Compare · Differences, not disparagement
Trade Ideas vs Chat·Backtest
Trade Ideas is a real-time stock scanning, charting and alerting platform for US and Canadian equities, operating since 2003, which also generates AI-produced entry and exit signals through its Holly engine. It includes an event-based backtester called OddsMaker and broker-connected order entry.
Everything below about Trade Ideas was read from their own site on August 6, 2026, and every row links its source. Pricing and features change — if you find something out of date here, tell us and we’ll fix it.
Feature by feature
| Feature | Trade Ideas | Chat·Backtest |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A real-time equity scanner and charting platform with vendor-generated AI signals and broker-connected order entry. Their tagline: "AI-Driven Stock Scanning & Charting Platform", established 2003. (source) | An AI strategy lab. Describe a strategy in plain English, get exact inspectable rules, and run them on about two decades of data. We are not a broker and not a charting platform. |
| Building a strategy | Point-and-click scan construction plus a Formula Editor over bracketed data-point variables, drawing on hundreds of metrics. No general-purpose programming language is named. Holly is a vendor-built signal engine you subscribe to rather than author. (source) | Plain English, edited by chat. The rules it generates are readable and exportable — no black box, and no language to learn. The rule grammar is deliberately bounded: anything it cannot express, it cannot run. |
| Backtesting | OddsMaker, an event-based backtester launched by right-clicking an alert, with "zero coding required". It is Premium-only, and their manual states "Typically, there are 64 days worth of history in the database". (source) | Built in and free to start — the first backtest needs no signup. Daily bars for everyone; intraday timeframes on Pro and above. |
| Markets & data | Equities, scanned tick-by-tick across "the NASDAQ, AMEX, NYSE, OTC, Pink Sheets, Penny Stocks, and Canadian markets". No official page we read names options, futures, forex or crypto as scannable or backtestable. (source) | US stocks and ETFs on daily bars, with intraday on Pro and the full US universe plus crypto on Max. This is the narrowest coverage on this page — every product here beats us on markets and data depth. |
| Forward testing | Paper Trading is included in Basic and Premium but not Free, offering "Real-Time Market Simulation" with "live data feeds, realistic executions, and authentic trade mechanics". Their paper-trading page does not state that rules are frozen once a forward test starts. (source) | Freeze a strategy and deploy it. The spec is hashed at deploy and the store rejects edits to it; a daily worker replays the frozen rules on closed candles and appends the result. |
| Public track record | No public, complete performance ledger appears on any official page we read. The public "Holly Records" page is explicitly curated — "real examples of Holly AI's top performing signals" — and carries a past-performance disclaimer. (source) | A public, append-only ledger. Backtest and forward curves sit side by side and are never merged, a revised strategy starts a new record at zero, and strategies that lose stay on the board. |
| Live trading | Yes. TradeStation, Interactive Brokers, E*TRADE and Alpaca are direct-connect integrations, with Brokerage Plus acting as the order and position control center. Automated execution is narrower than the integration list. (source) | None, by design. No broker connections, no order execution, no signals, no price predictions. The exports exist so you can wire that up elsewhere yourself. |
| Export / portability | Backtest results save to CSV via "Save Detailed Results", but "the saved data only contains the trade data, not the configuration settings". Scan contents also export to CSV. (source) | The full spec as JSON plus a runnable Python file, on every plan including free. It is your strategy, not ours to hold. |
| Free tier | A free account gets "15 minute delayed data on browser based TI Pro Market Dashboards". In the plan table the Free column's only positive entry is one chart on screen — paper trading, custom scans, the Formula Editor, Holly and backtesting are all excluded. (source) | First backtest with no signup. A free account adds daily-timeframe runs, chat edits, exports and one public deployment — no intraday, no crypto, 10 symbols per run. |
Pricing
| Trade Ideas | Chat·Backtest |
|---|---|
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What Trade Ideas does better
- Real-time scanning across every tick on the NASDAQ, AMEX, NYSE, OTC, Pink Sheets and Canadian markets. We have no scanner and no real-time data at all — we work on settled closes.
- Holly generates entry and exit ideas for you every day. Nothing here generates ideas; you bring the idea and the lab tests it.
- Broker-connected order entry through Brokerage Plus, and automated execution through Interactive Brokers.
- Intraday charting, alerting, and continuous operation since 2003 — a far longer track record as a business than this site has.
- Their backtester runs on 1-minute candles for short-horizon intraday event strategies, a horizon our engine is not tuned for.
The part that is actually different
Every product on this page can produce a backtest, and a backtest is worth having — it kills bad ideas cheaply and shows you how a strategy loses. But a backtest is graded on an exam whose answers already existed when the rules were written. With enough attempts, random noise produces a beautiful one.
Here, a strategy can be frozen: the rules are hashed at deploy and the store refuses to edit them afterwards. From that day it is scored on data that did not exist when it was written, and the record is append-only. Strategies that lose stay on the board.
That is the difference — not better indicators, and not more markets, where we lose to everything on this list. It is a record that means something because it could have gone badly in public. It is our own database with a spec hash, not an audit: what we can honestly claim is frozen, public, and append-only.
Which one you actually want
Pick Trade Ideas if: you trade intraday off real-time scans and want signals generated for you.
Pick Chat·Backtest if: you already have an idea and want to know whether it holds up over years, not 64 days — and want that answer in public.