Scanz is a market scanning platform for financial traders. Formerly known as EquityFeed, they have been in business since 2002 and rebranded to Scanz in 2019.
Whether you’re a day trader or swing trader, you’re always looking for ways to find new trading opportunities and make a profit. To avoid the hassle of shifting through hundreds of charts, scanning tools exist to make life easier.
Since 2002, Scanz has been regarded as one of the leading scanning tools for the best part of a decade. Their “secret sauce” technology streams US equity markets straight to your desktop. This means your computer processes the ticker data based on your filters and returns real-time results.
Scanz.com offers new customers a 7-day free trial to try out the service before committing to a monthly plan. Once you sign up you will be asked to enter your personal details and phone number to verify the account. Once everything is verified you will be emailed a link to download the desktop software to either MAC or Windows.
When you click to run the tool, a toolbar will load on the side of the desktop. They have three scanners which help cater to traders of all experience levels – Pro Scanner, Easy Scanner and Breakout Scanner.
Pro Scanner
Pro Scanner is the most popular tool and provides the more powerful capabilities. At the first the settings might cause confusion but after playing around with filters for 30 minutes you’ll develop a good understanding of how it works.
For example if you’re a day trader looking for high-volume penny stocks to build a watchlist, Scanz can easily help with this.
Based on the settings applied it generated a list of 83 stocks that matched the criteria. You can tweak the settings again to further reduce the amount of results. Then once you’re happy you can click on the tickers individually and it will open up the One Window Montage. This is essentially all-in-one dashboard to view charts, level 2 data and latest news for a ticker. Other features include chart drawing tools and technical indicators. Very simple and the UX is intuitive.
Easy Scanner
This scanner is designed to quickly provide an overview of the market with live data. Using Easy Scanner, you can filter based on market sectors, ETFs, indexes and regular stocks. A simple dashboard that offers all the necessary data to make trading decisions. For example, if you want to check how the banking sector is performing on a certain day, it’s relatively easy to gather these insights within a few clicks. Ideal for beginners!
Breakout Scanner
Another feature traders will find useful. The Breakout Scanner does exactly as the name suggests, it locates stocks breaking out.
They have five main filters:
- New Highs
- New Lows
- Price Breakouts
- Volume Breakouts
- Block Trades
Education
As with every new tool, at first you might feel overwhelmed with the different features. Luckily Scanz understand this and are keen to educate clients on how to maximise the benefits they get from the software.
Pricing
There are three tiers as shown below ranging from $79 to $149. The OTC package costs an extra $15 per month which is slightly annoying for penny stock traders.
Pro’s
- Relatively easy to use and learn
- Excellent customer support
- Saves time on having to manually research news
- Scanning results are lighting fast
- Great coverage of news and SEC filings
Con’s
- OTC package costs an extra $15 per month
- Broker integration feature is still in the early stages of development
- Premium features are pricey, more suited to advanced traders
Alternatives
The trading software market is very competitive and there are a dozen competitors all competing for the same customers.
- Trade Ideas
- Finviz
- TrendSpider
- TradingView
- Benzinga Pro
- StocksToTrade
Lawsuit with Tim Sykes
Scanz made financial headlines in August 2020 as they launched a lawsuit against Tim Sykes. They’re suing the penny stock trader and business partners for $10 million, alleging he copied their trading platform. Sykes originally used EquityFeed as a white label for Stockstotrade.com but terminated their contract in 2015. The lawsuit is still pending but it will be interesting to see how the case plays out in the long term.
Conclusion
Overall I think Scanz is an excellent tool but it’s only worth the money if your account size is big enough to cover the monthly fee. It doesn’t make sense to sign up if you’re only trading with $1,000, you’ll need to make 8% per month after broker fees to break even on the tool.
I highly recommend using the trial, let us know in the comment section about your experience and if my review is accurate.
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