BlackBoxStocks Review - Is This Market Scanner Worth the Money? (2024)

About BlackBoxStocks

BlackBoxStocks is a stock and options trading platform with a variety of tools to help traders find opportunities. Some of the indicators BlackBoxStocks offers are proprietary, but the real edge this service provides is convenience. Everything from charts to options order flow to customizable alerts can be displayed on a single screen. BlackBoxStocks also has a built-in social community to help traders connect and share ideas.

So, is BlackBoxStocks right for you? Keep reading our BlackBoxStocks review to find out.

BlackBoxStocks Pricing Options

BlackBoxStocks has one membership plan that provides full access to the service. It costs $99.97 per month or $959 per year (a savings of $240.64 compared to the monthly rate).

There is no free trial, but our BlackBoxStocks review will answer all the questions you have about the service.

Features Breakdown for BlackBoxStocks

BlackBoxStocks offers a range of trading tools for both stocks and options. The tools are designed to help traders find, analyze, and trade the best setups as they unfold. Key features include advanced technical charts, a stock market scanner, an options scanner, trade alerts, and much more. Let’s take a closer look.

Charts

BlackBoxStocks offers institutional grade charts for more than 13,000 US and international stocks. You can choose from candlestick, line, or bar charts and add dozens of technical studies. You can also plot multiple charts in a single window, which is helpful when you’re monitoring multiple setups that are developing in real-time.

In addition to standard indicators, BlackBoxStocks also has some of its own proprietary indicators. These include displays for dark pool volume, options dollar flow, gamma exposure, and more.

If you pull up a chart from a stock that triggered an alert, the chart is annotated to show where the underlying stock was trading at the time of the alert. This makes it easier to follow along as setups develop.

Overall, the charts are very nice. They’re not quite as good as the charts in TradingView or TrendSpider, but they’re not missing much.

Alerts

BlackBoxStocks uses algorithmic stock trade alerts to notify traders of new trading opportunities in real-time. Alerts are based on several different criteria, including:

• Pre-market activity
• Unusual trading volume
• Price volatility
• Fibonacci retracements
• Breakouts and breakdowns
• And more

You can filter alerts so that you only receive notifications for stocks that fit your trading strategy. You can also sort by time, volatility, and percent change. Clicking on an alert will bring up the ticker’s chart and news headlines involving that ticker.

Options Flow Scanner

BlackBoxStocks offers an options order flow scanner that’s similar to those from Cheddar Flow or OptionStrat. It automatically highlights unusually large options orders in a color-coded feed.

You can sort the feed by ticker, expiration date, trade type, strike price, implied volatility, and more. You can also search for any ticker, which is helpful for exploring options activity around tickers that triggered an alert. BlackBoxStocks lets you filter the options order flow feed with a wide range of parameters, including market sector, moneyness, stocks in your watchlists, and more.

BlackBoxStocks offers an additional options alerts feed to call attention to the most unusual options trading activity. Alerts cover:

• Swift bullish trades
• Steady bullish trades
• Large bullish trades
• Repetitive bullish or bearish trades

Dark Pool Scanner

BlackBoxStocks has a dark pool scanner that surfaces large trades taking place off of exchanges. Dark pool trades usually represent activity by institutional investors, so this scanner can be helpful for following what smart money is doing.

The feed shows the ticker being traded, the price it traded at, and the total volume of the trade. You can filter it by ticker or trade size.

News Feed

BlackBoxStocks includes a customizable news feed with headlines from sources like Fly-on-the-Wall, Seeking Alpha, and several newswire services. The news feed is a huge value add for this service. Traders who are used to paying for news services like Benzinga Pro or TradetheNews can save money instantly by looking at the newsfeed in BlackBoxStocks.

Watchlists

BlackBoxStocks lets you create your own custom watchlists. It also includes pre-made watchlists that turn over daily to highlight the biggest gainers and losers, stocks seeing the most trading volume, and more. Some traders might like having the watchlists, but they aren’t as actionable as the alerts.

Members Chatroom

The BlackBoxStocks chatroom is another great feature of this platform. The chatroom is usually occupied by 100 or more members at any time during the day. The Team Traders are a group of experienced traders who moderate the chatroom and dole out advice and encouragement to members. You can share text, audio, video, and chart screenshots.

While this chatroom isn’t as active as a standalone service like Investors Underground or Warrior Trading, it adds a nice social component to the platform. it is even more valuable for traders who aren’t already paying for a chat room subscription service from another company or who want to build their trading skills by learning from more experienced traders.

Customization and Layout

One of the advantages to BlackBoxStocks is that all of the platform’s tools and modules are available on the same screen. You can arrange the modules however you like and save custom workspace layouts to quickly jump between analysis approaches.

BlackBoxStocks is available on the web and as a mobile app for iOS and Android. The mobile app offers access to all of BlackBoxStocks’ modules and feeds, although you lose the ability to view them all on a single screen.

BlackBoxStocks doesn’t integrate with any brokerages for stock trading at this time.

Platform Differentiators

BlackBoxStocks offers a wide variety of tools for trading stocks and options. The combination of high-quality charts, algorithmic trade alerts, an options order flow scanner, a market newsfeed, and a trader chatroom make this platform incredibly powerful.

Even better, all of these tools are visible on the same screen. This is a huge advantage for day traders who need to evaluate a trading opportunity quickly and don’t have time to jump between multiple different platforms.

BlackBoxStocks offers a few proprietary indicators, but honestly these are just icing on the cake. It’s the fact that this service brings together so many different trading tools that makes BlackBoxStocks stand out.

Is BlackBoxStocks a Good Value?

BlackBoxStocks may seem expensive at first, but it can save you from subscribing to four or five different trading services. When you think about it that way, this service is actually a great deal.

The Fly-on-the-Wall newsfeed retails for $35-$65 per month, while a trader chatroom like Investors Underground can run nearly $300 per month on its own. An options order flow scanner like Cheddar Flow costs $85 per month. With BlackBoxStocks, you get key elements of all these services and market data for $99.97 per month.

It would be nice if BlackBoxStocks offered a free trial so you could test out the service before committing. But based on our experience, we think it’s worth paying for a month to try out BlackBoxStocks.

What Type of Trader is BlackBox Stocks Best For?

This sleek, powerful, and intuitively designed trading software accommodates a wide range of stock and options traders, including both beginners and experts. BlackBoxStocks is laser-focused on short-term, intraday setups, so it’s best suited for day traders and active swing traders.

Notably, BlackBoxStocks offers a trading system more than it offers a fully customizable platform. So, it’s ideal for traders who don’t want the complications of creating or configuring scans. BlacklBoxStocks can also be useful for traders who want to use the chatroom to find money-making ideas and learn from real trading pros.

Pros

• Convenient one-screen layout with all features available at-a-glance
• High-frequency trading strategies integrated in algorithms that do the legwork
• Includes options order flow and dark pool scanners
• Text and audio member chatroom generates ideas from top traders daily
• Amazing value that includes exchange data fees and The Fly-on-the-Wall newsfeed
• Simple and intuitive design makes it easy to learn platform quickly
• High-quality real-time trade alerts

Cons

• Traders still need a clear strategy to trade the alerts
• Minimal trading education provided for beginners
• No free trial available