FAQs

Pre-Market Picks are alerted before the stock market opens each day. These are good for people who are unavailable to make trades during the day. You can set up your trades before the market opens.

Market Hours Picks are alerted during normal U.S. stock market hours (9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern Standard Time). If you have the ability to respond to trade alerts during these times, then this might be a good service for you.

The Market Hours Picks have higher backtested returns per trade on average than the Pre-Market Picks, but a lower volume of trade alerts.

Our stock picks indicate a specific stock ticker symbol, which means if you want to trade it, you'll be buying shares of stock. Stocks are generally considered to be simpler to trade than options.

Our options picks are intended for people who like to use options as an investment vehicle. Options have more leverage than stocks, which means they offer more risk and potential reward. Option trade alerts will include a ticker symbol, expiration date, and strike price for a specific option. You can learn more about how options work by clicking here.

Absolutely. There is a button on the “My Account” page that allows you to cancel. That will discontinue all future billing. You only get charged for one month at a time, so you are never committed to the service for any longer than the current month.

We sure will! You can contact us any time if you have questions about the trade alerts or about anything else related to our service. We’ll be ready to help.

The main thing that you need in order to act on our trade alerts is a way to buy and sell stocks or options, depending on which service you sign up for.

This normally entails having a brokerage account. If you already have a brokerage account, then you’re all set to go. If you don’t yet have one, there are a number of free brokerage accounts available for you to consider. We like Thinkorswim.

We work really hard to make sure that our trade alerts are as simple as possible. We hope that makes it easy for beginners to benefit from them.

If you are brand new to trading, we have free guides that can help you. At bare minimum, you need to know how to buy and sell. If you're interested in our stock picking services, you can check out this guide that teaches how to buy and sell stocks. If you're interested in our option picking services, you can check out this beginner's guide to options.

The first step is to decide if you want to act on that specific trade idea. We try to provide you with meaningful information for each trade alert so that you can make an informed decision.

If you decide that you want to take action, then your next step is to open your trading platform and look up the ticker symbol from the trade alert.

Then you have to decide how many shares or contracts you want to buy. You can use our position sizing calculator to help you. After that you set up your order to buy.

If you need help learning how to buy stocks, you can check out our guide here. If you need help learning how to buy options, then check out this guide.

It's completely up to you to determine when to exit a trade. Each of our trade alerts indicates a time frame for holding the position. But ultimately, you can do whatever you want and can hold the position for as little or as long as you’d like.

You can also set up a profit target and stop loss if you want. We have a Stop Loss and Take Profit Calculator that can help you with setting those up.

Also, for those who are following our option alerts, we have a guide about selling options before expiration.

Each person has unique risk preferences, so it is up to you to determine what amount of risk you are comfortable with for each position.

You can look at our position sizing guide to get insights about different ways to determine how many shares or contracts to buy.

We also have a position sizing calculator that you can use to calculate how many shares or contracts to buy each time a trade alert comes up.

It differs based on the service you pick. The “Market Hours” alert services have less alerts than the “Pre-Market” alert services.

But both typically have multiple alerts most days. The Pre-Market alert services sometimes have more than 10 alerts in a day. You can adjust the alert filters to dial up or down your alert volume.

There is no minimum account size needed. But the smaller your account is, the fewer of our trade ideas that you can act on. We publish stock picks that require as little as $10 to buy one share of stock. We publish option picks that require as little as $50 to buy one contract.

Yes. Alerts for our Pre-Market Picks are sent before the market opens, which is before typical workday hours for many people. That allows you to act on any trade alerts before you go to work.

If you have a job where you can respond to trade alerts while you're at work, then our Market Hours Picks might work well for you. You get a text alert that notifies you about a trading opportunity, allowing you to make trades on the go.

It's no problem at all. You simply cancel at any time to discontinue all future billings. There is a button on the “My Account” page that allows you to cancel without the need to contact us. You are also certainly welcome to reach out to us and we can cancel the service for you.

You can use any trading platform you want. There is no specific trading platform that you are required to use. If you already have an existing trading platform, then you're good to go. If you don’t yet have one, there are a number of free brokerage accounts available for you to consider. We like Thinkorswim.

No, you are not. Any time you invest money in the stock market, there is risk involved. Even with our stock picks and options picks, which have strong performance results in backtests, there is still substantial risk.

Ultimately, there is no way to be sure what is going to happen next in the stock market. It might help your mindset if you come to terms with this, because otherwise it will be very hard for you to accept losses when they occur. From all the research we've done, we've never found a trading strategy that avoids losses.

Backtests give us a way to see how any given trading strategy might have performed historically. We take the rules of a given trading strategy and then look into the past to see when trades might have occurred for any given stock or option, and what the outcomes of those trades might have been. You can learn more about our backtests here.

No, they do not. Backtesting involved taking a trading strategy and simulating how it may have performed historically. Backtests give us helpful information, but they also have limitations.

We only post option picks for simple call options. Our option trade alerts are not for spreads or any exotic option setups. They are simple and straightforward call options.

The options we alert are deep in the money. We do this because our research suggests that the best odds of success might come from buying options that have very little extrinsic value. This allows the option’s price to track the underlying stock’s movements closely.

No, we don't. From all the research we've done, we've never found any meaningful long-term edges to shorting stocks or buying put options. They certainly might work well at times, but on a sustained, ongoing basis, we don't see any evidence that they offer meaningful profit potential.

This might be explained by the fact that the stock market has a positive average return historically, meaning that stock market prices as a whole have exhibited an upward lean over time.

If you're buying before the market opens, you can set up a market buy order. That will set up an order that executes at the opening bell at the prevailing market price.

With stocks, you also have the option of setting up an EXT buy limit order during the pre-market trading session. This allows you to make the transaction before the market opens.