Tradespoon Review – Automated Technical Analysis For Today’s Trader

What is Tradespoon?

Tradespoon is a relatively new player in the fintech space that uses multivariate modeling and automated technical analysis to predict stocks’ price movements. Unlike other automated analysis software, which simply assists with technical analysis, Tradespoon seeks to issue buy or sell ratings for particular stocks based on its model and claims to predict intraday, short-term, and long-term price movements with extreme accuracy. While this lofty claim seems to be surprisingly true in trending markets, it is difficult to backtest the software to determine how well it performs in other market conditions.

That said, Tradespoon offers a viable self-directed research platform for those who like to do stock research with some automated analysis (as opposed to getting stock picks directly from a company like the Motley Fool or other advisors).

Tradespoon Pricing Options

Tradespoon offers several pricing tiers, including a free option. However, the free service only allows access to training videos rather than to the Stock Forecast Toolbox, so there is little advantage to using Tradespoon for free.

Access to the Stock Forecast Toolbox and its price prediction tools is available in Tradespoon’s Stock Forecast tier, which costs $127/month or $697/year. Tradespoon also offers a Tools tier, which comes with access to some additional analysis tools but is otherwise identical to the Stock Forecast tool, for $147/month or $997/year. The Premium tier provides everything in the Tools tier, plus curated stock and options picks from Tradespoon’s analyst team and email and text alerts about these picks, at a cost of $197/month or $1497/year. Note that the monthly subscriptions are extremely costly compared to the annual subscriptions on a per-month cost basis.

Tradespoon Features

Price Forecasting

The heart of Tradespoon is its price forecasting tool, which uses Tradespoon’s algorithm to predict the future price of any entered stock. The algorithm works over three time periods – one hour, 10 days, and six months – that cover the needs of day traders and medium-term investors. In addition to stocks, Tradespoon’s forecast tool provides coverage for futures, forex, and Bitcoin.

The forecast result is simple to read and interpret, with the current price displayed alongside the forecasted high and low for the time period. Probabilities are assigned to the stock hitting the predicted high and low and a range trend indicator gives traders a sense of whether the model predicts net bullish or net bearish price action over the forecast timespan. In addition, a letter grade from A to C is assigned to the model to indicate the level of confidence in the forecast. A simple candlestick chart shows actual data displayed alongside the forecasted candlesticks for each day or five minutes.

It is extremely important that traders using the price forecasting tool interpret its results with a grain of salt. Although the tool appears to work with surprising accuracy over limited testing, there is no built-in method to test Tradespoon’s forecasts over long periods or to backtest it against bear or volatile market periods. As the forecasted charts update, they replace predicted data with actual data – not displaying if and by how much the predicted price may have deviated from the true price. Thus, while the price forecast tool can be useful for supporting a trade based on technical analysis, it should not supersede technical analysis.

Curated Stock and Option Picks

The analysts behind Tradespoon publish daily picks of the best bullish and bearish stock and options plays based on Tradespoon’s model. Both stock and option picks come complete with multiple entry points, price targets, and stop loss levels, allowing traders to follow the trades without their own technical analyses if desired. Tradespoon notes that their picks are meant to last one to two days and so are optimal for day traders rather than medium-term investors. Users can also opt to receive text message alerts whenever new trades are added to the curated picks.

In addition to these curated picks, traders get access to the real-time portfolios of the traders behind Tradespoon. This is a useful tool for developing new trade ideas in addition to those suggested in the curated picks.

Training

Tradespoon offers a number of training resources with both its free and paid memberships. Most of these resources come in the form of short videos that are either targeted lessons about stock and options trading, or else are video recordings of workshops that the analysts behind Tradespoon have held in the past. They aren’t as complex and structured as courses by Lex Van Dam, SMB Capital, or Bulls on Wall Street.

There are also online workshops offered every few weeks that are free to register for. However, note that while these resources do provide useful information for beginning traders, most are at least partially marketing materials designed to get traders to sign up for paid accounts with Tradespoon.

Platform Layout

Tradespoon is a browser-based platform that offers little in the way of customization. Users are not able to save searches in the forecast tools, nor are they able to keep a portfolio of their current holdings for quick access to forecasts. The platform can also be quite confusing to navigate, as there are multiple header menus and some pages have additional menus that cannot be accessed from the main dashboard. That said, essential data on specific pages, such as the stock forecast and stock and options pick pages, are laid out extremely cleanly and make it easy to identify important information.

What Tradespoon Does Well

The attraction of Tradespoon for traders is that it purports to predict the future price of a stock – something that traders have been trying to do for centuries with at best mixed success. Therefore, it is extremely important to take Tradespoon’s claims with a grain of salt. While the Tradespoon algorithm seems to work relatively well and the company offers a summary of performance data over the past two years, there is no way to backtest the algorithm or even to monitor its performance in the present except by meticulously tracking its predictions against real price data.

Instead of a magic prediction tool, Tradespoon is perhaps best thought of as a tool for finding new trade ideas. It is possible to look through the Tradespoon traders’ portfolios and the curated stock and options picks, as well as to use the forecast tool to cross-check trades identified through technical analysis. In this light, the forecast tool can be used to help set price targets and stop losses rather than to fully replace technical analyses.

Final Verdict on Tradespoon

Tradespoon is targeted primarily at intraday and short-term traders who don’t have the time to conduct their own exhaustive technical analyses to identify trades. The platform’s stock forecast tool and curated picks are both designed to make the process of identifying price targets, entries, and stop losses straightforward. However, it is important that traders using Tradespoon have some experience with technical analysis, as the algorithm’s recommendations and price targets should not be followed blindly. At present, longer-term investors may not see much benefit from Tradespoon since the platform’s longest forecast period is six months.