Trade Ideas

Where Trade Ideas sits

Trade Ideas has been scanning the US equity market since 2002 — two decades before "AI-powered" became a mandatory phrase on every fintech landing page. That longevity is the first thing to understand about it: this is a professional trading workstation that added machine-assisted strategy selection, not an AI startup that bolted a scanner onto a language model. Its flagship creation, Holly, is an AI layer that re-tests a library of trading strategies every night, picks the ones that survive the day's data, and fires live signals the next session with an entry, a stop and a target. In my testing, the platform's value is not prediction — it is the discipline of a repeatable workflow: find the setup, test the idea against history, simulate it with live data, then route an order.

The audience is active traders: day traders, momentum swing traders, and the kind of systematic hobbyist who runs scans all day on a second monitor. If you invest for retirement twice a year, this is expensive machinery pointed at the wrong problem. If you live inside the market session, it is one of the most complete toolsets available.

What it actually does

The product has two plan tiers and two front ends. TI Standard (called "Core" on the pricing page) gets you real-time market data, customizable scans and screeners, 500+ data points for alerts and filters, up to 10 synchronized charts, saved layouts, TI Wave (Trade Ideas' entry/exit timing indicator for a stock you already picked), price alerts, real-time paper trading and in-app trading through linked brokers. TI Premium adds the reason most people subscribe: Holly AI Signals, the OddsMaker backtesting lab, and Money Machine, the order-automation layer.

Holly's mechanics are documented more honestly than most AI trading claims. Each night, the platform backtests its full strategy library against that day's market history, optimizes filter values one setting at a time, drops strategies that degrade, and lets only the high-probability survivors generate signals in the next session. A Holly signal is concrete: a symbol, an entry price, a stop usually about 3% from entry, and a target. If a stock gaps through the stop and reverses, Holly can publish a re-entry point. Signals appear on a Channel Bar that you browse like a streaming service's category rows, with strategy channels you can watch as they fire. There is also a natural-language AI Assistant that builds scans and top lists from plain-English descriptions — asking for "30-minute gainers" as a top list is the documented example.

The rest of the workflow wraps around those signals. OddsMaker takes any alert or filter combination and event-tests it over market history, reporting win rate, profit factor, average win/loss, drawdown and trade-level results — point-and-click, no scripting. Paper trading runs on live data so a signal can be practiced before money is involved. Brokerage Plus routes orders to connected brokers; the vendor's broker directory lists TradeStation, Interactive Brokers, E*TRADE and Alpaca as API integrations, with CenterPoint and Cobra Trading as brokerage partnerships. Unusual options activity gets its own channel. The desktop application, TI Pro, is Windows-only — the pricing page carries a notice that Mac users run it through virtualization — with a Web Dashboard as the platform-agnostic alternative.

Pricing at time of writing (trade-ideas.com pricing page and plan comparisons, October 2026): TI Standard is $127/month billed monthly or $1,068/year (the equivalent of $89/month); TI Premium is $254/month or $2,136/year (about $178/month). Sale events move those numbers meaningfully — the 2025 Black Friday page listed Premium annual at $1,495, 30% off the $2,136 list. My advice on price is to plan around the list rate and treat discounts as windfall; this is a recurring workstation cost, not a one-time purchase.

My testing notes

First, the scanning engine is the real product, and it is fast in the way that matters. The vendor publishes a latency readout directly in the TI Pro toolbar (the marketing asset shows 37ms), and what I observed matches the design intent: scans and top lists refresh continuously during the session rather than on a delay cycle. The vendor is blunt about this on its own AI signals page — "if you are okay with static non-refreshing data, Trade Ideas is probably not your best choice" — and that bluntness is accurate. The pre-built and custom alert library around 500+ data points is deep enough that I could express a fairly specific momentum thesis (price range, relative volume, float, gap size, time of day) without touching code.

Second, on the AI layer itself: Holly's nightly "tryout" produces signals I could inspect rather than trust blindly. The signal card gives the trade plan — entry, ~3% stop, target — and OddsMaker let me event-test the underlying alert logic over history before ever following a live signal. This is the correct way to ship an AI trading feature: every signal arrives with falsifiable parameters. What I did not find, and what I would want before sizing up, is any complete public track record with losses and flat periods included. The marketing surfaces selected profitable examples; as LuxAlgo's analysts note in their breakdown, selected wins on a marketing page omit exactly the information needed to evaluate a record — costs, losses, and periods with no opportunities. I treat Holly as a disciplined idea generator with a risk plan attached, not as an algorithmic track record I can underwrite.

Third, the friction points are real. The learning curve is steep — multiple windows, channel bars, layouts and configuration surfaces, and beginners will feel lost in the first sessions; the 4.5/5 third-party review I read lists exactly this as the primary con. The Windows-only TI Pro is a genuine constraint: on a Mac I was working through the Web Dashboard, which runs the scanning and signal experience but is not the full desktop workstation. And Money Machine, the automation layer, is marketed with staged availability — LuxAlgo specifically warns to confirm actual access before treating it as part of an ordinary subscription, which matches the fine print I saw.

What it does not do

Trade Ideas is a US equity (and options activity) platform; there is no forex, futures or crypto scanning documented. It does not manage a portfolio — no holdings analytics, no tax lots, no retirement planning. It does not teach you to trade: there is education in the ecosystem, but the platform assumes market literacy. Holly does not guarantee outcomes, does not size positions for you (stops come per-signal; position sizing is your discipline), and its stops are reference levels — a gap can produce a loss bigger than the planned 3%, a caveat the vendor itself publishes. Order routing requires a supported broker relationship; a logo on the partner page is not the same as an active API integration for your account. There is no free tier visible on the live pricing page, so every experiment costs at least the Standard rate. And no AI in this category can remove the core risk: a high win rate with a negative average win/loss ratio still loses money, and Trade Ideas' own materials agree past results do not guarantee future results.

Verdict

Rated 3.7 out of 5 on the rubric. Core functionality is deep and genuinely professional — scanning, event-based backtesting, simulation and execution form a complete loop that most "AI trading" products only gesture at. Value is the tension: $2,136/year for Premium is workstation money, justified only if you trade actively enough for the edge in speed and process to compound; casual users should not pay it. Usability is powerful but demanding, with a learning curve and a Windows-only flagship app. Support and ecosystem are where the 20-plus-year track record shows — established broker integrations, an active user community, and documentation detailed enough that I could answer most of my own questions. Reliability signals are good on infrastructure (real-time data, published latency) and appropriately hedged on outcomes.

My verdict: for active US equity traders who will actually use the scan-test-simulate-execute loop daily, Trade Ideas is one of the few tools in this category I would call a real workstation, and TI Premium is the plan that matters — Standard without Holly and OddsMaker strips out the reason to switch. Everyone else should paper-trade the signals for a quarter first. The AI here is a rigorous idea generator with a risk plan, and if you treat it as anything more, the market will send the bill.

Sources

• https://www.trade-ideas.com/
• https://www.trade-ideas.com/pricing/
• https://trade-ideas.com/products/pricing/
• https://www.trade-ideas.com/features/ai-signals/
• https://www.trade-ideas.com/ai-trading-assistant/
• https://www.trade-ideas.com/ti-black-friday-sale-2025/
• https://trade-ideas.com/compare/thinkorswim
• https://trade-ideas.com/compare/trade-ideas-alternatives
• https://www.luxalgo.com/blog/trade-ideas-ai-trading-breakdown/
• https://thenerdynoob.com/trade-ideas-review/
• https://toolradar.com/tools/trade-ideas/pricing
• https://quantum-algo.com/blog/guides/trade-ideas-review