If you are serious about becoming a successful trader, you have to be able to find the stocks that fit your unique niche. Many new traders just join a chatroom and follow the leader’s picks. The reality is that you will never consistently profit from following someone else. You need to have your own stock scanning software to generate your own ideas.
Becoming a successful trader means you are self-sufficient. Chatrooms are great places for idea generation and discussion, but you should never be completely reliant on one for your trading ideas. You have to scan and find stocks that fit your own trading strategy. When I discuss my watchlist, they are stocks that fit my style and trading strategy. If you just follow my stocks, you will miss out on stocks that are more suited to your trading strategy, or not understand how to trade them.
For these reasons, we are going to talk about the best stock scanners (free and paid) for swing and day traders. These scanners will help you become a self sufficient trader, and allow you to come to the market prepared everyday to succeed.
Finviz
Finviz.com is one of the best free scanners out there. It is the go-to-scanner for traders who are low budget, and are trying to keep their trading expenses to a minimal. Their screener allows you to filter and find stocks by pretty much every characteristic you can think of. Check out a screenshot of the screener below:
Once you run these scans, you can click on individual stocks. Finviz provides a ton of information on the stocks technical and fundamentals. You will see a candlestick daily chart, a variety of fundamental components (float, shares outstanding, market cap, P/E, and so much more), recent analyst activity around it, and links to recent press releases about the stock. See below:
One of the disadvantages of Finviz is if you are a big intraday day trader, the quotes are delayed 15 minutes so you may miss out on some moves. They also do not have scans with pre-market quotes. They do have a paid version for about $25 a month that gives you real time quotes and access to even more features.
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas is my favorite intraday scanning tool. I use it everyday to filter the hundreds of stocks gapping up and down every day, and filter out the high quality stocks from the low quality. The big advantage Trade Ideas offers over Finviz is premarket scanning. Trade ideas will have a list of all the stocks gapping up and down every day. Here’s what my filters and scans look like:
We run morning and nightly scans with Trade ideas to stay on top of all the biggest movers in both directions. Everytime a momentum stock hits our scanner, we will be one of the first traders to know about it because of our scanning settings. We run our morning scans at around 8:30AM to see what’s moving, what has news ect. At around 8PM we will run a nightly scan to see everything that was moved during that day and during after hours trading.
If you are interested in getting all of our Trade Ideas scans we use, you can check them out in this article here.
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