Concepts

The mental model behind Scanz. How Scanner, Signals, News, Alerts, and Watchlists fit together — and which one you reach for in any given moment.

Scanz is built around five core surfaces: Scanner, Signals, News, Alerts, and Watchlists. Each one answers a different question about the market. Once you have the mental model — what each tool is asking, and when you’d reach for it — the product clicks.

This page is the conceptual map. The how-to lives in the individual feature guides; this is the layer above that, the one that tells you which feature to open in the first place.

The five questions

Each of the five surfaces answers exactly one question:

Surface	The question it answers	When you reach for it
Scanner	What stocks match my criteria right now?	Building watchlists, surveying the market, finding candidates.
Signals	What just happened?	Catching the moment something triggers — a breakout, a volume spike, a moving-average cross.
News	What’s the catalyst on stocks I’d care about?	Filtering thousands of headlines down to ones attached to stocks matching your setup.
Alerts	Did this specific stock hit my level?	Watching a known ticker for a specific price or condition.
Watchlists	What’s on my list, and how is it moving?	Tracking a curated set of stocks across days or sessions.

Read those questions out loud and you’ll know which feature to use most of the time. The rest of this page is just the longer version.

Scanner: the snapshot

The Scanner is a continuous filter over the entire US equity market (NYSE, Nasdaq, AMEX, OTC). You define a set of criteria — say, price between $1 and $20, gapped up 10%+ pre-market, volume over 200K — and the Scanner shows you every stock currently matching, updating twice per second.

It’s a snapshot of now. A stock leaves the result set the moment it stops matching. There’s no history, no event stream, no notification — just the current state of the market filtered by your rules.

You’ll typically use the Scanner for discovery: building a morning watchlist of pre-market gappers, finding stocks setting up against a level, prospecting for unusual volume. If you’re trying to answer “what’s worth looking at right now?” — the Scanner is the answer.

Signals: the event

The Signal Scanner runs on the same filter engine but answers a fundamentally different question: not “what matches?” but “what just transitioned?” Signals detect discrete events as they happen — a stock crossing above VWAP, printing a new 52-week high, having three consecutive green candles, rotating 50% of its float.

The distinction matters. The Scanner shows you a stock that’s been above VWAP for the last hour. Signals fire the instant it crossed VWAP, an hour ago. For trading, that timing edge is often what you’re paying for.

You’ll reach for Signals when timing matters more than discovery. You already know what kind of move you want to catch; you want to know the moment it forms. The result is a stream — each row in Signals is a record of something that fired, not a current state.

News: the catalyst

The News Scanner aggregates headlines from 97+ sources and runs them through the same filter engine as the price scanner. The unique idea: filter news by stock characteristics, not by keyword.

Most news feeds give you two bad options. Watch all news and drown in irrelevant headlines, or limit to a watchlist and miss news on stocks you haven’t discovered yet. News in Scanz solves that — show me headlines, but only on stocks gapping 10%+ pre-market with 500K+ volume. Or only on stocks with float under 20M and a halt today. The headlines that survive the filter are pre-qualified for the kind of setup you trade.

Reach for News when you want context attached to candidates. The Scanner finds the stock; News tells you why it’s moving.

Alerts: the targeted notification

Alerts invert the workflow. Where Scanner, Signals, and News all start with “monitor the market and tell me what surfaces,” Alerts start with “I already know the stock — tell me when it does X.”

You enter a ticker, build a condition (price hits $175, volume crosses 1M, RSI drops below 30), and the alert sits there waiting until the condition fires. Use them for stocks already on your radar — entries and exits on positions, levels you’re watching on stocks you’ve researched, conditions you don’t want to babysit.

The simplest litmus test: if you can name the ticker before you build the condition, you want an Alert. If you don’t know the ticker yet, you want the Scanner or Signals.

Watchlists: the curated set

Watchlists are saved lists of tickers. They serve two roles, and the second one is the under-rated one.

Role one — they’re a container for stocks you’re tracking. You can pull up the list and see real-time price action, volume, percent change for everything on it.

Role two — they’re a filter for the rest of the platform. Most surfaces in Scanz let you scope to a watchlist. Run a scan, but only over stocks in your “earnings this week” watchlist. Watch news, but only for tickers in your “biotech” watchlist. Stream signals, but only on stocks you’ve curated. This turns watchlists from a static list into a personal universe that the rest of Scanz can scan against.

How they fit together in a typical day

A common workflow strings several of these together:

Pre-market. Open the Scanner with a gappers prebuilt. The result is a list of 10–30 stocks moving on something. Send the interesting ones to a watchlist.
Market open. Switch to the Signal Scanner watching for breakout events on that watchlist. Now you’re not surveying the universe — you’re waiting for triggers on stocks you’ve already qualified.
News. A signal fires on a ticker. Pull up News filtered for that symbol or open QuickView from the signal row to see the catalyst inline.
Alerts. You miss the entry but want to know if the stock pulls back to a level. Drop an alert on the ticker, get notified, decide whether to act.
End of day. Update your watchlists with anything that ran today and is worth tracking tomorrow.

That’s the full loop. Scanner discovers, Signals time, News explains, Alerts babysit, Watchlists curate.

The 80/20

If you’re new and want the shortest possible answer to “where do I start?” — start in the Scanner. Most traders’ first hour with Scanz is one of the prebuilt gapper or momentum scans, watching how the results flow during the open. Everything else builds on that foundation.

Scanners 101 — A deeper look at the three scanner types (Data, Signal, News).
Data Scanner — Full guide to building scans.
Signal Scanner — Event-driven scanning.
Alerts — Targeted notifications on individual stocks.
Watchlists — Curating your personal universe.

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