Frequently asked questions

StockSetups is a technical-analysis platform for swing and day traders, built around two engines. After the U.S. close, a nightly scan reads the full US-equities universe (~12,300 US stocks and ETFs, sourced from Databento — the whole market, not a liquidity-screened slice; you filter by average dollar volume on the board), 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. Discord, Telegram and webhook delivery is on the roadmap (a higher tier).

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 an informational and educational tool only — not investment advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Patterns frequently fail and past performance doesn't guarantee future results. 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 consolidated 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 U.S. 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 a long-only product — bearish patterns are skipped. The landing page walks through all four in order.

Chart patterns from trendline geometry — triangles, wedges, channels, flags, pennants, flat bases / Darvas boxes, cup & handle, head & shoulders, and island-top reversals — confirmed by single-, multi-candle, and continuation setups such as engulfing bars, hammers, shooting stars, dojis, morning/evening stars, kickers, and three-methods. Because the product is long-only, bearish-bias patterns are detected but filtered out of 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 — pattern quality, trend, relative strength, volume and the indicator stack rolled into one number you can sort and filter by. Scores and grades are a Pro feature.

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), opt-in indicator crosses (EMA, MACD, RSI, Bollinger), multi-timeframe candlestick formations, and trading halts and resumptions including LULD pauses. Each alert carries price, day %, volume, a relative-volume read and an AI “why it's moving” catalyst.

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 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.

Today, alerts are delivered to your in-app Live Tape and a personalized email digest (Pro). Direct delivery to Discord, Telegram or a custom webhook (structured JSON for your own automation, with per-type and per-symbol filtering) is on the roadmap as a higher tier.

From Databento's live US-equities feed, a consolidated, exchange-compliant tape we're licensed to display and redistribute to subscribers. Prices are real, NBBO-quality prints, so the last price, day change and intraday chart candles you see are accurate.

This is the one honest trade-off worth understanding. The live feed is a sampled consolidated 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 (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; Pro screens the full universe and unlocks saved scans and watchlists.

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 an AI “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 AI Smart Picks (a daily AI-ranked top list).

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 (the 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.

Free (with a login) shows the Broke out and Retesting-breakout lanes for stocks and ETFs, 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. The timely Setting-up and Breaking-out lanes, real-time (no-delay) alerts, pattern names, conviction scores, the 30+ indicators and trade plans, the full screener, saved scans and watchlists, symbol detail pages, the multi-window workspace, and the daily email digest are Pro. Discord/Telegram/webhook delivery is on the roadmap (a higher tier).

Pro is $49/month at the standard rate. Quarterly billing brings the effective rate down to $42/month (billed $126 every 3 months — about 14% off), and yearly drops it to $36/month (billed $441 once a year — about 27% off). Pick your cadence at checkout.

Cancel anytime from your account via the Stripe billing portal — you keep Pro access through the end of the period you've paid for. First-time subscribers are covered by a 14-day money-back guarantee. 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.

The email digest is a Pro feature. From your account page, under Email digest, Pro subscribers can opt in or out and tune which sections they get at any time; on the free plan that card shows the upgrade option instead.

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