Trade Ideas vs Benzinga Pro
Trade Ideas vs Benzinga Pro: Which trading tool wins the race? I have full access to both tools and included various screenshots and notes to each section.
About Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas is a privatly-held company in Encinitas, California and was founded in 2003. Since 2017, Trade Ideas ranks within the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies in the United States. Since its inception, Trade Ideas’ primary focus is to help day traders archive the best possible trading results by providing excellent market scans, research- and trading tools.
About Benzinga Pro
Benzinga Pro was introduced in 2011 and started as a real-time news service with insightful market commentary. In 2019, the all-new Benzinga Pro was introduced and now includes more features than ever before, intending to provide investors and traders with an all-in-one streaming platform for analysis, scanning and research.
Costs
Let’s start with an important fact. Neither Trade Ideas nor Benzinga Pro are cheap trading tools. Both are in a premium-pricing segment, and even with our high discount offers, the costs per month are still on a higher level. Therefore it is crucial to understand better what the tools offer and what subscription type matches the best to your requirements.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas offers two subscription types, Trade Ideas Standard and Trade Ideas Premium. Both subscriptions can be started on a monthly payment plan or with a pre-paid plan for 12 months.
- The Trade Ideas Standard plan includes full access to the scanner, all price alerts, charts, real-time streaming trade ideas, access to the trading room and the simulated trading environment.
- The Trade Ideas Premium subscription includes everything from standard plus the artificial intelligence features, chart trading, backtesting capabilities and the auto trade via Brokerage Plus.
| Regular Price | Standard Plan | Premium Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly Payments | $118 | $228 |
| Annual Payments | $999 | $1.999 |
The table below is always linked to the best possible discount. You can save a minimum of 15% Off of your first Trade Ideas subscription.
| Payments and Discounts | Trade Ideas Standard | Trade Ideas Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | 15% Off [use coupon code DAYTRADINGZ] | 15% Off [use coupon code DAYTRADINGZ] |
| Annual | 15% Off [use coupon code DAYTRADINGZ] | 15% Off [use coupon code DAYTRADINGZ] |
You can use your credit card, PayPal, or a bank wire transfer for payments.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga offers three subscription types, Benzinga Pro Basic, Benzinga Pro Essential and Benzinga Options Mentorship. All subscription types are available on a month-by-month subscription and with a yearly payment. The Basics and Essential subscription can also be started quarterly.
- The Benzinga Pro Basic plan comes with delayed quotes, watchlist alerts, the movers list, stock statistics, the calendar suite and newsfeed access.
- The Benzinga Pro Essential subscription is the most popular one and adds Nasdaq real-time quotes, audio squawk, chat room access, sentiment indicators and trade alerts.
- The Benzinga Options Membership is a newly introduced feature and covers everything included in the Essential subscription and adds the trading mentorship and education with Nic Chahine, access to the inner circle chat room, webinars and 6 options picks per month.
| Regular Price | Basic Plan | Essential Plan | Options Mentorship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Payments | $27 | $197 | $457 |
| Quarterly Payments | ✘ | $547 | ✘ |
| Annual Payments | ✘ | $1,997 | $4,570 |
The table below is always linked to the best possible discount. You can save a minimum of 35% Off of your Benzinga Pro subscription. Click on the link and the discount will be applied automatically. Scroll down on the secure checkout page to see the exact savings.
| Payments and Discounts | BZ Pro Basic | BZ Pro Essential | Options Mentorship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | ✘ | 35% Off | 35% Off |
| Quarterly | ✘ | 35% Off | ✘ |
| Annual Payment | ✘ | 35% Off Coupon | 35% Off Coupon |
| Free Trial | ✘ | Click Here | ✘ |
You can use your credit card to make your payment for Benzinga Pro.
Scanner Features
Let’s proceed by comparing Benzinga Pro vs Trade Ideas focusing on the scanner functionalities, followed by insights to the stock market analysis features and trading strategies, automated trading and the live trading room comparison.
Trade Ideas Scanner
Trade Ideas has two main scanner features, the alert window and the top list window. Both offer unique ways to scan, filter and sort trading signals.
Trade Ideas Alert Window
The first one is the Alert Window. An alert window alerts the user once the stock scanner criteria are met. It is organized in a list where each alert is a separate row. That means that one stock can have multiple alerts. You can sort the alert window by all types of criteria. For example, by the age of the alert, the stock price and over 300 other alert types.
This includes new breakout alerts like new high, running up, Fibonacci retracement and chart pattern alerts, candlestick-related alerts, and moving averages. You can also scan for strong stocks relative to similar stocks in the same sector, list all trading halts and trading resume infos and monitor for wide-range bars.
Every Trade Ideas Alert can be combined with hundreds of filters. In combination, you can create thousands of scanner criteria. Typical filters are the price, moving average values, VWAP-values, minimum trading range, minimum trading volume, relative trading volume, short float filters, or fundamental filters like dividends, revenue, cash, assets, and more.
Finally, each combination can be applied to the full range of stocks listed on US stock market exchanges or pre-defined watchlists. The alerts are streamed in real time, and you see the alert right when things happen.
Top List Window
The second scanner type in Trade Ideas is the Top List Window, where each stock symbol has its own row. The Top List Window is typically used to sort by the most important values. For example, leading gappers, the biggest change from open, position in previous day range, and more. You can use the Trade Ideas filters and either use them to filter the results based on your preferred values or to include the filters as columns in the Top List Window.
You can think about the Top List Window like a big Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. You can apply hundreds of filters like you would do in excel with the filter functionality, and it is upon you to show those data fields as columns or use the value filters in the background, similar to an MS Excel pivot.
The Trade Ideas Top List windows are updated every second.
Trade Ideas Customizations
All of that can be done with a few mouse clicks and without writing any line of custom code. Trade Ideas also offers about 50 pre-defined stock screeners for all popular types of scans like trending stocks, biotechs, unusual options activity, unusual volume, after-hours scans, gap scans and many more.
More advanced users can also go a step further, use the Trade Ideas custom formula feature, and design complex formulas to create proprietary scanners. The formulas a pretty easy to work with. You simply connect the if, then, else parts of the formula similar to MS Excel and Google sheets with simple logic.
Finally, you can download the stock screener results by exporting them as a CSV file.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga Pro comes with a market screener and a market scanner.
Benzinga Pro Market Screener
The Benzinga Pro Market Screener allows you to screen stocks based on the categories
- Overview
- Valuation
- Financial
- Trend Following
- Last Candle
Each of the categories includes various fields where you can set filter values. For example, market cap, stock price, % change, EPS, Dividend Yield, and other fundamental data values. In addition, you can apply filters for Technical Analysis based values like SMA values, VWAP, GAP, and relative volume.
The update interval ranges from 1-minute over 1 day to 1 week. You can download all results as CSV-file.
Benzinga Pro Market Scanner
The Benzinga Pro Market Scanner is different from the Benzinga Pro market screener. First of all, you can choose from update intervals ranging from real-time, over 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, or freeze the scanner results. Therefore the scanner is the better tool for day traders who need real-time market data updates.
The Benzinga Pro Market Scanner has similarities to Trade Ideas’ Top List Window. You can use various data points as filters and columns, and you can sort and filter them as you would do in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. The number of data points included grows constantly, and recently the data for share float was included. Some other cool features are coming soon.
One data point that makes the Benzinga Pro Market Scanner stand out from competitors is the “Vol (1m)” data, which is super helpful for day traders to identify stocks moving with a high number of traded shares right now. In addition, this scan can be combined with filters for a minimum of traded shares, minimum or maximum change vs. previous day, gap, and various more.
Stock Market Analysis
Stock market analysis is more than simply scanning for various data points. It is also about visualization and analysis techniques.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas primary objective is to provide users with the best possible scanner features included in the Trade Ideas scanner. But Trade Ideas also offers charts, a brokerage API interface, auto trading functionalities, artificial intelligence based trade alerts, news and a trading room.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga Pro mainly focuses on the newsfeed, featuring news from various sources, including some Exclusive news. Benzinga Pro grows from month to month, and it is a long time ago that the news feature was the only noticeable feature. Meanwhile, the mentioned scanner and screener were added, trade signals and the trader chat are online now, and some other tools are included too.
Charting
Visual confirmation is important to many traders, and both platforms go a unique way in serving customers with the best possible solution.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas implemented the charting feature a few years ago and fully integrated the feature into the platform. Users can connect the alert and top-list window to the chart. As a result, the chart will update automatically when you click on a trade alert or top list item.
The Trade Ideas charts include pre-and post-market data, indicators, various time frames, and a line tool. A unique feature is the implemented AlphaTrends Anchored VWAP from Brian Shannon.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga Pro uses the TradingView developer API to serve customers with the best possible charting tool. If you already have an active TradingView subscription, you can also go with Benzinga Pro only since both charting tools are similar for the most part.
Many time frames, chart types, annotations, drawing tools, indicators, and more are available. Unfortunately, a pre-market and post-market option is not available right now. However, if you are a day trader and want to get into technical analysis, Benzinga still provides high value.
Trading Strategy Development
Trade Ideas
Trading Strategy development is definitely one of the core strengths of Trade Ideas, and it was also one of the reasons why Trade Ideas has its name. Trading strategy development allows the trader to define, test and execute trading strategies. Those can be executed manually or via auto trading.
Trade Ideas offers an artificial intelligence Trade Ideas module, the backtesting engine called OddsMaker, an automated trading feature and an included trading simulator for risk-free trading.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga Pro doesn’t offer a backtest engine, automated trading or a trading simulator right now.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence stands for self-learning algorithms replacing human interaction.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas included some A.I.-based functionalities within their tool. The A.I. feature consists of 4 different pre-defined stock screener layouts. Holly Grail, Holly 2.0, Holly Grail 2.0 NEO and NEO A.I. You can open them by clicking on “New,” “channel Bar.”
The settings behind each stock screener layout trigger various trade alerts per day. The strategy, time, profit, stock symbol and various other details are listed in the strategy window and also include the P&L for the day. You can filter the trades by open positions, closed positions, long and short strategies. The charts visualize the entry and exit price with a buy and sell tag.
Benzinga Pro
There is no A.I. integration available for Benzinga Pro right now.
Backtesting
A backtest engine enables the user to verify the profitability of a trading idea and trading strategy based on historical data. While the backtest result does not directly imply profitability in the future, it at least shows if the trading idea was ever rewarding in the past. That can be useful to determine the overall probability of a positive outcome. It also helps to analyze trade executions. That is helpful since you see the exact price data points instead of just visually confirming a trade idea on a chart.
Trade Ideas
The Trade Ideas backtest engine has the name OddsMaker. It is used to backtest strategies defined in the Trade Alert window. For example, you defined a gap up scanner and want to validate the efficiency. Open the alert window, right-click on one of the trade alerts of the strategy you want to test and click “Backtest Strategy.”
The OddsMaker allows you to change settings for the time window where trades can be opened and closed, define the risk management parameters, and test custom exit parameters. Now you can click on simulate buy or simulate sell to test the profitability of the strategy for long-trades and short-trades.
The OddsMaker is a fantastic backtest tool because it allows you to test various scenarios in seconds without any coding needed. Once you hit the simulate buy or sell button, the backtest engine starts and the results are displayed fast. All trades are listed in a table, and you can use the information to visualize it on a chart. You can easily optimize the strategy, and you can export a CSV file with all trade results and proceed with analysis in Excel.
Now, one more word about the unique optimization process. You can click on the optimization tab, and there you see the exact results per category in different clusters. For example, you can use the price interval and set it to $10. Then, the OddsMaker shows the results separately for the stocks classified from $0.00 to $10, $10.01 to $20.00 etc. This way, you see on what stocks the strategy worked best. A conclusion can be that it works best on stocks priced between $10 and $20 but only has mixed results on stocks between $20 and $50 and does not work with stocks $50 and higher. You can do this with many different factors and parameters.
The parameters can be adjusted fast, and new tests can be processed immediately. Then, a few seconds later, you have the latest results. The Trade Ideas OddsMaker is a powerful tool for trading strategy development.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga Pro does not have a backtest engine.
Automated Trading
Auto trading is a steadily growing business in the trading industry. Most institutional traders use algorithms to determine the best possible entry and exit and execute the trades automatically by sending the order without human interaction to the stock exchange.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas offers auto trading since 2014, but in 2018 the feature reached a new level. Trade Ideas now fully integrates via API with the direct access broke platform TWS from Interactive Brokers. As a result, traders can now fully automate trading by sending trade alerts directly from Trade Ideas to Interactive Brokers for automated trade execution.
Traders can also use Trade Ideas for manual trade execution and route orders from Trade Ideas to Interactive Brokers using the buy and sell buttons within TI Pro.
Benzinga Pro
Automated Trading is not available within Benzinga Pro.
Simulated Trading
Simulated trading enables traders to test new strategies at no risk. Whether you are a day trader or swing trader, if you trade on technical analysis signals or fundamental data analysis, the simulated environment is an essential tool. It ensures the best that you reach your financial goals.
Trade Ideas
As I lined out before, Trade Ideas comes with an auto trading feature and an integrated order execution panel for manual order executions. In addition, every Trade Ideas subscriber can connect Trade Ideas Pro with a free simulated Interactive Brokers trading environment. So you don’t even need to open an Interactive Brokers trading account. That’s pretty awesome and makes testing of new strategies more effortless than ever before. It’s also a great feature to learn to trade, handling the platform, and improve analytical skills.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga Pro does not offer simulated trading features.
Breaking News and Squawk
News are often the catalyst for market movements. Therefore, it is beneficial to belong to people knowing about the news first.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas is not a typical news network. Instead, you can see the latest news per stock symbol by opening the so-called Single Stock Window. Here you see the latest news for the stock from sources like MarketWatch, Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha and Benzinga, and insider trading statistics, along with some other helpful metrics.
Benzinga Pro
Benzina started as a real-time news-only tool before adding new features like the stock scanner, stock screener and chat room. Therefore, streaming market news and the squawk radio feed belong to Benzinga’s core strengths.
When you open the Benzinga Pro platform, you will notice two different newsfeed items. The regular Newsfeed and the Advanced Newsfeed. The advanced newsfeed is all you need since it has everything that the normal newsfeed offers, plus incredible extras.
Sure, the newsfeed is full of news headlines, sorted by date and time and comes with the stock symbol and headline. You can define the news sources like Benzinga Wire, press releases or SEC notifications. You can also define categories like important news for stocks, options, pre-market, short selling activities and more.
But, what makes the Benzinga Pro advanced newsfeed unique?
The advanced newsfeed combines news with stock screener filters. That means that you can now limit the news on filters like market cap, traded volume, price ranges, average trading volume, and more. So, for example, you can define to show only news for stocks within a price range of $10-$20, with a market cap of at least $2B, a trading volume of over 1M shares, only in the financial sector, listed on NYSE.
Chat Room
The chat room feature is the final part of the Trade Ideas vs Benzinga Pro comparison. Where can you interact with other traders? What do you get when joining the chat room? Let’s get into it.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas offers a free trading room where the moderator Berrie Einarson streams his trading desktop in real-time throughout the day. This way, you can learn to trade, handling the platform and get insights into his trading strategies.
Benzinga Pro
Benzinga integrated numerous chat rooms, from support to options trading, over day trading cryptos and the Benzinga Pro lounge. All those rooms are free for all subscribers. The chat rooms are purely for interactions between traders.
The Benzinga Options Inner Circle Chat room is one exception since only subscribers to the Benzinga Options Mentorship Program can access this room. The moderator Nic Chahine teaches options trading and sends 6 options trading alerts to subscribers. Nic moderates the room every day sends screenshots and market comments. A real-time desktop stream is not available, but there are various webinars and educational classes open to subscribers. The Benzinga Options Mentorship Program subscription is the highest tier subscription to Benzinga Pro and includes access to everything.
Trade Ideas vs Benzinga Pro Conlusion
Trade Ideas is the best choice for active day traders looking for the most advanced market scanner, automated and simulated trading, backtest capabilities and trading education. The Standard plan and Premium plan include real-time data, stock screener and chat room access, plus extensive support and education. In contrast, other features like the trading robot and backtest engine are only included in the Premium plan.
Click here to jump back to the Trade Ideas discount section of the article.
Benzinga Pro is the best choice for active traders and investors focusing on financial news with desktop notifications combined with good market screener and scanner capabilities. However, the basic package only comes with delayed quotes. Therefore the Essential subscription is recommended. Options traders consider the Option Membership, which includes Benzinga Pro access plus options picks and education.
Click here to jump back to the Benzinga Pro discount section of the article.
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