signals, the OddsMaker backtester, smart risk levels, the RBI/GBI window and auto trading. Annual billing is the only discount, and it cuts the monthly rate by about 30%.

There is no free tier of the scanner and no functional trial: the vendor says exchange rules for live data are the reason it offers none. A free account exists, but it buys 15-minute delayed data on the browser dashboards, not the platform, and the dashboards meter it. The way in is the paid "Test Drive" — a quarterly window of one or two weeks at Premium level for a small fee.

Data & coverage

US equities and ETFs, real-time, intraday. There is no non-US listing coverage, no futures, no forex and no crypto. Options orders can be routed to a broker from the platform, but there is no options analytics behind them: no chain and no greeks, and the only options material is a call-and-put volume board in the browser dashboards.

Integrations

Broker connections for execution: Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, E*TRADE and Alpaca by API, plus partner arrangements with moomoo, Centerpoint and Cobra. Orders go out and positions are managed through the Brokerage+ module; nothing is imported for portfolio accounting, and there is no documented public data API.

Limitations

• The complete product is a Windows desktop application. Mac users are told to use Parallels or a cloud Windows box. The browser build is real but is not the full platform.
• Most of what the site sells is behind the $254 tier. At $127 you have the full scanner but no backtesting, which means no way to check whether a scan you built has ever worked.
• Money Machine, the automated-execution layer the site promotes heavily, is still an alpha in simulated mode only, restricted to Premium. It is not a feature you can buy today.
• No API, no webhooks, no scripting language. Alerts live inside the application.
• The AI signal record is the vendor's own; nothing about it is independently verifiable from outside a subscription.

Alternatives

Finviz Elite is a fraction of the price for screening if you do not need streaming alerts. TC2000 and TrendSpider cover real-time scanning with a lighter platform and run in a browser. Benzinga Pro is the alternative if news-driven alerts, not technical conditions, are what you are scanning for.

See the rest of the charting platforms and screeners.