Trade Ideas Review: What Holly AI Really Does, the Pricing, and Who Should Pay for It

Trade Ideas is the scanner that professional US day traders used before "AI trading" was a search term, and Holly — its AI analyst — is what most people searching for it want to know about. This review explains what the scanner does, what Holly actually is (a strategy library re-optimised nightly, with exits), what Premium costs and adds, where the product is weak, how it compares with Finviz and TradingView, and whether the fee pays for itself on your numbers.

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What is Trade Ideas?

Trade Ideas is a real-time stock scanner for US equities that has been running since 2003, and for most of that time it was the tool professional day traders used to find stocks doing something unusual right now: gapping, breaking a range on volume, printing a new high, halting. Around 2016 it added Holly, an "AI virtual analyst" that runs dozens of strategies through an overnight backtest and streams the ones that qualify as entries during the session, and the marketing has been about the AI ever since. The scanner is still the product. Holly is a scanner with a suggested entry, stop and target attached.

This review is for the trader deciding whether Trade Ideas is worth $89–$254 a month against Finviz Elite, the TradingView screener or nothing at all, and for the trader who has heard "Holly AI" and wants to know what it does before paying for it. It covers the scanner, the AI tools, Brokerage Plus, the pricing, the learning curve, where it is weak, how it fits a Smart Money workflow, and a tool to tell you which plan — if any — pays for itself on your numbers. Prices were checked in September 2026.

What is the verdict on Trade Ideas?

Rating: 4.0 / 5. The most capable real-time equity scanner a retail trader can buy, with a backtester and an autotrading bridge that nothing at its price competes with — and a price, a learning curve and a US-stocks-only scope that rule it out for most of the people who search for it. Loses points for the desktop interface, for Holly's crowded signals on thin names, for all-sales-final billing, and for an AI label that promises more than a strategy scanner delivers.

Best for: full-time US-stock day traders who are at the screen all session, run several scans at once and act on them; traders who want to backtest scan-based ideas or autotrade them through Interactive Brokers, TradeStation or E*TRADE. Not for: swing traders (Finviz Elite is a fifth of the price), part-time traders, anyone trading futures, forex or crypto, and anyone expecting the AI to be a signal service.

What does Trade Ideas do?

◆ Trade Ideas · the brand

• Real-time scanning — the core. Hundreds of filters and alert types (gaps, volume spikes, new highs and lows, range breaks, halts, unusual options activity through partners) combined into channels that stream matching tickers as they happen. Pre-built channels cover the common setups; custom ones are where the value is.
• Holly AI — nearly fifty strategies re-optimised every night on the previous session's data; the ones that pass a threshold trade the next day, and every entry, stop and target is streamed to Premium subscribers. Several Hollys run at once with different risk profiles. It is a strategy scanner with position sizing, not a prediction engine.
• The Money Machine — the newer AI layer, a chart-based assistant that flags entries and exits on the chart you are watching.
• OddsMaker — the backtester. Take any scan or alert, define an exit (time, target, stop), and test it across recent history in seconds. The single most useful feature for a systematic trader, and Premium-only.
• Brokerage Plus — the autotrading bridge to Interactive Brokers, TradeStation and E*TRADE. Scans or Holly entries become orders with rules for exits; it also runs a simulated-trading mode for testing.
• Charts, Channel Bar, Stock Racing, Market Pulse — a chart layout (10 simultaneous on Standard, 20 on Premium), curated workspaces, and visual market-breadth tools that are distinctive and, for most traders, decorative.
• Live trading room — daily, included on both paid plans.
• Web and desktop — the desktop application is the full product; the web version covers the essentials.

How is Trade Ideas priced, and what does Premium add?

The gap between Standard and Premium is the whole reason to buy Trade Ideas rather than a screener: Holly, OddsMaker and autotrading are all Premium. Standard is a very good real-time scanner at a price where Finviz Elite ($39.50) and the TradingView Premium plan already sit. If you are going to pay for Trade Ideas, the honest choice is Premium annual or nothing. Note the billing terms: all sales are final, with store credit or exchange rather than refunds, and there is no open free trial — the free Par plan is the try-before-you-buy. Prices checked September 2026 on the Trade Ideas pricing page.

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What does Holly AI actually do?

Every night the system takes its library of strategies — momentum, mean-reversion, gap plays, breakout variants, each with its own entry, exit and sizing rules — and backtests them on the recent past. The ones whose recent results clear a bar are "activated" for the next session, and during the day Holly streams an entry when a stock meets an activated strategy's conditions, with a stop and a target attached. Holly Grail, Holly Neo and Holly 2.0 are the same idea with different risk appetites.

Three things follow from that description. First, it is honest work: a re-optimised strategy library with defined exits is exactly how a systematic trader would run a scanner, and the exits are the part retail scanners never give you. Second, it is not prediction, and the win rates people quote for it (mid-50s to 60s per cent on published tests) are the win rates of the underlying strategies in a favourable tape. Third, every Premium subscriber receives the same signal at the same time, so on a thin name the entry is crowded within seconds, which is the most repeated complaint about it and the one the marketing does not address. Use Holly as a scanner whose output includes a stop and a target, size the thin names down, and you get most of the value and none of the disappointment. The can AI predict the stock market answer is the longer version of that argument.

Where is Trade Ideas weak?

• US equities only. No futures, forex or crypto. A large share of the traders searching for it cannot use it.
• The interface. The desktop application is powerful and looks it: dense windows, an old-fashioned layout, a genuine learning curve measured in weeks. Reviewers who love it still rate ease of use lowest.
• Price. $2,268 a year for Premium, before data fees for Brokerage Plus and before the broker. A trader netting $1,000 a month is paying a fifth of it to the scanner.
• Crowded signals. Holly's entries are shared with the whole Premium base; slippage on small caps is real.
• Charting. Functional. The chart work belongs on TradingView, which most Trade Ideas users run beside it.
• Billing. All sales final; no refund window; annual plans commit you for the year.
• The AI framing. A nightly re-optimised strategy library is a good scanner. Calling it an AI analyst sets expectations the product cannot meet, and the disappointed reviews are mostly people who believed the label.

How does Trade Ideas compare with other scanners?

The Finviz review makes the case for the cheaper tool: for a trader who scans before the open and works a list, Finviz Elite does the job at a fifth of the price. Trade Ideas wins when the scans have to run all session and feed decisions in real time, and when backtesting or autotrading the scan is the point. The how to find stocks for day trading guide shows both workflows.

Is it worth it for you?

Enter what you trade, your screen time, trades per week and your average winner, and whether you want Holly or just the scanner. The tool returns which plan, if any, pays for itself, and how many extra winning trades a month it has to produce to do so.

Reference data

Worked example: a month on Premium

A full-time trader takes Premium on the monthly plan, $254, to test it against her existing Finviz Elite workflow. Week one is spent building three custom channels — a pre-market gap scan with relative volume above three, a range-break scan on the first 15-minute candle, and an afternoon new-high scan — and learning the window layout. She keeps Holly on a second monitor and does not trade her entries; she logs them.

By week three the channels are producing two or three names a day she would not have found on a static screen, mostly range breaks on stocks that were not on the morning list. OddsMaker on the range-break scan with a 2R target and a 30-minute time stop shows a 54% win rate over the last sixty sessions. Holly's logged entries are 58% winners on paper and noticeably worse where the float was small. Month's result: five extra winning trades attributable to the channels at an average $190 net, $950 against $254, and she moves to annual Premium at $178 a month. The point of the example is the method — a month, a log, a number — not the outcome; the same month for a two-hour-a-day trader would have produced one extra name a week and a cancelled subscription.

What mistakes do traders make with Trade Ideas?

• Buying Premium for Holly and trading her entries on thin names at full size. The signal is shared with thousands of subscribers.
• Buying Standard and expecting AI. Holly, OddsMaker and autotrading are Premium.
• Paying for it to swing trade. A daily-close screen on Finviz does that for $39.50.
• Paying for it to trade futures or crypto. It does not cover them.
• Skipping the free Par plan and the simulated-trading mode before committing to an annual plan with no refund.
• Running the default channels only. The value is in scans built for your setups, backtested in OddsMaker.
• Treating the AI win rate as a promise. It is the strategy library's recent backtest, in the tape that produced it.

Trade Ideas and a Smart Money workflow

Trade Ideas finds the stock; it does not read the level. A range-break alert tells you a name has cleared its opening range on volume, and the Smart Money question — did it sweep the pre-market high first, is there an order block under the break, is the move displacement or a drift — is answered on the TradingView chart with Zeno Stocks marking the structure. The pairing that works is Trade Ideas (or Finviz, for the part-timer) as the list, TradingView as the chart, and the best indicator for stocks guide covers the chart side. The free key-levels indicator draws the pre-market and prior-day levels the scanner alerts are usually breaking.