5 Best Trade Ideas Scanner Settings 2023

In this article, you will find my five favorite Trade Ideas scanner settings and an exciting interview with Dan Mirkin, founder and CEO of Trade Ideas.

Alexander Voigt

By Alexander Voigt | Updated August 03, 2023

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In addition, the separate Trade Ideas review explains all features and functionalities in detail, while the page about the Trade Ideas coupons and discounts lists all current promotions.

Best Trade Ideas Scanner Settings

Using Trade Ideas out of the box is simple and straightforward. In addition, traders who want to fine-tune scanner settings can modify them using over 500 trade alerts and filter types. Here are the 5 most popular Trade Ideas scanner settings to illustrate how to use the Trade Ideas scanner to find specific alerts like gaps, momentum and high relative volume.

1. Trade Ideas Gap Scanner

Gap-trading strategies belong to the most popular strategies for day trading. A price gap is the price difference between the previous close and the opening price.

For example, if a stock opens higher than the previous close, it is an up-gap, while it is a down-gap when it opens at a lower price. Trade Ideas scans over 8,000 stocks.

Gap-scan example: Show me all stocks gapping up more than 10% or gapping down more than 10%. You can modify the settings by changing the values and adding more or fewer criteria.

trade ideas gap scanner


2. Trade Ideas Momo Scanner

A momo scanner is a momentum scanner that identifies high volatile stocks. Price volatility, in combination with high relative volume, often allows day traders to get in and out of a trade with fast trade executions and low slippage even with high share sizes.

Trade Ideas Momentum Scanner Settings

Here are the TI momentum scanner settings and scanner example results:

trade ideas momo scanner


3. Trade Ideas Breakout Scanner

The breakout scanner identifies stocks that break out of a specific price range. This, for example, can be a breakout through the previous day high or an opening range breakout. Here is a scanner setting to identify stocks that broke through the previous day high and the scanner example results:

trade ideas breakout scanner


4. Trade Ideas Bull Flag Scanner

A bull flag scanner is not directly available within TI pro, but you can define alerts and filters to archive similar results. For example, you can combine alerts like the Fibonacci 38% Buy Signal, New High or the Crossed Above Resistance alert with price pattern filters like tight consolidation in the upper half of the day range during the past 15 minutes. In that case, you see alerts for strong stocks during or near a breakthrough resistance. Here is a scanner result example:

trade ideas bull flag scanner


5. Trade Ideas Relative Volume Scan

The relative volume filter can be used to identify stocks with an exceptionally high relative volume, low relative volume or any other correlating volume pattern compared to a previous period. After an earnings announcement, we often see stocks gapping up or down significantly. In many cases, more than the usual average number of shares are traded on such days. The filter helps to identify such volume patterns right when they appear. For example, if news comes out during the trading day, we often see a volume spike within seconds, and TI immediately shows a trade alert if the criteria are met. Here is an example of the filter with its results:

high relative volume scanner


Trade Ideas Platform Overview

The Trade Ideas stock scanner was introduced to the public 20 years ago, in 2003. Since then, Dan Mirkin and his team have innovated the platform with new key features, such as:

  • Trading strategies development and backtesting,
  • Simulated trading,
  • Brokerage API with Interactive Brokers & TD Ameritrade
  • New Trade Ideas stock scanner filters
  • Live trading room
  • Price alerts via artificial intelligence
  • Educational resources
  • Holly AI real time alerts
  • Proprietary technology based machine learning
  • Custom scans and simultaneous charts

The Trade Ideas stock scanner was always designed as a user friendly platform for beginners and experienced traders. Users can choose between the Trade Ideas Standard Plan and Trade Ideas Premium. Our Trade Ideas Standard vs Premium comparison explains the differences between the stock scanner subscriptions.


Trade Ideas Stock Scanner – Interview With Dan Mirkin

dan mirkin ceo trade ideas

When did you start with stock trading, and what was your personal motivation to get into this business? Do you still remember your most successful trade and your biggest mishap?

Hi to you, Alexander, and to everyone listening or reading.

I was very lucky to have gotten into the business.

My very close friend Steven Geduld whose family was in the Market Making business on the Nasdaq, introduced me to the business.

I learned about trading, making markets, and SOES from his family.

When I graduated, I was very fortunate that my father was able to fund me a starting trading account.

This was a big risk, but my dad believed that I had a chance.

Learning via SOES ( Small Order Execution System), you get to see the market the way it actually existed.

What is the size of an offer? What is a refresh? These things start to make sense when you understand order flow.

All of these things were learned then, and I was fortunate to be at the right place at the right time.

It was like seeing inside the Matrix.

The lesson of SOES was to get my face away from the front of the tree to see the forest.

We were so focused on the short term. That we totally were not seeing the gigantic moves being made, just holding on at the proper times.

DELL computer stock went up over 20K % from 1995 to 2000. Generational wealth is acquired with that type of a run.

So when the search engines were going later in my trading career SEEK and LCOS, I got more of the moves and built my base. So I also made a very big mistake too.

I got into QCOM somewhere around $80, and that thing ran to $440, and I honestly believed I had transcended the trade.

I moved beyond the need to worry about it because I had so much locked down. It went all the way back.

Also, I bought 10K shares of TSLA at around $20. It traded around there for a while, and I hung on to the stock. It started to move higher, and with every point, it was making an extra $10K.

When it hit $35 dollars, I sold my entire position and raised my hands up in victory. I was victorious.

I had won!

So then I forgot about TSLA and noticed it again at $50 dollars and never had the courage to get back into it.

My fear of the QCOM repeat made me lose focus on the stock, and I got distracted. That one was one that I probably would have never needed to sell again.

That is part of the beauty of this game of self-directed investing. You get to see things that are fantastic that most people just dream about seeing.

We see it and feel it every day, and it feels alive.

It invigorates the spirit when done well.

We are continuing to make that easier through Trade Ideas.

To which kind of investors do you offer the services of Trade Ideas?

If you are truly self directed, meaning you plan on making your own decisions, then I honestly don’t know how you would not want our technology.

It is revolutionary in that it, in a sense, is “Virtual” without the stupid headset that makes you want to puke. Holly is your virtual analyst/trader.

She is telling you what to do if you were speculating based on the odds.

Odds are the most efficient, eloquent, simple, and truthful way to speculate because they don’t care about direction. It is all thresholds.

Once a set up with odds presents itself, our A.I. sees it and gives you the play-by-play. I recall learning my active trading from other good traders around me at the trading office.

Holly, our Trade Ideas A.I. incorporates all the best practices of what we learned through over two decades of active investing and communicating with our customer base. People want an Oracle, but the future is actually unknown.

We simply must be prepared for the multitude of possible outcomes when they present themselves in the proper way.

This is an art and science meeting and what we have done at Trade Ideas.

We believe we are years ahead of anyone else in this space. We are going direct to the consumer, and the consumer has overwhelmingly voted in favor of the A.I. by making our subscriber growth rate go exponential.

Every bracket of self-directed investor should consider investigating our technology and seeing for themselves what it is capable of offering.

What is the main difference between Trade Ideas and the competitors in the market?

The biggest difference is the data. There is no competitor who has our metadata which we have been building for over 14 years.

Our whole stack is custom technology built for real-time market analysis and data dissemination all over the world.

All the communication layers and server technology allow for a paper think client to display complex data sets.

In this perspective, we are like Wolverine “The Best at What We Do!” Also, our A.I. is the only thing like it and it is like the Coke formula. Nobody else could have our A.I. and match our signals.

Somebody could try their own, but it would be totally different from Holly.

She is one of a kind.

She self learns the market every single day and does the kind of raw data processing that is even more than most institutions.

There are other filtering tools like Finviz and StockFetcher. We have evolved past traditional technical analysis.

Our A.I. understands the indicator value relationships better than any human. If they are useful, they are used, and if they are not they are ignored. We are the new digital media.

What are the most important changes in stock market trading during the last years? What changed for the better, and where do you still see an urgent need for action?

I believe we are at the very early phase of the new era of self directed asset management.

In the first version, it gave birth to firms like Etrade and TD Ameritrade who were supposed to serve the individual.

However, the industry pivoted away from self directed investing after the dot-com bubble and instead went for the fee based model.

The problem, of course, is one cannot gain wealth on a bus with every other person.

It could be a good long, happy ride, and that is what we all hope. However, for those that happen to have invested in 2000 in the Nasdaq, just broke even in 2017.

Think about that in terms of inconvenience. People are starting to wake up to the truth. Costs are low and opportunity costs of missing interesting ground breaking things are high.

The brokerage business is a commodity business. Everybody knows.

We believe the future driver is “Idea Generation,” the new digital media that helps individuals to discover real opportunities and manage ones that do not work out.

The costs are low, and there are no barriers to entry. The time for the individual investor is NOW.

If you could look into the future to see where we will be in three years, what will have changed in stock trading then?

I think more and more people will come to realize that “timing” is not a crystal ball type of future prediction but rather a flow state characteristic that allows one to sense supply and demand inefficiencies.

We do not know all the reasons for the inefficiencies, but we understand them to be opportunistic, so using technology as a way to spot those opportunities and profit will be much more mainstream and less of a gambler stigma.

What are the three most significant advantages of the stock market?

Easy to get in, Easy to get out, Easy to Repeat

What are your goals for the future?

We believe our technology is pivotal. Right now, it is aimed at investors, but we can imagine at some point spinning the data analysis part of the technology away from Trade Ideas and applying it to medical trials and law enforcement and other areas where real time notification is critical.

Trade Ideas Stock Scanner – Conclusion

Trade Ideas is a great day trading stock scanner. A Trade Ideas subscription can help day traders to find stocks with real time market data on U.S. stock exchanges. The pre-defined channels are a good starting point for retail investors, but it is also possible to define each stock scanning criteria by yourself. The robo trading and Holly AI features, with up to ten simultaneous charts with technical indicators, are a good addition for more experienced investors.

Alexander Voigt
Alexander Voigt is the founder of DAYTRADINGz, was a regular contributor to Benzinga and has been featured and quoted on leading financial websites such as Business Insider, Investors, Capital and Forbes.