Frequently asked questions

StockSetups is a technical-analysis platform for swing and day traders, built around two engines. After the US close, a nightly scan reads the full US-equities universe — about 12,300 US stocks and ETFs, sourced from Databento; the whole market, not a liquidity-screened slice — detects chart and candlestick patterns on the daily timeframe, sorts every long setup into one of four status lanes, scores each 0–100 and attaches a trade plan. Then, live all session, an always-on engine fires 35+ real-time intraday alert types the instant those moves happen — published to your dashboard and an optional email digest. Pro also pushes a filtered real-time feed to Discord, Slack or any webhook, and adds custom alert rules and price-level alerts that ring the in-app bell.

Swing traders who want a structured nightly read of the chart-pattern landscape, and active day traders who want real-time intraday alerts, session Top Lists and a multi-window workspace — without scrolling hundreds of charts by hand.

No. StockSetups is a software tool for informational and educational use only — not investment advice, and not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything. SCRIPTTHEMARKET LLC is not a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer, and labels like "picks", "grade" or "entry" describe technical criteria, not recommendations. Trade plans (entry, stop, target) are computed algorithmically from each chart's levels — not by an adviser and not tailored to you — and a stop can be gapped through. Patterns frequently fail and past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Every trade is your own decision and risk; always do your own research. See the Legal & Disclaimer page.

The daily scan runs once after the close and tells you what's setting up for the coming days — patterns, lanes, conviction scores and trade plans across the full universe. The real-time engine runs all session on the live tape and tells you the instant those moves fire — runners, breakouts, gaps, volume bursts, halts and block trades — so you catch them as they happen rather than the next morning.

Once per trading day, after the US close — a poll-until-fresh job that waits out the end-of-day data publish, so the board and the email digest are typically ready the same evening. Markets-closed days have no new scan. The real-time alert engine, by contrast, runs continuously from premarket through after-hours.

Each long setup is classified into exactly one lane describing where it is in a breakout's life-cycle: Setting up, Breaking out, Broke out, and Retesting breakout. StockSetups is long-only — bearish patterns are skipped. The home page walks through all four in order.

Chart patterns from trendline geometry — ascending, descending and symmetrical triangles, bull flags and pennants, rising and falling wedges, channels, cup & handle, flat bases / Darvas boxes, head & shoulders and island reversals — confirmed by candlestick formations such as engulfing bars, hammers, shooting stars, dojis, marubozu, morning and evening stars, kickers and three-methods. Because the product is long-only, bearish-bias patterns are detected but filtered off the board. The full list is on the home page under “What the scanner reads.”

Every signal carries a 0–100 conviction score and an A+/A/B/C/D grade summarizing how clean the setup is — how tight the base is, the trade plan's reward:risk, how far price sits above its 50-day average, how calm its daily range is, and the pattern's structure, rolled into one number you can sort and filter by. The weights come from how our own past signals actually performed, and the report card tracks each grade forward. Free accounts see the score and grade on every free-board symbol and every symbol page; Pro shows them on every signal in every lane.

30+ technical indicators and systems on every signal — RSI, MACD, ADX, ATR, moving averages, the 52-week range, relative strength vs SPY, the Minervini trend template, Bollinger / TTM squeeze, Donchian and Supertrend, OBV and Chaikin money flow, anchored VWAP, and RSI/MACD divergence.

More than 35 types across categories: momentum (runners, gainers/losers, fast moves), new session and 52-week highs and lows, breakouts (opening-range break/breakdown, prior-day high/low, VWAP and open crosses, round-number crosses), gaps (gap up/down, gap-and-go, gap fill), volume (relative volume, multi-timeframe volume bursts, block trades, float rotation), compression (NR7 squeeze), multi-timeframe candlestick formations, and trading halts and resumptions including LULD pauses. Each alert carries price, day %, volume, a relative-volume read and a “why it's moving” catalyst from the latest headlines.

The engine runs all session, premarket through after-hours. Level crosses can fire the instant the price trades through, with no bar-close wait; structural and volume alerts fire on the close of the bar that confirms them. Break-style alerts (a new high, a gap, a prior-day-high cross) fire once per symbol per session — a break is a fact, not a recurring condition — and repeating conditions are spaced by a cooldown, so the tape stays readable.

Logged-in free users get the Live Alert Tape, session Top Lists and scan boards on a 15-minute delay; the real-time, no-delay feed is Pro. Signed-out visitors see a preview with an upgrade prompt.

Yes — webhook delivery is included with Pro. In Settings → Notifications you build a filtered real-time alert feed (by alert type, symbol list, price and volume floors) and point it at any webhook URL — a Discord or Slack channel, or your own bot endpoint — as structured JSON. Pro also includes custom alert rules (any indicator, live metric or candle condition) and price-level alerts, which ring the in-app bell and can email you.

No — real-time is included in Pro. Many real-time charting and alert platforms bill live exchange data as a monthly add-on on top of the subscription, and have you sign exchange subscriber agreements (declaring professional or non-professional status) before it switches on. StockSetups runs on a fully licensed, redistributable sampled tape instead, so there's nothing extra to pay and nothing to sign. You get the same alerts: prices are real trade prints, so price-level crosses, breakouts and gaps fire on the same moves, and ratio-based volume alerts like relative volume read the same because the sampling cancels out. The one difference is raw volume, which we calibrate to the full consolidated tape — see below.

From Databento's live US-equities feed (EQUS.MINI), a sampled tape from a subset of US trading venues that we're licensed to display and redistribute to subscribers. Prices are real trade prints, so the last price, day change and intraday chart candles track the full market closely; raw volume is a sample, which we calibrate — see below.

It's the trade-off that keeps real-time data fee-free. The live feed is a sampled tape: prices are real, but its raw share volume runs only a few percent of the full consolidated tape. So we don't show that raw number — we calibrate displayed share and dollar volume against Databento's consolidated session statistics (the true cumulative volume, roughly 10 minutes delayed), prioritizing the real total and estimating only the most recent few minutes. The result is a realistic consolidated volume, though the freshest minutes are an estimate and can differ slightly from your broker's official print. Ratio-based signals — relative volume and the multi-timeframe volume bursts — are unaffected, because the sampling cancels out of a ratio.

US market-data licensing. A feed that is simultaneously real-time, 100% of consolidated volume, and redistributable to subscribers requires per-user exchange display fees and reporting that scale with every subscriber — it can't be a flat, affordable line item. Any flat-fee, redistributable, real-time feed is necessarily sampled. We chose the affordable, fully-licensed path and close the volume gap with the consolidated-statistics calibration above, rather than passing per-seat exchange fees on to you.

A flexible multi-window canvas: a live Alert Tape, session Top Lists, scan boards, intraday and daily charts, live news and your watchlist side by side — every window filterable, sortable, resizable and keyboard-navigable, with one-click momentum presets (premarket gappers, low-float runners, squeeze watch, 52-week breakouts and more) and saved named layouts. There's also a keyboard-driven cockpit that flips through every signal's chart, levels and trade plan as you arrow the board.

Yes. A full screener filters every technical and fundamental field at once (min/max ranges plus enum and boolean filters) and exports to CSV. Save any screen as a saved scan — dynamic, where the filters re-run each day, or fixed, a snapshot of today's symbols — and build named watchlists you can open as a workspace window. Free screens the free board on a technicals-only field set and keeps one watchlist of up to 20 symbols; Pro screens the full universe and unlocks saved scans and unlimited named watchlists.

Yes. Log positions by hand — entry, size, stop and target — and the Portfolio page marks them to the latest price: open P&L, R-multiples, risk to your stops and sector exposure. Closing a position moves it to the journal, where win rate, profit factor, expectancy and an equity curve build up trade by trade. A signal's trade plan can pre-fill a new position. There is no broker link — entry is manual. Free tracks up to 5 open positions marked at the last close; Pro is unlimited with live prices.

Yes, and they're free. The earnings calendar lists every upcoming report — confirmed or projected, before the open or after the close — with consensus EPS and last quarter's surprise (a preview without an account, the full calendar with a free login). The market calendar covers Fed decisions, CPI, jobs reports, options expiry and exchange holidays. The heatmap is a sector map sized by market cap and colored by the day's move, and the leaderboards rank the market by day move, relative volume, RS Rating and more — a few score boards, such as squeeze and earnings beats, are Pro.

Every signal is a dossier, not just a ticker: the chart with drawn levels and the trade plan, the full indicator read, fundamentals (valuation, margins, growth, analyst and ownership), short interest and float, a squeeze score, recent SEC filings and insider (Form 4) activity, US Congress trades, WSB-Reddit buzz, live news, and a “why it's moving” catalyst from the latest headlines. There are also dedicated boards: Reddit sentiment, Congress STOCK Act trades, an SEC EDGAR filings board, a live news stream, and Daily Picks (a daily ranked shortlist of the strongest still-early setups).

Daily and live price bars come from Databento; company fundamentals, SEC filings and insider Form 4 activity from SEC EDGAR; short interest and short volume from FINRA; float from EDGAR. The Reddit sentiment board aggregates ticker mentions from r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks, r/daytrading and other trading subreddits via ApeWisdom, refreshed every few hours. The Congress trades board aggregates STOCK Act disclosures by US House Representatives and Senators from the official US House Clerk and Senate eFD filings (executive-branch trades via OGE), refreshed daily — disclosures lag the trade by up to 45 days by law. Live news headlines come from Yahoo's per-ticker RSS, and trading halts from the Nasdaq halt feed. All data may be delayed, incomplete, or contain errors and is provided as is — verify independently before acting on it.

Yes. The Signal Report Card forward-tracks every published long signal and reports the win rate and average forward return by lane and pattern, with sample sizes — a forward-tracked record, not a backtest or a cherry-picked highlight reel. Read it before relying on any signal: as of November 2026 the setups as a group have not beaten the S&P 500, so treat StockSetups as a way to find and watch setups faster, not as a market-beating system. The figures are hypothetical (measured on daily closes, not actual trades) and exclude commissions and slippage. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results.

Yes, all free and no-signup: a plain-English trading glossary defining chart patterns, candlesticks, indicators, fundamentals and order types; in-depth articles and guides; free trader calculators (position size, risk/reward, Fibonacci, pivot points and more); programmatic scan hubs; and head-to-head comparisons with other tools.

StockSetups Pro is $29/month flat (about $22/month billed yearly) with real-time data and all 35+ alert types included. By approximate list price: Trade Ideas (≈ $127–254/mo), TrendSpider ($82–321/mo), Finviz (free; Elite ≈ $39.50/mo) and Benzinga Pro (≈ $37–197/mo) — prices change, and each comparison page shows the date it was checked. Each of those tools goes deeper in its own niche; every comparison says where the rival is the better pick.

For the core jobs, yes — one login covers the nightly chart-pattern scan with a trade plan on every setup, 35+ real-time alerts, a full screener with saved scans and watchlists, live news with a "why it's moving" read, SEC filings, US Congress and insider trades, Reddit sentiment, earnings and economic calendars, a heatmap and a portfolio tracker. Bought separately, the four tools that cover the same core jobs — Trade Ideas ($127), Finviz Elite ($39.50), Benzinga Pro ($37), Quiver Quantitative ($25) at entry-level list prices (September 2026) — run about $229/month; StockSetups Pro is $29/month (about $22/month billed yearly) with real-time data included. It is not a full charting studio, and it has no options flow, Level 2 or native mobile app.

No. Pro is one plan at $29/month or $264/year, and it includes real-time data, every alert type, webhook delivery, custom alert rules, unlimited price alerts and the email digest. There are no exchange data fees, no exchange subscriber agreements, no alert packs and no higher tier to unlock a feature.

Free tiers (Finviz, TradingView, Stock Titan, StockSetups) are delayed. On monthly billing, among tools with real-time data included in the price, MOMO Pro (Mometic) ($27–67/mo) and StockSetups ($29/month) are the lowest we've found; billed yearly, StockSetups is about $22/month. Platforms such as StockCharts ($19.95–49.95/mo plus real-time add-on), TC2000 ($24.99–99.99/mo plus data add-ons) and TradingView look cheaper but bill real-time or consolidated data on top. See cheap stock scanners for the full price table.

Pick TradingView for a full charting studio and community scripts, Unusual Whales for options flow, Scanz or a broker platform if you need 100% real-time tick volume or Level 2, and Trade Ideas if you want its AI to backtest and run day-trading strategies. StockSetups is web-only — there's no native mobile app yet.

Free (with a login) shows the top 3 of every lane — Setting up, Breaking out, Broke out and Retesting breakout — for stocks and ETFs, and every symbol on that free board comes with the full dossier, exactly like Pro: pattern names, the 0–100 conviction score and A–D grade, the 30+ indicators, drawn levels and the trade plan (entry, stop, target, R:R). You also get candlestick signals (the best example of each pattern type), the full WSB-Reddit buzz list and the top-3 Congress tickers — with full charts on those trending names — plus the Live Alert Tape, session Top Lists and scan boards on a 15-minute delay, a watchlist of up to 20 symbols, 3 price alerts (in-app + browser push), a 5-position portfolio and a nightly board email. Pro is about breadth, not depth: all of every lane (not just the top 3), real-time (no-delay) alerts, the full screener, saved scans and unlimited named watchlists, the real-time multi-window workspace with saved layouts, and the daily email digest. Pro also includes webhook delivery (Discord / Slack / JSON), custom alert rules and unlimited price-level alerts with email.

Pro is $29/month. Yearly billing drops it to $22/month (billed $264 once a year — 24% off, like getting 3 months free). The 7-day free trial needs no credit card; add a card to keep Pro on the monthly $29 plan, and switch to yearly anytime.

Every new account gets a 7-day free trial with no credit card — it starts when you sign up and drops to the free plan when it ends unless you add a card, so you are never charged without one. Once you subscribe, cancelling takes a few clicks — an optional reason, sometimes a discount offer you can skip, then the Stripe billing portal; no email or call. After the trial, cancel anytime and you keep Pro access through the end of the period you've paid for. Full details are on the Refunds & Cancellations page.

Yes. Payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number. See the Privacy Policy for what we do and don't collect.

Free accounts get the nightly “Tonight's board” email — turn it off under Notifications on your account page, or with the unsubscribe link in any email. The customizable full digest is Pro: under Email digest, Pro subscribers opt in or out and tune which sections they get.

Email support@stocksetups.com or use the contact page — we usually reply within 1–2 business days.