Blog
Methodology, market commentary, and occasional rants about scanner pricing. Posts are short. Newest first. RSS.
Every stock scanner claims to beat the market. Almost none publish a daily, append-only, back-checked track record you can audit. Here are the five tests we'd put any scanner through before paying — and how to read between the lines when the answers get vague.
Read →RSI stands for Relative Strength Index — a 0–100 momentum oscillator that signals overbought vs oversold conditions. Here's how it actually works, what the 70/30 thresholds mean, and the three mistakes retail traders make using it.
Read →Momentum investing rewards stocks where price is sustainably accelerating up. The problem: pure 'biggest movers' lists are mostly noise. Here's how to filter for real momentum, including the three confluence checks that separate runners from head-fakes.
Read →Retail trading folklore says 'buy at the open', 'wait until the last hour', or 'never on Mondays'. We pulled the data on intraday + day-of-week + month-of-year patterns. Here's what actually holds up — and what's just superstition.
Read →We benchmarked the four sub-$30/mo stock scanners retail traders actually consider in 2026 — Finviz Elite, Stock Rover Essentials, Zacks Premium, and Tapeline Pro — across feature depth, data freshness, and (the part nobody else publishes) whether the picks beat SPY. Here's the honest matrix.
Read →SEC Form 4 — the filing every corporate insider must submit within 2 business days of a trade — is the rawest 'smart money' signal retail traders can access. But 90% of Form 4 activity is noise. Here's how to filter for the 10% that matters, and how Tapeline's Smart Money sub-score does it automatically.
Read →'Smart money' is the most misused phrase in retail finance. It's not influencer alpha, not the latest hedge-fund headline, not yesterday's CNBC clip. Here's what Tapeline's Smart Money factor — 15% of the composite — actually measures, what the data sources are, and where the lags lie.
Read →Everyone uses 'screener' and 'scanner' interchangeably. They're not the same thing — and the difference predicts whether your tool will earn its slot in your daily workflow or get cancelled in three months.
Read →Most scanner scores are a number with no instructions. This is the opposite: a worked example on NVIDIA showing what each of the six factors is saying, how to read the radar, and when the composite is telling you the trade is harder than it looks.
Read →Most scanner sales pages are 50 filters and a screenshot. Here are the five questions that actually predict whether a tool will be useful in six months — and how Finviz, Trade Ideas, Zacks, and Tapeline answer them.
Read →Six descriptive labels, no buy/sell language. Here's what each one represents in the underlying score, why we picked descriptive words, and what it means when a ticker moves between them.
Read →A third-party market-data feed covers thousands of US tickers. We actively score ~2,500 by daily dollar-volume — here's why that cutoff exists, what we do with the rest, and why bigger isn't better.
Read →Every other prosumer score-per-ticker tool hides their methodology as IP. We publish the six factors and the exact weights — because the day the formula stops working, you should know to leave.
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