TradingView vs. Trade Ideas - Which Platform is Better? (2024)

Looking for a comprehensive charting, screening, and trade idea generation platform? Two of the leading services available are TradingView and Trade Ideas. Both platforms are built with advanced self-directed traders in mind and offer a wide range of features to help you spot trading opportunities.

In this guide, we’ll compare TradingView vs. Trade Ideas head-to-head so you can decide which platform is right for you.

About TradingView and Trade Ideas

TradingView is an online market analysis platform founded in 2011. The platform made heavy-duty charting and analysis tools available to traders via the cloud, plus added a social network to enable traders to learn from one another. Ten years after its founding, TradingView has more than 30 million monthly users.

Trade Ideas has been the gold standard for advanced market scanners since the platform launched in 2003. It originally catered to professional traders and hedge funds and the company’s technology has been licensed by E*TRADE. In recent years, Trade Ideas has made a push to become more user-friendly to attract non-professional traders to its user base.

TradingView vs. Trade Ideas: Compatible Brokers and Assets

One of the first differences to note between TradingView and Trade Ideas is that they’re compatible with different brokers. TradingView lets you place trades directly through the software with a variety of brokers, including Tradovate, AMP Globa, OANDA, Forex.com, and Gemini. Trade Ideas only lets you trade with Interactive Brokers and E*TRADE.

Another difference is in what assets the two platforms enable you to analyze. TradingView covers stocks, bonds, commodity futures, currencies, and cryptocurrencies, but doesn’t offer any features for options trading. Trade Ideas only covers stocks and options.

TradingView vs. Trade Ideas: Charting

A major difference between TradingView and Trade Ideas is the emphasis the two platforms place on charting. Advanced charts are one of the main selling points for TradingView. In fact, many brokers license TradingView’s charting software because it’s so comprehensive.

With TradingView’s platform, you can view up to eight side-by-side charts each with a custom timeframe and price data down to one-second intervals. There are hundreds of built-in indicators available, and you can easily create custom studies using TradingView’s built-in Pine script editor or import indicators created by other TradingView users. In addition, TradingView lets you replay price action to see how setups unfold.

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Trade Idea’s charts are very basic by comparison. It seems that Trade Ideas assumes traders will have charting capabilities through their trading platforms, and so doesn’t devote much real estate or attention to charting. You’ll find a small selection of popular technical indicators, but not many options for customization.

TradingView vs. Trade Ideas: Scanning and Ideas

Where Trade Ideas excels is in its scanning and idea generation capabilities – after all, this is explicitly what the platform is designed to do. The platform comes with dozens of built-in screens to help you find setups around specific themes, like cryptocurrency stocks, cannabis stocks, or SPAC stocks. There are also screeners made by TradingView’s team of in-house analysts, which you’re free to customize further. Importantly, Trade Ideas allows you to run dozens of screeners simultaneously throughout the trading day and they automatically refresh every few seconds.

Another major plus to Trade Ideas is the platform’s AI idea generator, Holly. Holly runs simulations overnight for a variety of different trading strategies to find the most likely profitable trades for the next day. The top results are then presented with entry and exit prices, so you can simply execute the trade as described. Holly’s results can also be incorporated into screens for traders who want to hone their own ideas.

TradingView’s screeners are also quite robust, although they’re not as comprehensive as what you’ll find within Trade Ideas. You can filter stocks by hundreds of fundamental and technical metrics, including the most popular technical indicators. Scan results can also automatically refresh every 10 seconds, which makes the platform more useful for intra-day screening.

The more interesting feature that TradingView offers for idea generation is its community feed. Anyone on TradingView can post a trade idea, which can range from a few sentences to a detailed thesis complete with annotated technical charts. Of course, these ideas are contributed by individual traders, not an AI running millions of simulations – so it’s much harder to have confidence in the trade setups you’ll see on TradingView compared to those identified by Holly.

TradingView vs. Trade Ideas: Pricing

TradingView is much cheaper than Trade Ideas, which could help tilt the choice between these two platforms for traders on a budget.

TradingView starts at $155 per year, and the top-tier Premium plan costs $599 per year. The main difference between plans lies in the number of charts you can view simultaneously and the amount of data you can add to your charts.

Trade Ideas starts at $1,068 per year and a Premium plan costs $2,268 per year. You’ll need a Premium subscription to access Holly’s AI-enabled trade ideas as well as Trade Ideas’ strategy backtesting features.

Which Service is Better?

TradingView and Trade Ideas are both high-quality trading services with a lot to offer. We think that TradingView is best for traders who are looking primarily for an advanced charting platform. The software makes it easy to create your own custom technical indicators or import indicators from other users. Plus, strategy backtesting features are included with every TradingView plan.

Trade Ideas, on the other hand, is best suited for experienced traders who want to be able to find actionable setups in real time throughout the trading day. The platform’s AI-enabled trade ideas are incredibly powerful for active traders, and the fact that you can run dozens of highly customizable screeners simultaneously is a huge plus. To get the most out of Trade Ideas, traders should already have an advanced charting platform – or consider using TradingView to fill that gap.

Alternatives to TradingView and Trade Ideas

One competitor to TradingView and Trade Ideas that’s worth a look at is Thinkorswim. What’s attractive about this platform is that it’s completely free to use – you just need to open a brokerage account with TD Ameritrade.

Thinkorswim’s charting interface isn’t quite as easy to use as TradingView’s, but it’s just as comprehensive and offers a similar script editor to enable you to build custom indicators. Thinkorswim also gives you a lot of leeway to design custom screens using its script editor. However, you won’t find many screens available out-of-the-box like you will with Trade Ideas. You also won’t find curated trade ideas like you get with Holly.

Conclusion

TradingView and Trade Ideas are two powerful platforms for day traders. TradingView stands out as one of the top charting platforms for traders who need greater technical analysis capabilities than their broker offers. Trade Ideas, on the other hand, is best suited for experienced traders who already have charting capabilities and want to find actionable trading setups throughout the day.