Best Trade Ideas Scans for Momentum Traders: 5 Recipes Worth Building First

Ask ten momentum traders for their Trade Ideas scan settings and you'll get ten variations of the same non-answer: "high relative volume, strong price action, good float." That's a description of momentum, not a scan. A scan is a specific stack of alerts and filters with specific values — and the difference between a scanner that prints money-losing noise and one that surfaces two or three genuinely interesting names a session lives entirely in that stack.

This guide gives you five complete momentum scan recipes for Trade Ideas, built from the platform's official documentation — exact alert names, exact filters, starting values, and the reasoning behind every component. It also covers the one piece of platform logic that breaks most beginners' scans before they fire a single useful alert, because no recipe works if you don't understand how Trade Ideas combines its ingredients.

One promise up front: these are well-constructed starting points, not profit machines. A scan finds candidates; whether a candidate becomes a good trade depends on your strategy, your risk management, and conditions no scanner controls. Every recipe here ends with its failure mode, and the final section covers how to test any of them before real money is involved.

What are the best Trade Ideas scans for momentum traders? The five highest-value momentum scans to build first are a pre-market gap scan (using volume-pace filters, since relative volume doesn't calculate in the early session), an opening range breakout scan, a high-of-day momentum scan, a low-float runner scan, and a confirmed-surge scan. Each combines one or two event alerts with volume, price, and float filters that suppress noise.

Before any recipe, one piece of platform mechanics — straight from Trade Ideas' own documentation — that determines whether your scans work at all.

Trade Ideas combines conditions in two different ways depending on what they are. Alerts combine as OR. An alert is an event — a stock making a new high, breaking an opening range, surging upward. If you check three alert types in one window, the window fires when any one of them happens. Filters combine as AND. A filter is a standing condition — price above $5, relative volume above 2, float below 50 million. A stock must pass every filter you've set.

Put together: a stock appears in your window when it satisfies all of your filters and at least one of your alerts. That single sentence explains the two classic beginner failures. The silent scanner — someone stacks a dozen filters so restrictive that nothing in the market can pass them all — and the firehose — someone checks five alert types with barely any filters, then drowns in hundreds of rows at the open. Every recipe below follows the same architecture for exactly this reason: one or two alerts to define the event, and three to five filters to define the quality bar.

One refinement worth knowing exists: some alerts carry their own alert-specific filters (a New High alert can be qualified to only fire on, say, 5-day highs), separate from the window-specific filters that apply to everything. And if you select no alert at all, Trade Ideas quietly assigns the Heartbeat alert — which is usually the explanation when a "filters-only" scan behaves strangely.

With the logic settled, here are the five scans, in the order the trading day actually uses them.

What it finds: stocks gapping up on real pre-market activity — the raw material for every gap-and-go, momentum, and opening-drive setup of the day.

The trap this recipe avoids: the obvious volume filter doesn't work here. Trade Ideas' Relative Volume filter compares current volume to the average for the same time of day — and per the platform's own documentation, it doesn't calculate in the early pre-market session. Beginners build a gap scan around RVOL, watch it sit empty at 8 AM, and conclude the scanner is broken. The documented fix is the Volume 5 Minute % filter, which measures volume pace over rolling five-minute intervals and works before the bell.

A Top List is the right window type here because pre-market is about building a ranked watchlist, not reacting to events — Trade Ideas' top lists re-rank automatically every 30 seconds, showing the top 100 candidates by default. By 9:15, this list is your morning universe. What you do with it — checking the catalyst, the float, and the chart before the open — is a research discipline of its own, covered in the pre-market gappers evaluation guide.

Where it fails: a gap without a catalyst. This scan measures activity, not reasons — a stock gapping on dilution or a fluff PR looks identical to one gapping on real news until you check. The scan builds the list; it doesn't vet it.

What it finds: the first break above the opening candle's high — the classic momentum entry of the first hour.

Trade Ideas' Opening Range Breakout alerts are among the best-documented on the platform, and they contain a detail that makes them stronger than they look: the platform defines the opening range as the first candle of the day, and the breakout alert fires only the first time price crosses above that candle's high. By construction, that means the stock is simultaneously breaking dedicated resistance and making a new daily high — a double confirmation packed into one event. The alerts come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30, and 60-minute variants; the official documentation notes 15 minutes is the most popular choice, and it's the right default for a first build.

Two usage notes from the platform's own documentation that most articles miss. First, don't run this scan only as a stock-picker — run the breakout and breakdown variants side by side and watch the ratio. A morning printing thirty breakouts against five breakdowns is telling you something about the whole tape, which is exactly how Trade Ideas suggests using these alerts as a market-strength gauge. Second, match your chart to your alert: a 15-minute ORB alert makes visual sense on a 15-minute chart, not a 1-minute one.

The scan handles detection; the trade around it — sizing the entry, placing the stop relative to the range, handling the failure — is the substance of our first 15 minutes playbook and the broader market open playbook.

Where it fails: low-volatility mornings. When opening candles are tiny, trivial moves "break" them, and the alert's double-confirmation logic loses its meaning. The RVOL filter suppresses most of this, but on a dead tape, fewer alerts is the correct output — resist the urge to loosen filters just to see activity.

What it finds: stocks pushing through their daily high with volume behind the push — momentum continuation in its purest form.

The naked version of this scan is famously unusable. A bare New High alert fires every time any stock ticks above its daily high, which at the open means thousands of alerts washing through your window — noise that buries anything actionable. The entire craft of a HOD scan is in the filters that make "new high" mean "new high that matters."

The reasoning stack matters more than the exact numbers: each filter removes a specific noise category. RVOL removes stocks having a normal day; the volume-pace filter removes highs drifted into on thin prints; the up-from-close floor removes technical "highs" on stocks barely off yesterday's close; the time restriction removes the open's blizzard. What's left, most days, is a short list of names the whole momentum community is watching.

Worth adding once you're comfortable: Trade Ideas' New High alert supports alert-specific qualifiers, so the same architecture extends to multi-day highs (a 5-day or 10-day high with the same filter stack is a swing-strength variant). And for a deeper cut on when a stock typically makes its high of day, the platform's time-of-day filters add a genuinely underused edge layer.

Where it fails: chop. In a rangebound tape, stocks poke new highs and immediately retreat, and this scan will hand you every one of those pokes. It's a continuation scan — it presumes a market where continuation happens.