Trade Ideas runs on two moves: the Toolbar’s New Tab opens every window, and the right-click configures whatever you opened. Learn those two, plus the difference between an alert window and a top list, and the program stops being intimidating in about an hour.
This guide is for traders who already have a subscription and a blank screen. If you’re still deciding whether the scanner earns its price, read our full Trade Ideas review first; this is a powerful professional tool, and if you only check the market a couple of times a week, no tutorial will make the subscription pay for itself.
What you need before starting:
- An active subscription. Basic ($89 a month on annual billing, $127 month to month, verified against the official pricing page in June 2026) covers everything in steps 1 through 7: custom scans, screeners, 10 charts, layouts, and paper trading. The pricing page lists Holly’s AI signals, the Channel Bar, customizable Multi-Strategy Windows, backtesting, and auto trading under Premium ($178 a month annual, $254 monthly), so step 8 and parts of step 4 need the higher tier. Full tier math lives in our pricing breakdown.
- A Windows PC. The desktop program, TI Pro, is Windows software. Mac users have two documented routes: the browser-based web version, or running Windows through Parallels, Boot Camp, Windows 365, or an AWS virtual machine. The web version carries the same scan speed and all 500+ alerts and filters, but the official guide states it lacks the Market Explorer, the Brokerage Plus module, and external linking, caps you at 5 charts, and drops ticker call-outs from the sound alerts.
- Not enough: the free account. It’s browser dashboards on 15-minute delayed data with a single chart. Fine for kicking the tires, useless for following this guide. The free options and the quarterly Test Drive are covered in our free trial explainer.
The official 10-episode Getting Started video series covers the same ground as this page in about 30 minutes of footage; the steps below follow the official documentation so you can work through everything in text, at your own pace, with the exact menu names in front of you.
Step 1: install the desktop program and log in
Download TI Pro from your account on trade-ideas.com and run the installer. The official guide notes a machine reboot may be required after installation, so don’t schedule your first session for 9:25 am.
Once installed, you’ll find a TI icon on your desktop. Double-click it and the program launches, prompting you for your username and password. That’s the whole login. If the connection status shows anything other than connected in green, restart the program before digging deeper; persistent login trouble goes to info@trade-ideas.com.
Step 2: learn the two moves that run everything
Everything in the program opens from one place. Go to the Toolbar and open the New Tab. From its dropdown you can load every window type: Alert Windows, Top List Windows, Multi-Strategy Windows, Charts, the Single Stock Window, Price Alerts, the Compare Count Window, Stock Races, the Channel Bar, the Brokerage Plus module, and the Holly AI windows on Premium.
The second move: right-click into any window to configure it. Every Trade Ideas window puts its settings behind the right-click menu. When you’re lost, right-click. That habit replaces an hour of menu hunting.
Two layout styles exist, free-floating and docked, and they can be combined. Free-floating windows scatter across your monitors and suit multi-screen setups; docked layouts snap everything into one container you can move as a unit. Pick one style for week one. You can rebuild later.
Step 3: understand alert windows vs top lists before you build anything
This is the one concept that separates traders who get value from the scanner from those who stare at a wall of flashing rows. The two core window types do different jobs:
| Alert Window | Top List Window | |
|---|---|---|
| Marker on the window | “A” in the top left corner | “T” in the top left corner |
| What it shows | A real-time stream of events, newest at the top with a time stamp | A ranked list of stocks meeting your criteria |
| Update rhythm | The instant an event fires | Refreshes every 30 seconds |
| Built from | Alerts plus filters | Filters only |
| Think of it as | A police scanner for price action | A self-updating spreadsheet |
The logic underneath matters too. Alerts work in an OR fashion: each one fires independently when its event happens. Filters work in an AND fashion: a stock must pass every filter to appear. So an alert window with a new-high alert, a gap-up alert, and a relative volume filter shows you stocks doing either thing, but only if they clear the volume bar.
One housekeeping fact from the official docs: each top list defaults to the top 100 symbols, extendable to 1,000, and every additional top list window costs system resources and bandwidth. Resist the urge to open twelve.
Step 4: borrow a working setup instead of building from zero
On Premium, the fastest route to a functional screen is the Channel Bar: Toolbar, New Tab, then Channel Bar for the free-floating version or Docked Channel Bar. It holds over 40 preconfigured but customizable channels, each a complete workspace of alert windows, top lists, Multi-Strategy Windows, and charts. There’s a momentum channel, a short squeeze channel, premarket and after-hours channels, a gappers channel, sector channels, and one for unusual options activity, among others.
Pick the channel closest to how you trade and watch it run for a session before touching anything. A warning straight from the documentation: channel layouts are fixed and will repopulate the same way after every restart. If you rearrange one and want to keep it, you must save it (step 7) or your changes evaporate.
On Basic, the Channel Bar isn’t included, but you’re not locked out of prebuilt scans. Open an Alert Window from the New Tab, then move to step 5: the config window’s Strategies Tab ships with a library of ready-made bullish, bearish, and neutral strategies on both tiers.
Step 5: build your first custom scan
Here’s the full path, using the exact menu names from the user guide.
- Right-click into your Alert Window, select Configure, then open the Strategies Tab.
- The left panel lists every available strategy, sorted into bullish, bearish, and neutral folders. Click the plus sign to expand a folder. Selecting a strategy shows its description, alerts, and filters in the right panel.
- Load it with the Load Settings button, or just double-click the strategy name.
- Now modify. Every alert and filter in the loaded strategy appears as an icon. Filter icons carry teal and purple backgrounds; alert icons show an image on a mostly white background. Click an alert icon to open the Select Alerts Tab and check or uncheck alerts. Click a filter icon to open the Windows Specific Filters Tab and adjust values.
- Right-clicking any icon opens a popup with three options worth knowing: Help (the full alerts and filters reference), Modify (jumps to the right settings tab), and Show as Column (displays that data point as a sortable column in your window).
- Before you commit, use Show Me. It previews how many stocks your current filter settings let through, which is how you catch a scan that’s filtered down to nothing or wide open to the whole market.
- The Flip option at the bottom right converts the whole strategy from bullish to bearish or back, opening the Summary Tab with a breakdown of the flipped version. One click turns your gap-up scanner into a gap-down scanner.
- Hit OK. The window now streams your strategy.
Want to start clean instead? Select Start from Scratch in the Strategies Tab and press Load Settings. You then pick alerts and filters in the Search Tab, set values in the Windows Specific Filters Tab, choose markets in the Exchanges Tab, include or exclude tickers in the Symbol Lists Tab, and pick display columns in the Columns Tab. It’s the right path eventually. It’s the wrong path on day one, because a prebuilt strategy teaches you what sensible filter values look like before you invent your own.
Everything you load lands under Recent Settings, which you can view, edit, or delete from the Recent Alert Settings section of your Account Management page on the website. When you’re ready to tune filter values seriously, our scan settings guide picks up where this step ends.
Step 6: symbol-link your charts so one click does the work
Symbol linking is what turns separate windows into a workstation. Per the official guide, most windows, including Alert, Top List, Multi-Strategy, and Compare Count Windows plus the Holly AI windows and Price Alerts, can be linked to a Chart or Single Stock Window. Click a ticker in your scanner and every linked chart switches to it instantly.
The defaults: all free-floating windows belong to the blue “Link to All” color group, and all docked windows sit in the pink “Dock Window” group, where only windows inside the same dock respond to symbol changes. You can create up to 4 additional linking groups, which earns its keep once you’re running separate scans for separate strategies.
To link windows one at a time: right-click into the window, select Symbol Linking, and pick a color. For a chart specifically: right-click, select Properties, then Symbol Linking, and add the checkmark. To assign many windows at once: Toolbar, Tools Tab, Symbol Linking Groups, checkmark the windows, pick a color from the Link Groups dropdown, and choose Set All Selected.
Step 7: save your layout to the cloud, every time
The trap every new user hits: you spend an afternoon arranging windows, close the program, and tomorrow it’s all back to default. Layouts are not auto-saved.
The fix is one menu path: Toolbar, File Tab, Save or Share to Cloud before you exit. To restore it, File Tab, Load from Cloud. Premium users can also pin up to five saved layouts as Custom Channels in the Channel Bar, which makes switching between a premarket layout and a regular-hours layout a single click. Make the cloud save the last act of every session until it’s muscle memory.
Step 8: put Holly on screen (Premium)
Holly is the AI engine, and on Premium she gets two main windows, both opened from the Toolbar’s New Tab and both included in the Trade Ideas AI Channel.
The Premium AI Strategy Window lists the strategies Holly selected for the coming session after her overnight backtesting and optimization run. The Premium AI Strategy Trades Window shows every trade Holly enters during the day, with the entire row flashing on each new entry. Her suggestions include entry prices, stops, and targets, and the documentation states she exits all her trades by the end of each trading day; a separate AI Long Term Strategy Trades Window tracks the signals with multi-day follow-through potential.
One setting to change immediately: AI Trade Size. By default, all of Holly’s profit and loss math assumes 100 shares per trade, which makes her displayed P&L meaningless for your account. You can switch the basis to Dollars per Trade, Shares per Trade, or Risk based on Stop Loss. The risk option is the one that matches how disciplined traders actually size: the guide’s own example is that at $100 risked against a $0.20 algorithmic stop, Holly’s math runs on 500 shares. Set it to the dollar amount you’d genuinely risk per trade and her numbers start meaning something. You can also enable Show AI Trades in a chart’s properties to paint her entries directly on price, green where the trade is profitable and red where it isn’t. For what’s actually under Holly’s hood, read our breakdown.
Step 9: run it in sim before you risk a dollar
Trade Ideas includes a real-time simulator inside Brokerage Plus, the built-in order and position manager. Click the Brokerage Plus Sim button in the Toolbar and you’re connected to the in-house simulator automatically; no broker account needed. When you do go live, Brokerage Plus connects to Interactive Brokers, Alpaca, and TradeStation in both live and paper modes, and to E*TRADE live accounts, with one-click order entry from charts and scanners.
Use the sim for at least a couple of weeks of full sessions. You’re not just testing the scanner’s signals; you’re testing whether you can execute on them, and most day traders lose money precisely in that gap between seeing a setup and trading it well; the numbers are laid out. Log every sim trade in a journal from day one (our free template) so your first week of live data has a baseline to compare against. Premium users who want to pressure-test a strategy on historical data before even sim-trading it should learn the backtester next.
Recommended first-week settings
- Start from a prebuilt strategy, not Start from Scratch. Modify one filter at a time and run Show Me after each change so you can see what each filter costs you in candidates.
- Leave top lists at the default 100 symbols. The 1,000 cap exists, but more rows means more bandwidth and more noise, and nobody trades the 400th-ranked gapper.
- Switch AI Trade Size from the 100-share default to Risk based on Stop Loss with your real per-trade risk number, even in sim. Practicing with fantasy sizing builds fantasy expectations.
- One layout, saved to the cloud at the end of every session. Add a second layout only when the first one has a job it demonstrably can’t do.
- Pick one channel or one custom scan and trade only its output for a week. The program can stream more setups than anyone can process; your edge comes from depth on one stream, not coverage of all of them.
Troubleshooting
A stock you expected isn’t showing up in your scan. Use the Missing Symbol Check, which the guide describes as automating every manual step of figuring out why a symbol didn’t appear in your strategy, with red and green color coding on each filter. Nine times out of ten one filter value is doing more work than you intended.
Your layout reset overnight. Expected behavior, not a bug. Channel layouts always repopulate in their fixed arrangement after a restart, and custom arrangements only persist if you saved them via File, Save or Share to Cloud.
You’re on a Mac and the installer won’t run. TI Pro is Windows software, full stop. Use the browser-based web version, or run Windows via Parallels, Boot Camp, Windows 365, or AWS. If your workflow needs Brokerage Plus or the Market Explorer, the web version won’t carry it; budget for virtualization.
You’re stuck and the docs aren’t helping. Every trading day at 12 pm Eastern, a trader educator hosts a live one-hour Q&A on the official Trade Ideas YouTube channel, and support answers at info@trade-ideas.com. Both are included with every subscription.
Where to go next
Your scanner now opens, scans, links, and saves. The next skill is making the scans themselves sharper: our guide walks through specific filter values for gappers, momentum, and low float plays. And if you’ve been following along on someone else’s screen and don’t own the software yet, the place to decide is the full review, which covers what each tier includes, the billing terms you should read before subscribing, and who shouldn’t buy it at all.
FAQ
Do I need Premium to follow this guide?
Steps 1 through 7 work on Basic: custom alert windows, top lists, charts, symbol linking, layouts, and the simulator are all included at $89 a month on annual billing. The pricing page puts the Channel Bar, Holly’s AI windows, customizable Multi-Strategy Windows, backtesting, and auto trading on Premium, so steps 4 and 8 as written need the higher tier.
Can I use Trade Ideas on a Mac?
Yes, two ways: the browser-based web version, or the full Windows program through virtualization (Parallels, Boot Camp, Windows 365, or AWS). The web version runs all 500+ alerts and filters at the same scan speed but lacks Brokerage Plus, the Market Explorer, and external linking, and limits you to 5 charts.
Is there a free way to practice first?
A free account gets you browser dashboards on 15-minute delayed data with one chart, which shows you the interface but not the real-time scanning that justifies the product. There’s no free fully functional trial, a restriction the help center attributes to exchange requirements around live data. The closest thing is the quarterly Test Drive, one to two weeks of Premium access for a small fee.
How do I keep my layout from resetting?
Save it before you close the program: Toolbar, File Tab, Save or Share to Cloud. Restore it anytime with Load from Cloud. Without that save, the program reopens with the default arrangement.
Can Trade Ideas place trades for me?
Through Brokerage Plus, yes. It supports one-click order entry from charts and scanners with a connected account at Interactive Brokers, Alpaca, TradeStation, or E*TRADE, plus a built-in real-time simulator that needs no broker at all. Full strategy automation is a Premium feature.