Investing and trading in stocks has never been more accessible for retail traders like us. There are thousands of stocks on various market exchanges but how do we know which stocks to pick? Traders use a variety of tools and strategies to help them analyse and decide what to trade.
One such tool is a stock scanner.
A stock scanner is like a search function on the stock market. It helps traders and investors screen for a list of ideal stocks based on criteria defined by themselves, much like how you would search for real estate properties based on location, budget and number of bedrooms.
With those filters for scanning stocks, you get to shortlist stocks that meet your criteria before conducting further analysis on your trade plan. Imagine the time saved doing your research!
I have no experience using a scanner to trade before this. The main reason is because as a beginner trader I wanted to get my basics right before diving into these cool tools. However, when Sniperscan offered their Instagram followers the opportunity to test their product in beta mode, I couldn’t resist and signed up for it.
Disclaimer: I’ve not been incentivised by Sniperscan or its parent/child company to write this review. I registered for the beta trial and was granted a 1-month free access to test out the stock scanner.
What is Sniperscan?
Sniperscan is a real-time stock screener that has the ability to find stocks within your specific search criteria, alert you in real-time when those criteria are met and backtest your strategies. All these functions can be customised to suit your ideal trading style.
Charts used on this platform are from tradingview.com, and similar to the interface on tradingview, you can draw on these charts while on Sniperscan’s interface. The only difference here is your drawings will not be saved.
Personalised scanning dashboard
This web-based platform has the ability for you to build your own scanning dashboards, create alerts on the strategies you use and even read news on the side.
The flexibility of Sniperscan allows you to set up more than one dashboard on their platform. This is an absolute luxury when you have multiple strategies to test, scan for premarket stock movement and trade intraday.
There doesn’t seem to be a limit to the number of dashboards you can create but I’m sure the more dashboards you create, the more likely it will slow down your interface.
Backtesting strategies so you can implement them when market goes live
I’m not sure about other scanners or trading platforms – the ones I use doesn’t have the capability for backtesting. You can imagine my delight when I saw that Sniperscan has a built-in system to test certain filters and alerts on trial runs. This helps you to see how your set-up would work during market hours.
Colour and sound customisations
If you’re big on categorising with colours, Sniperscan has a whole spectrum of colours to customise your dashboard with. The fact that you can assign different colours for each of the filters is like having the UI-Goddess answer your design-related prayers.
To top it off, you can even assign various sounds for different alerts. For example, I set high-of-day (HOD) alerts to sound like “ka-ching!” while my low-of-day (LOD) alerts had a “ba-dum” tone. It was pretty fascinating (or annoying) when a whole slew of stocks hit their HOD and go “ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching” nonstop for a good 20 minutes after market opens.
Reading the news
Some traders trade on news while others want to find out what’s going on with a particular stock. Having a newsfeed run alongside your scanner is beneficial to understand what’s happening to the price analysis of a stock.
Sniperscan has integrated a newsfeed and news-alert capability on its platform.
The newsfeed, as the name suggests, feeds you general news from reliable news outlets on the stocks.
Whereas the news-alert tool allows you to do a specific search on a ticker; and search for keywords such as “acquisition”, “earnings”, “growth stocks”; essentially any terms you might want to search for when trading.
Scanning cryptocurrencies
Sniperscan has indicated that cryptocurrency charts are available on their platform, however, these crypto charts are not real-time at the time of writing. It is unclear whether they intend to make it real-time.
Education on Sniperscan
Sniperscan has kindly included a simple guide on how to set-up filters and its various customisation on its platform.
As a bonus, Sniperscan has included some presets where HOD, LOD, range breakout and etc are already preset on their dashboards.
Being a beginner trader though, I was slightly lost when I tried to set up my dashboard. Trying to find out what the “HOD” or “above 9EMA” filter could mean for my strategies.
That said, I must note that Sniperscan is still a brand new scanner on beta mode and has yet to be launched. Perhaps they may include cheat sheets in their tutorials once they have officially gone live.
Pricing and subscription
Again, Sniperscan is still in its beta phase – which is scheduled for a month between April to May 2022. News on their pricing and subscription model has not been announced at the time of writing.
One thing is for sure, this scanner will be a paid tool due to the fact that they are pulling real-time data from reliable sources.
Thoughts on using Sniperscan
Having tried Sniperscan for three weeks, and this being the first time I’m using a real-time scanner, I must say my trading prep-work has been reduced. Call me lazy but I stopped doing pre-market research for the last two weeks.
However, this is NOT to say that using a stock scanner is like having a magical crystal ball. Because not all trades that are signalled will give you 100% win rate. You are expected to know the basics of trading, learn to read price actions and do your due diligence before taking any trades.
As always, the market’s been crazy. Know that not all trades are profitable and size according to your risk appetite and you will be fine.
Let me know what you think of Sniperscan and how you would trade with a scanner like this.