Trade Ideas Review and Whether Trade Ideas Is Worth the Price

Trade Ideas is worth it for a US day trader who sits in front of the market every session and will act on real-time scans and AI signals within minutes. On that use it is one of the fastest scanners you can buy. It is poor value if you trade a few times a month, if you want to know whether a strategy holds up over years rather than weeks, or if you expect to get your money back after a bad month, because under its current billing policy every sale is final.

We read Trade Ideas' pricing page, its Billing and Cancellation Policy (effective September 14, 2026) and its product pages on October 5, 2026. Figures below come from those pages unless we name another source. Every tier and billing term is also broken down on our Trade Ideas pricing page, and the backtester is examined line by line in does Trade Ideas have backtesting.

Trade Ideas at a glance

Is Trade Ideas worth it?

Trade Ideas is worth paying for if you trade intraday momentum most days and a scanner that surfaces movers in seconds saves you trades you would otherwise miss. At $178 a month billed yearly for Premium, it has to earn back about $2,136 a year before it pays for itself. If you trade part time, that bar is high, and a $50 scanner will cover most of what you use.

The honest way to decide is to ask which tier you would actually use. Trade Ideas splits its product cleanly: Standard is the scanner, Premium is the scanner plus the AI and the backtester. Most people shortlist Trade Ideas because of Holly, and Holly is not on Standard.

How much does Trade Ideas cost?

Trade Ideas costs $127 a month for TI Standard and $254 a month for TI Premium on monthly billing. Paid yearly, Standard is $1,068 and Premium is $2,136, which Trade Ideas presents as "Equivalent to $89/mo" and "Equivalent to $178/mo". Monthly billing costs about 43% more on both tiers. Those were the prices on October 5, 2026, unchanged from our previous reading in September.

Two details change what you actually pay. First, the "$89 a month" headline most reviews quote is the yearly rate on the tier without the AI, so the real entry price for Holly is $178 a month paid up front, or $254 month to month. Second, the banner at the top of the pricing page carried two October codes when we read it: 28% off Premium annual and 22% off Premium monthly. That lowers the first bill, but the policy states that a promotional subscription "renews at the standard price for that plan", so budget the second year at list.

Is Holly AI worth paying for?

Holly is worth paying for only if you will follow intraday signals in real time and size them sensibly. It is Trade Ideas' AI engine, listed on Premium as "1st Gen AI Signals", and it publishes buy and sell signals with entry and exit levels during the session. Its second-generation product, the Money Machine, is described as "long in the top 3 momentum based stocks at $5K per position", exiting when a stock leaves the top three.

Read every performance figure on those pages as what it is. Trade Ideas' own billing policy lists "dissatisfaction with alerts, scans, signals or data, including where their performance differs from historical or illustrative figures" as a ground that does not give rise to a refund. That is a fair rule for a software vendor, and it tells you how to treat the track records: illustrative, not a promise. The useful question is not whether Holly has had good days, but whether the trades it takes would suit your account after spreads, slippage and your own reaction time.

How good is the Trade Ideas backtester?

The backtester, the OddsMaker, is good at one narrow job: telling you how a scan's alerts would have traded over recent sessions. Trade Ideas' own user guide says "typically there are six weeks worth of history in the database", it works on one-minute bars, it skips premarket and after-hours, and it caps a test at 100 positions a day. It is on Premium only.

Six weeks is about 30 trading days, which is one market regime. A setup that looks excellent through a calm stretch can fall apart in the next volatile one, and no OddsMaker configuration will show you 2020 or 2022. If what you need is evidence that a rule survives years of different markets, test it on decades of daily data. Our trading strategy tester runs a rule you type in plain English on adjusted daily history, charges costs on every trade and reports the drawdown against buy and hold.

Can you get a refund from Trade Ideas?

Generally no. The Billing and Cancellation Policy that took effect on September 14, 2026 says "All sales are final. No refund is payable on a paid invoice." Trade Ideas keeps a discretion to offer a refund, credit or plan exchange in individual cases, but states that this discretion "is not exercised in respect of promotional purchases", so anything bought with a discount code is final for that period and each renewal that follows from it.

Three other clauses are worth knowing before you pay:

• Cancellation. You can cancel any time in Account Management or the Billing Portal. Access runs to the end of the invoiced period and nothing is prorated.
• Test Drive. Trade Ideas sometimes runs paid Test Drive events with full access for a limited period. The fee is final, and a Test Drive does not turn into a subscription.
• Billing errors. Duplicate charges, charges after a confirmed cancellation and wrong amounts are corrected, but they "must be reported to [email protected] within 60 days of the invoice date".

That 60-day window is the one that catches people, because a $254 renewal that should not have happened is easy to miss on a busy card. If several trading subscriptions renew on the same card, it pays to match your card statement against vendor invoices every month so a wrong charge is flagged while you can still claim it.

Does Trade Ideas charge professional fees?

Yes, if you are classified as a professional. Section 13 of the policy says "Trade Ideas pays market data exchange fees for non-professional users. Customers classified as professional traders are liable for the additional exchange fees applicable to their status", and that you must tell Trade Ideas if your status changes. Exchange fees already incurred are not refunded.

This is the surcharge model: the plan price is the same for everyone and a professional pays the exchange's professional rate on top. Trade Ideas does not print the amounts on its pricing page. TC2000, which uses the same model, does print them, and they come to as much as $161.50 a month for Nasdaq, NYSE and options data (see TC2000 pricing). How vendors across the category handle professional users, and who counts as one, is on our non-professional subscriber page.

Trade Ideas compared with the alternatives at the same budget

If you mainly want a fast scanner, TC2000 Premium does most of what TI Standard does at well under half the price and lets you try it with a money-back window. If you want charts and a backtester that goes deeper than six weeks, TrendSpider is the closer match, and its plans are on TrendSpider pricing. If you want robot signals at a lower price, Tickeron pricing covers its bundles and its no-refund rule. And if you are comparing Trade Ideas with tools that test your own rules rather than hand you signals, see the Trade Ideas alternative page.

Who should not buy Trade Ideas

Do not buy Trade Ideas to find out whether a strategy works. It answers "what is moving right now" brilliantly and "has this rule made money across market cycles" only for the last six weeks. Do not buy it on a promo code you have not tested, because that purchase is final. And do not buy yearly Premium before a month of monthly billing has shown you that you act on Holly's signals during the session, since nothing paid is returned.

If the rule you would trade off a Trade Ideas scan is "buy when a stock gaps above its 20-day high on heavy volume", you can find out what that rule did over a decade before you pay for the scanner that fires it. Type it into the trading strategy tester, read the drawdown and the trade list, and then decide whether the signal is worth $2,136 a year.

Our verdict on Trade Ideas

Trade Ideas is a strong, fast real-time scanner, and Premium is a reasonable buy for a full-time intraday trader who will use Holly and the automation every day. For everyone else it is expensive, its backtester is short, and since September 14, 2026 its billing policy leaves no room for a change of mind. Pay monthly first, keep your invoices, and test the rule behind the signal on long history before you commit a year.