Finviz vs Trade Ideas
Stock screeners offer day traders a quick and easy way to scan through the thousands of available stocks and find the ones that meet their criteria for trading opportunities. Two of the best ones are Finviz and Trade Ideas.
Both offer sophisticated, easily customizable stock scanners, along with a generous helping of other features, such as market news, strategy backtesting, and alerts.
In this article, we’ll compare the two services’ features and costs and try to help you determine which one may be best suited for your needs.
About Finviz
Finviz is a frequently recommended and widely used stock screener, at least in part since many of its features are available free for traders to use. The paid version of Finviz – Finviz Elite – offers additional features such as backtesting and additional charting capabilities. We cover both versions of Finviz in this review.
Finviz is known for offering a stock screener that is extremely easy to use and good visual presentations of data. In addition to stock market data, it also provides coverage of the futures, forex, and cryptocurrency markets.
Finviz Features
Many traders are introduced to Finviz as just a free, easy to use stock scanner. But the website provides a number of other features, especially with the more advanced Finviz Elite membership.
Here’s a breakdown of what Finviz has to offer:
Stock Screener
The Finviz stock screener is, of course, what most investors come to Finviz looking for. You can use the scanner to apply filters drawn from three main categories, each of which you can access simply by clicking on the appropriate tab. The categories are as follows:
- Descriptive – Investors can choose from filters such as market capitalization, average trading volume, and short float
- Fundamental – The choice of fundamental analysis metrics includes P/E ratio, return on equity, and dividend payout ratio
- Technical – This category includes technical indicators such as moving averages, candlestick patterns, and gaps
You can also click tabs to see a variety of financial, valuation, ownership, and other information.
With a registered free account, you can save screening presets – the Elite version allows twice as many preset scans and the ability to customize the filters, layout and data exports.
Charts
Bringing up a chart is as easy as searching for a stock and then clicking on the stock symbol, where it appears below the screener. With a registered free account, you can save a stock to your “portfolio.” With a Finviz Elite account, you can create price alerts.
With a free membership, you can choose daily, weekly, or monthly chart timeframes and choose between candlestick or line charts. Additional features available with Finviz Elite are considerable and include real-time price quotes and data and interactive charting with technical indicators, drawing tools, and intraday timeframes.
Below a chart, you’ll find analyst ratings and relevant market news.
News
The newsfeed naturally appears in chronological order but can be customized by source. It includes the latest breaking news from sources such as Bloomberg and MarketWatch, along with articles from several financial information blog sites.
Heat Maps
Finviz also offers heat maps of S&P 500 stocks, the complete list of U.S.-traded stocks, world stocks that include stocks listed on exchanges in Canada, the UK, Germany, China, Japan, and several other countries, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Futures, Forex, and Cryptocurrency Data
Finviz provides price quotes, performance, and chart information on the futures, forex, and crypto markets.
Finviz Elite Features
The following features are only available with a paid Finviz Elite subscription (in addition to the Elite features already mentioned):
- Email alerts on price, news, and ratings
- The ability to backtest trading strategies with 24 years of historical data and compare strategy performance to that of the S&P 500 Index
- Find positively or negatively correlated stocks
Finviz Cost
Users have a choice of a free account, a registered free account that opens a few more features, and the full-feature Finviz Elite account. The cost for Finviz Elite is $299.50 annually or $39.50 monthly. The annual option saves you $174.50.
Best Finviz Offer
Click here and save 36.8% on your yearly Finviz Elite subscription or register for a free account.
Finviz vs Trade Ideas: Who is Finviz Best For?
Finviz appeals to investors on a budget, as it offers a lot of basic screening features for free, and even the Elite subscription is considerably more affordable than either Trade Ideas subscription. It’s worth noting that a Finviz Elite membership includes real-time price quotes and real-time data for less than those services alone cost from some other sources.
Traders interested in other markets besides stocks, such as futures and forex, will find Finviz’ broad financial market coverage a convenience for finding other trade ideas.
Although Finviz offers a lot, some advanced stock market day traders may not be satisfied with the lack of features such as Level 2 market data and the ability to trade directly from the site.
About Trade Ideas
When Trade Ideas was first launched in 2002, its focus was on providing information and screening services for hedge fund and portfolio managers. Thus, it was geared toward serving the needs of even the most advanced stock traders.
Finviz offers free scanning features and is easy for even beginning traders to use. Trade Ideas provides perhaps the most comprehensive and infinitely customizable stock scanner available and for its artificial intelligence (A.I.) program that signals fresh trade ideas every trading day.
Trade Ideas also offers a wealth of stock trading educational material in the form of online videos, webinars, and a live trading room.
Trade Ideas Features
Trade Ideas offers many features that extend well beyond just screening stocks – notably, artificial intelligence trading signals and the ability to enter stock trading orders directly from the T.I. platform.
Here’s a summary of all the things that stock traders can find at Trade Ideas:
The Trade Ideas Stock Screener
T.I.’s scanner offers more options than most traders would ever need. It’s much more complex, comprehensive, and customizable than the Finviz scanner and comes pre-loaded with dozens of stock scans. Users can also create their own scans, choosing from among hundreds of filters to apply. Option scans are available, too.
You can also set price alerts in the scanner, view a “top list” of stocks that meet your scan criteria, and view performance comparisons of multiple scans (such as “gap up” and “new 52-week high”). The program also provides streaming trade ideas.
Channel Bar
The channel bar is a very convenient feature with Trade Ideas. It brings up a visual of boxes representing multiple scans – both scans that you’ve created yourself and preset scans from Trade Ideas. Then, just click on any channel to see detailed data and have the option to modify the scan to suit your preferences.
Trading Room
The Trade Ideas trading room is just one of the ongoing trading educational features available. It’s hosted by a Trade Ideas staffer from 9-3:30 Eastern time each trading day. He trades his personal account live while offering investors a running market commentary throughout the day. Other investor education features include daily webinars, a library of investor resources, extensive website training and support, and one-on-one training sessions (although that’s an extra-cost option not included in either Trade Ideas subscription).
Holly, the Artificial Intelligence Trader
Trade Ideas’ artificial intelligence trading program – nicknamed “Holly” – is the big extra that’s offered with the more expensive “Premium” membership. This robo-advisor is comprised of dozens of trading algorithms that are run through more than a million trading scenarios before the stock market opens to produce the trades that are rated the most likely to outperform. It provides traders with both entry and exit trading signals.
Charting
Trade Ideas’ charting platform is full featured, with multiple timeframe options and technical analysis indicator overlays, as well as the ability to set price and trade alerts. It also offers simulated trading to test out trading strategies and the ability to click directly to the latest market news. All price data is real-time.
Backtesting
T.I. offers strategy backtesting with its “Oddsmaker” program that can test the performance of various scans and other trading strategies. You can also enable the program to optimize a strategy for you by making adjustments to the strategy’s parameters.
Direct One-Click Trading
Trade Ideas gives you the ability to have trading strategies automatically executed through its “Brokerage Plus” feature that offers direct connections to E*TRADE and Interactive Brokers.
Trade Ideas Costs
There’s no abundance of freebies with Trade Ideas as there is with Finviz. The site offers two paid subscription levels. The “Standard” subscription goes for $999 a year or $118 on a monthly basis. A “Premium” subscription is $1,999 annually or $228 monthly.
The extra $1,000 for a yearly Premium subscription gets you access to T.I.’s artificial intelligence trading ideas – including trade assistance and trade risk assessment, the backtesting capabilities, and the Brokerage Plus automated trading connection.
Best Trade Ideas Offer
Click here and save 15% on your first Trade Ideas subscription, or 25% during special promotions throughout the year (the promo code will be updated automatically to the newest one).
Finviz vs Trade Ideas: Who is Trade Ideas Best For?
Trade Ideas is an optimal choice for serious day traders who want every advanced trading feature imaginable right at their fingertips. It also has an obvious appeal to traders who believe that A.I. algorithms are, indeed, the best way to find the best trades.
It is not, however, the best choice for beginning traders who simply can’t afford either of T.I.’s subscription prices.
Finviz vs Trade Ideas: Conclusion
Trade Ideas‘ pricing accurately reflects the fact that it’s a superior platform for day traders. Its stock screening capabilities are unparalleled, it has more flexible backtesting than the Finviz program, and it offers the premier artificial intelligence feature.
Finviz is perhaps more suitable for beginners and intermediate traders, not just because of the significantly lower cost. Its stock screener and backtesting capabilities are more than adequate to suit the needs of many traders and, by being a little less feature-rich, it’s a significantly easier platform to learn to navigate.
See Also: Trade Ideas Pro Review
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