Momentum Scanner Update: New Strategies and SEC Filings
StockTitan has rebuilt the Momentum Scanner from the ground up. The new version of Argus, our momentum alerting system, watches more of the US market, names the detection pattern behind every alert, and brings SEC filings into the picture alongside press releases. This guide covers what changed, what each new strategy means, and how to get the most out of the tool, whether you've used it for years or are seeing it for the first time.
At a Glance
| What | Real-time alerts on unusual price and volume moves in US-listed stocks, with news and SEC filings attached |
| Who it's for | Active traders who follow intraday moves, and anyone who wants to see where the day's action is |
| Where | stocktitan.net/scanner/momentum |
| Cost to try | Free with a 15-minute delayed view, no account required; real-time data on Gold and Platinum |
Table of Contents
What the Momentum Scanner Is
On a typical trading day, thousands of US-listed stocks are open for business at the same time, and a handful of them are doing something genuinely unusual. The problem is that nobody can watch them all. The usual workaround is juggling a screener in one tab, a news feed in a second, and a filings page in a third, then trying to line up timestamps by eye while the move you cared about finishes without you.
Argus, StockTitan's Momentum Scanner, exists to do that watching for you. It runs through pre-market, the regular session, and after-hours (4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET on trading days) and posts an alert when a stock's price or volume behavior stands out from the crowd. The page has three working parts. The Top Gainers and Top Losers cards show the scanner's leading movers, updated at your plan's data speed. The alerts feed is a running log of every trigger through the day, one row per event. The activity chart above them shows how alert flow has risen and faded over the past two days, which is a quick way to read how lively the market itself is.
When a mover has recent headlines, they appear right on its card and alert row, so the news is one click away instead of a search away. Whether the news explains the move is your judgment to make; plenty of alerts arrive with no headline at all, so treat the board as a starting point rather than a complete account of any move.
What's New in the Update
This release replaces the scanner's detection engine and redesigns the page around it. The short version:
- Broader coverage. The old scanner followed a ranked list of the day's leading gainers and losers. The new engine monitors eligible US-listed common stocks and ADRs (American Depositary Receipts, the US-listed shares of foreign companies), so a sharp mover no longer needs to be on a leaderboard to be seen.
- A strategy behind every alert. Each alert now carries a badge naming the pattern that fired it: New High or New Low, Rapid Move, or Volume Spike.
- SEC filings join press releases. Relevant filings appear beside a mover's news as compact chips linking to the document.
- A faster, cleaner interface. The alerts feed handles thousands of rows smoothly, follows the newest alert while you watch, and stays out of your way when you scroll back to read.
Eligible means companies. Funds, preferred shares, and derivative securities are excluded on purpose, so the board stays focused on common stocks and ADRs rather than the products built on top of them. The rebuilt engine is also simply faster than the one it replaces.
The Three Alert Strategies, Explained
Until now, an alert told you that something happened. It didn't say what kind of something. The new Strategy column closes that gap, and it exists because members kept asking for it. Every alert row shows one of three badges, and whenever the underlying figure is part of your plan's view, the table also highlights the cell whose value fired the alert, so you're rarely left scanning a row wondering which number mattered.
New High and New Low
This strategy fires when a stock breaks to a fresh high or low for the day on an outsized move. The badge is directional, green with an up arrow for new highs and red with a down arrow for new lows. Traders tend to watch these closely because a stock printing fresh session extremes is behaving differently from one drifting around the middle of its range, and the badge makes that difference visible without reading a chart.
Rapid Move
Rapid Move catches acceleration, a sharp price change inside a short window, in either direction. A stock that grinds higher all day and one that repositions in minutes can end the day with the same percentage change, but they're very different events while they're happening. This badge separates the two, and its arrow tells you which way the burst pointed.
Volume Spike
Volume Spike flags trading activity far above what's normal for that particular stock. Volume is relative by nature. A million shares is a sleepy afternoon for a mega-cap and a landmark day for a small company, so the strategy compares each stock against its own typical behavior rather than against a fixed number. A volume anomaly can show up with or without a large price move, which is why it earns its own strategy instead of hiding inside the price-based ones.
Reading the row: the badge names the pattern. When your plan includes the underlying figure, the highlighted cell shows it: the day change for New High and New Low alerts, the five-minute change for Rapid Move, and relative volume for Volume Spike. Once you know that mapping, a row reads in about a second.
A hypothetical row: on a Gold or Platinum view at 10:47 a.m., a small-cap stock trading around $6.40 posts a Volume Spike alert. The row shows the day change at +3.1%, the five-minute change at +0.4%, and relative volume at 7.2x, with the relative-volume cell carrying the highlight. Read it in order. The badge says the trigger was unusual volume, the highlighted cell says trading is running at several times this stock's normal pace, and the modest price change says the trigger was volume, not price. No headline or filing is attached, so the board offers no context for the activity. The row doesn't evaluate any of this; it says something unusual is happening, and the natural next step is the symbol's own page, where the chart, news history, and filings live.
SEC Filings Beside the News
Material company information doesn't always come with a press release. An offering, a current report on Form 8-K, or a merger document can reach the market before any story is written about it, and press coverage sometimes never follows at all. The updated scanner now surfaces selected SEC filings directly on a mover's card and alert row, as compact chips linking to the filing on StockTitan.
The list is screened. Companies file routine paperwork constantly, and a scanner that pinned every administrative document to every alert would bury the interesting ones, so the scanner aims to show the filings most likely to be relevant context for the session. As with news, a filing appearing next to a move is information, not an explanation, and establishing what actually moved a stock takes more than adjacency.
The Redesigned Interface
The page around the data was rebuilt as well, with changes aimed at people who keep the scanner open for hours at a stretch:
- A calmer top of page. The header now lays out what each section does, and a row of plan cards shows exactly what data speed you're on, so there's no guessing about what you're looking at.
- A collapsible activity chart with a same-day summary of alert count and average gain, which remembers whether you left it open or closed.
- An alerts feed built for volume. Busy sessions produce thousands of alerts. The feed renders them without slowing down, follows the newest row while you're at the end of the list, and stops following the moment you scroll away to read, showing a counter of new arrivals instead of yanking the view.
- Search that keeps up. Filtering the feed to one symbol keeps live alerts flowing into your filtered view.
- Columns your way. Show, hide, and reorder columns, including the new Strategy column, and the layout is saved to your account.
- Color as signal. Symbols appearing for their first alerts of the session render in blue, while stocks that have been active since an earlier session render in white, so fresh momentum and ongoing momentum are distinguishable at a glance.
Data Speed by Plan
The scanner is the same tool on every plan. What changes is how old the data is when you see it, and how much of the workflow opens up around it.
| Plan | Scanner data | Favorites | Workflow features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free and guests | 15-minute delay | Not included | Full board view, sound alerts |
| Silver | 1-minute delay | 1 symbol | Everything in Free |
| Gold | Real time | 5 symbols | Custom filters, CSV export, voice alerts |
| Platinum | Real time | Unlimited | Everything in Gold, plus the full real-time Dashboard |
The honest way to think about the ladder is by what a delay costs you. On a slow afternoon, fifteen minutes changes little. During a fast open or a headline-driven spike, a 15-minute-old picture describes a market that no longer exists. The free view is a genuinely useful way to learn how the board behaves and what the strategies look like in practice. When the scanner starts earning a permanent place in your routine, Gold removes the delay entirely and unlocks the filtering, favorites, and export workflow, and Platinum wraps the same real-time feed into the full Dashboard alongside the rest of StockTitan's live widgets. Current plans and pricing are on the pricing page.
What an Alert Doesn't Tell You
An alert is detection, not evaluation. Argus reports that an unusual move is happening. It doesn't know whether the move is justified, sustainable, or relevant to you, and it makes no attempt to judge. Treating an alert as a signal to act on, rather than a fact to investigate, skips the entire step where you find out what's going on.
The attached news may not be the reason. Headlines and filings are attached because they're recent, not because anything has established a cause. Stocks move on sector rotations, index changes, thin floats, large orders, and sometimes nothing discernible at all. Many alerts arrive with no news attached, and a headline sitting next to a move can be pure coincidence of timing.
Session context changes what a move means. Pre-market and after-hours moves often ride far thinner volume than regular-session moves, and prices set in thin trading can retrace quickly once the full market weighs in. The same percentage move at 5:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. is not the same event.
Getting Started
- Open the scanner: head to stocktitan.net/scanner/momentum. The delayed view works without an account.
- Read the cards first: Top Gainers and Top Losers show you the session's current leaders and how the day is leaning.
- Watch the alerts feed: each row is one event. The strategy badge names the pattern that fired, and when your plan includes the underlying figure, a highlighted cell points to the number behind it.
- Click through: a symbol click opens the stock's page with its chart, news history, filings, and financials, which is where the actual research happens.
- Make it yours: reorder columns, turn on sound alerts, and on Gold and above, set custom filters and star the symbols you're tracking.
Related Tools and Reading
- Understanding Argus Alerts explains every column of the alerts table in detail, including today counts versus session counts and the two relative-volume figures.
- 52-Week Highs and Lows covers the longer-horizon cousin of the New High and New Low strategy.
- Stock Movers Today is a snapshot of current top gainers and losers, free and public.
- Real-time news feed shows the press-release flow the scanner draws its headlines from.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a stock momentum scanner?
A momentum scanner is a tool that continuously monitors the market and flags stocks making unusually large or fast price and volume moves. StockTitan's version, Argus, adds recent news and SEC filings to each alert and runs from pre-market through after-hours.
Is the StockTitan Momentum Scanner free?
Yes, the full board is viewable free of charge on a 15-minute delay, with no account required. Paid plans shorten or remove the delay: Silver runs on a 1-minute delay, and Gold and Platinum receive data in real time.
What do the strategy badges mean?
New High and New Low mark a stock breaking to a fresh daily extreme on a large move. Rapid Move marks a sharp price change within a short window. Volume Spike marks trading activity far above the stock's own normal volume. On plans that include the underlying figure, the highlighted cell shows the number that triggered the alert.
Does an alert mean the stock will keep moving?
No. An alert describes something that has already happened, and the scanner makes no predictions. Moves that trigger alerts sometimes continue and sometimes reverse immediately, which is why an alert is a starting point for research rather than a conclusion.
I used the old scanner. What happens to my setup?
The scanner lives at the same address, and your saved column layout and filters carry over to the updated page. Starred favorites carry over too in the same browser, keeping their normal daily reset. The main visible additions are the Strategy column, the SEC filing chips, and the redesigned page around them.
Sources and Methodology
This guide describes StockTitan's own Momentum Scanner. Feature behavior, plan entitlements, and data handling described here reflect the platform as of this update's release; the scanner's alert data comes from StockTitan's real-time market data pipeline, and filing links point to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. For how StockTitan produces and reviews content, see our editorial policy.
Disclaimer: This guide is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Momentum alerts describe observed market activity and are not recommendations to buy or sell any security. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always conduct your own research before making investment decisions.
The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendation, or an endorsement of any particular investment strategy. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.