Five scans cover most of what a day trader needs from Trade Ideas: a premarket gapper list, an open momentum scan, a pullback scan, a halt monitor, and a VWAP reclaim scan. Every setting below uses the official alert and filter names, with bracket codes from the Trade Ideas help index, so you can rebuild each one in minutes. Base values come from the scan recipes published in the Trade Ideas user guide, and every adjustment we suggest comes with the reasoning attached.
This guide is for traders who already run the software and want better output from it. If you don’t own it yet, start with our full Trade Ideas review to decide whether the price is justified for how you trade, because copying scan settings won’t matter if the subscription doesn’t fit.
Prerequisite: a paid subscription. Customizable scans are included on both the Basic and Premium tiers; the free account doesn’t include them, per the official pricing page (verified June 2026). Basic runs $89/month billed annually or $127 month to month, and everything in this guide except the Multi-Strategy Window works on it. Multi-Strategy Windows, which combine several scans into one container, are Premium only. The full tier-by-tier cost breakdown covers the annual-versus-monthly math. The steps below follow the Windows desktop version (Trade Ideas Pro); the pricing page notes that Mac users run it through virtualization tools like Parallels, and a browser-based web version also exists.
How to build a scan, step by step
The configuration flow is the same for every scan in this guide. Menu names below match the user guide exactly.
- Open a new window from the New menu on the toolbar. Pick an Alert Window when you want events streaming in as they happen (momentum, halts, VWAP crosses). Pick a Top List Window when you want a ranked list (the premarket gapper scan). The distinction matters: alert windows stream, top lists rank.
- Right-click inside the window and select Configure. The Config Window opens with eight tabs: Strategies, Search, Select Alerts, Window Specific Filters, Exchanges, Symbol List, Columns, and Summary.
- In the Strategies Tab, either load one of the pre-built strategies (they’re grouped into bullish, bearish, and neutral folders; double-click or hit Load Settings) or choose Start from Scratch to build clean. Starting from scratch is the better habit. You’ll know exactly what’s in your scan.
- In the Select Alerts Tab, check the alert types you want. This is the “what happened” half of the scan; there are over 500 alerts and filters in total.
- In the Window Specific Filters Tab, set your filter values. Teal icons are minimums, purple are maximums. The magnifying glass between them opens Show Me, which lets you drag sliders and watch how many stocks pass at each value, with a histogram, a chart view, and a plain-English In Words tab. Use it on every threshold you’re unsure about. To add a filter that isn’t showing, press More, search for it, highlight it, and press Add Filter.
- One documented trick worth adopting: leave a filter’s value blank but add it through Show as Column. The value then displays in your window at the time of each alert without restricting the scan. Float is the classic candidate. You want to see it on every alert, but you don’t always want it deciding what you see.
- Check the Summary Tab to confirm the whole recipe reads the way you intended, then hit OK.
- To keep a configuration, right-click the window and choose Save As Default for that window type. Your recent configurations also persist in the Strategies Tab under Recent Settings, and you can view, edit, or delete them from the Accounts Management page on trade-ideas.com.
One more tool before the recipes: the Flip option in the Strategies Tab converts a bullish configuration to its bearish mirror in one click. Build the long side of any scan below, flip it, and you have the short side without retyping a single filter.
Scan 1: premarket gapper list
Run this from roughly 8:00 to 9:25 ET in a Top List Window, ranked by gap with the biggest on top. Gappers are where the volume and the catalysts live before the open; this list becomes your trading day. The trade plan behind it lives in the gap-and-go strategy, and the deeper scan-building logic in our gap scanning guide.
| Setting | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Gap [GUP] | Min +3% | The gap filter measures yesterday’s close to today’s open. Index-level drift runs about a percent; 3% means something actually happened to this stock. Small-cap traders often raise this to 8–10% to isolate real movers. |
| Price [Price] | Min $2 | Trade Ideas uses a $2 floor on its own published parabolic scan. Below that, spreads and manipulation eat retail traders alive. |
| Volume Today [TV] | Min 100,000 | Shares already traded in the premarket session. If 100k hasn’t printed before the bell, getting filled at your price later is a coin flip. The official intraday recipes use floors of 125k to 300k. |
| Float [Float] | Blank, shown as column | Don’t filter it; display it. Low float tells you how violently the stock can move. Why that matters is in our float and volume explainer. |
Premarket mechanics, including which data you’re actually seeing before 9:30, are covered in our premarket trading explainer.
Scan 2: open momentum scan (stocks in play)
This is an Alert Window for the 9:30 to 11:00 window, and the values below are the Trade Ideas published “stocks in play” recipe, unchanged. It catches liquid names making fresh highs or lows on abnormal volume: the definition of stocks in play (that term and the rest of the working vocabulary are in the day trading glossary).
| Setting | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Alerts | New high [NHP] + New low [NLP] | Fresh extremes are where momentum continuation lives. Swap in the filtered versions [NHPF]/[NLPF] if the stream gets noisy; per the official alert help, the filtered alerts condense rapid repeats into fewer entries. |
| Price [Price] | $5–$70 | Liquid mid-priced territory. Tight spreads, real institutional participation. |
| Average Daily Volume (10D) [Vol] | Min 500,000/day | Guarantees baseline liquidity regardless of today’s action. |
| Volume Today [TV] | Min 300,000 | Confirms today specifically is active, not just historically. |
| Volume 5 Minute [Vol5] | Min 250% of normal | Trade Ideas measures this against the 10-day average for that exact time of day, so 250% at 10:15 means genuinely unusual 10:15 volume. |
| Change 5 Minute [DUp5] | Min $0.25 | The stock has to be moving right now, not just trading heavy. A quarter in five minutes is real intraday velocity on a $20 name. |
The relative volume math here deserves a sentence, because it’s the best thing about this scanner: RVOL of 1 means normal volume for this time of day, 2 means double. It’s time-of-day adjusted, so a premarket RVOL reading is as meaningful as a midday one.
Scan 3: pullback scan
Chasing the entry on a stock that’s already ripped is how most momentum traders bleed out. This Alert Window, again using the published Trade Ideas recipe verbatim, finds strong stocks resting in the lower part of their daily range, then alerts when they start to reclaim. Entries near the low of the pullback give you a defined stop instead of a prayer.
| Setting | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Alert | 5 minute high [IDH5] | The stock prints a fresh 5-minute high: the pullback may be resolving. |
| Price [Price] | $5–$100 | Same liquidity logic as scan 2. |
| Relative Volume [RV] | Min 2 | At least double normal volume for this time of day. Keeps you in stocks in play. |
| Volume Today [TV] | Min 125,000 | Enough prints on the day that fills are realistic. |
| 5 Day Range [Range5D] | Min $0.50 | The stock has to actually move. A 50-cent weekly range is the floor for a tradeable swing. |
| Change from the Close [FCP] | Min +0.1% | Green on the day. You want pullbacks in strength, not downtrends in disguise. |
| Position in Range [RD] | Max 60% | The official recipe’s pullback condition: no more than 60% above the low of today’s range, meaning the stock sits at least 40% below its high of day. |
Scan 4: halt and resume monitor
Trading halts are where the biggest moves and the biggest account damage both happen. This Alert Window has one job: never miss one.
| Setting | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Alerts | Halt [HALT] + Resume [RESUME] | Both ends of the event. The resume is the tradeable moment, and the more dangerous one. |
| Price [Price] | Min $1 | Filters subdollar noise and nothing else. |
| Everything else | Blank | A monitor’s job is coverage. Every additional filter is a chance to miss the resume on a stock you’re holding. |
Keep this window small, give it its own sound (right-click, Actions, and the sound options are under Sound Alert), and leave it running all session.
Scan 5: VWAP reclaim
VWAP is the institutional reference price, and a cross back above it on volume is one of the cleanest intraday signals there is. Long-side configuration below; use Flip for the short side.
| Setting | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Alert | Crossed above VWAP [CAVC] | The reclaim itself. |
| Price [Price] | $5–$250 | Wide on purpose. VWAP behavior matters on large caps too. |
| Relative Volume [RV] | Min 1.5 | A reclaim on dead volume is noise. 1.5x is enough conviction without strangling the scan. |
| Volume Today [TV] | Min 500,000 | Keeps you in names where the level actually means something to big participants. |
Calibrating by time of day
The same settings behave differently at 9:35 and at 12:30, because volume dies and ranges compress after the first 90 minutes. It’s a chop fest after 11; most of these scans should either tighten or go quiet. Two practical moves. First, the Time of Day [Time] filter exists for exactly this: cap your momentum and pullback scans at 11:30 if you have no business trading lunch. Second, when a scan goes silent midday, resist loosening it. The scan isn’t broken. The market is closed for opportunity, even though it’s open for business.
And the uncomfortable part that no settings file fixes: a scanner surfaces candidates, it doesn’t produce profits. Most day traders lose money, and a faster feed of tickers speeds that up as easily as it slows it down. The scans tell you where the action is. Whether you have an edge in that action is a separate question, and your journal answers it; the trading journal template is the place to start logging which scan’s alerts you actually trade well.
Troubleshooting
The scan shows nothing. Your filters are stacked too tight, or it’s midday. Open Show Me on each filter and watch the histogram; if a single threshold drops the candidate pool to single digits, that’s your culprit. Loosen one value at a time, never three at once, or you won’t know which change mattered.
The same ticker fills the whole window. That’s a breakout doing what breakouts do: printing the same alert repeatedly. In a Multi-Strategy Window (Premium), the documented Don’t Repeat feature suppresses repeat symbols for a window you define. Five minutes is a sensible setting. In a plain Alert Window, switching to the filtered alert versions ([NHPF] instead of [NHP]) thins the stream.
You want alerts away from the desk. Email and SMS notifications are supported for Alert Windows only; Top List Windows and other scan types don’t support them, per the user guide. Build anything you need pushed to your phone as an Alert Window.
A filter wiped out stocks you expected to see. Remember that any filter with a value excludes everything that fails it. If you only wanted to see the number, clear the value and use Show as Column instead.
Next steps
The honest way to know whether these settings have edge for you is to test them: our guide to backtesting with OddsMaker walks through running a scan’s signals against recent history before you risk a dollar on them. If you’re still deciding on the software itself, the full breakdown of what each tier includes and who shouldn’t pay for it is in our Trade Ideas review, and the broader workflow from install to first layout is in how to use Trade Ideas.
FAQ
Do custom scan settings work on the free Trade Ideas account?
No. Customizable scans require a paid plan; the pricing page lists them as included on Basic and Premium and excluded from the free account. Basic at $89/month annual is the minimum entry point for everything in this guide except Multi-Strategy Windows, which need Premium.
What’s the difference between an Alert Window and a Top List Window?
An Alert Window streams events in real time, newest at the top, and is built for things that happen (new highs, halts, VWAP crosses). A Top List Window ranks stocks by a metric you choose, biggest on top, and is built for lists like premarket gappers.
Should I filter by gap or by change from the close?
They measure different things. The gap filter compares yesterday’s close to today’s open and is fixed once the market opens. Change from the Close [FCP] compares yesterday’s close to the current price and stays live all day. Use gap for premarket lists, change from the close for intraday scans.
Can I just copy someone else’s scan settings?
You can, and Trade Ideas publishes its own starter scans with cloud links in the user guide, which is a fine starting point. But settings encode a strategy. Numbers tuned for someone else’s entries, risk, and schedule won’t fit yours out of the box, so treat any imported scan as a draft and adjust it with Show Me.
How many scans should I run at once?
Three to five is plenty. Past that, you’re not scanning, you’re watching television. One gapper list, one or two entry scans matched to setups you actually trade, and the halt monitor covers most desks.