Flash Research Review – Is This Platform Right For You?

Flash Research is a unique trading platform that helps you build strategies for trading price gaps at market open. It offers detailed historical data on gaps along with dozens of filters and a backtesting tool so you can develop a profitable approach to gap trading.

In my Flash Research review, I’ll take a close look at this platform’s tools and explore how they can help you build a trading strategy. Keep reading to find out if Flash Research is right for you.

About Flash Research

Flash Research launched in 2022 and it’s one of the only platforms I’ve seen that’s solely focused on price gaps at market open. It tracks stock data on the day gaps occur as well as the following two days, which is typically long enough for gaps to either fill or continue. The software includes a real-time feed of stocks with gaps as well as historical data going back more than 20 years.

Flash Research Pricing

Flash Research offers two paid plans and a free plan.

The free plan offers a surprising amount of access to the platform. You get full access to the real-time scanner, three months’ worth of historical data, and a limited version of the backtesting tool. However, it lacks most of Flash Research’s filters, which makes the free plan better for testing out the service than for using it for developing a custom trading strategy.

The Premium plan costs $89.95 per month or $911.40 per year and unlocks most of Flash Research’s tools. You get 20+ years of historical data and access to all filters. The backtesting tool is still limited, though, which makes it more difficult to develop a profitable strategy.

The full version of the backtesting tool is available with the top-tier Elite plan, which costs $389.95 per month or $1689.96 per year. It’s worth noting that you could sign up for this on a month-to-month basis, then downgrade to the free or Premium plan once you have a few backtested strategies you feel confident in.

Flash Research Features

Gap Screener

The gap screener is a real-time feed that shows all stocks in the Flash Research universe that have market opening gaps during the current trading day. The feed displays the ticker that gapped, the size of the gap, the price change since open, and the total return since the previous close. It also includes data about each stock’s trading volume compared to the previous day’s volume.

The screener is split into several different lists. You can view stocks that gapped up or stocks that gapped down, as well as stocks that gapped in premarket trading and stocks that gapped in aftermarket trading. I especially like using the premarket trading screen in the morning as a way to identify high volatility stocks that could be worth trading regardless of whether they open with a large gap.

You can apply a wide range of filters to limit your view based on metrics like the gap size in percentage points, relative volume, the stock’s price range, the previous day’s price return, and even the stock’s premarket volume. Flash Research also has filters for fundamentals like market cap, sector, and exchange, and you can even build watchlists of specific tickers to limit the feed to stocks you want to trade. You can save combinations of filters as presets, which is great if you have several different gap trading strategies and want to quickly find candidates for each strategy.

Ticker Analysis

When you find a stock that’s gapping that you want to investigate further, you can click on it to open Flash Research’s individual ticker analysis dashboard. This allows you to see data about every instance in the past in which that specific ticker has gapped up or down at market open. Flash Research displays each gap’s size, total return, trading volume and close direction—both on the day of the gap and the following day. It also shows average statistics, which can help you get a sense of how the current gap might play out.

The ticker analysis dashboard includes TradingView charts, so you can dig into each gap instance and view the price action around it. Flash Research also includes basic fundamental data about the stock you’re viewing and lets you add your own notes to each ticker.

Historical Gap Analysis

Flash Research gives you a few different ways to analyze historical price gaps in aggregate across thousands of stocks.

First, an analysis dashboard enables you to select a date range and any filters you want to apply—including filters related to the next-day performance of gapped stocks. The platform offers a wide range of summary statistics that illustrate the likelihood of gaps continuing or filling over different timeframes. For example, you can see the average return of gapped stocks 60 minutes after market open or by the next day’s close. You can also view the average high price gapped stocks reach above their open and the average difference between stocks’ premarket high and their opening price.

Flash Research also breaks gap data down by time. For example, you can view the average return at close for gapped stocks month-by-month and year-by-year.

Finally, the platform breaks down gaps into gap value and price buckets. For example, you can see what percentage of stocks that gapped up 20%-30% closed in the green or in the red. Or you can see what percentage of gapped stocks priced between $5-$10 at market open closed in the green or in the red.

Strategy Backtesting

All of Flash Research’s data culminates in the strategy backtester, which enables you to test out custom strategies for trading around gaps. You can simulate a long or short strategy, trade on the gap day or the following day, and—with the Elite plan—use all of Flash Research’s filters to limit the universe of stocks and gaps available to trade within your strategy. The backtester also lets you set custom entry and exit conditions with the Elite plan. For example, you can enter trades only within the first 20 minutes after market open and only if a stock is trading above its VWAP. 

The results display your total profit and loss over time along with a list of all trades executed as part of your strategy. It’s very detailed, and you can dig into any individual trade to investigate what aspects of your strategy need to be tweaked.

Is Flash Research Easy to Use?

Flash Research is relatively easy to use thanks to its streamlined dashboard and consistent terminology in how it refers to gaps, Day 2 data (the day after a stock gapped), and price spikes. It also helps that Flash Research has a handful of short tutorials built right into the platform, speeding up the learning process.

The biggest issue with Flash Research is that it seems to stop short of actually helping you develop profitable trading strategies. It gives you a ton of data about gaps, including the conditions that lead up to them and what happens next. You can dig into years’ worth of information to identify potential patterns and then use the strategy backtester to see if those patterns are tradable.

But finding patterns in all this data is a hefty task, and Flash Research doesn’t let you export data so you can build custom models using the site’s information. Without that, you’re relying on being able to simply eyeball the data and then plug something into the backtester to see if your idea pans out.

In addition to enabling data exports, I’d like to see Flash Research implement its own AI model to analyze the platform’s data and suggest potential strategies. This would make the platform a lot more actionable by giving traders a starting point for developing gap trading strategies and then customizing the AI’s suggestions to suit their goals and risk tolerance.

Flash Research Platform Differentiators

Flash Research is the only platform I’ve seen that provides an in-depth, historical analysis of gap activity. While other trading platforms offer screens for the current day’s gapping stocks, Flash Research lets you go back decades and explore all of the instances in which a specific ticker has ever experienced a price gap. It also tracks detailed data about what happened before and after the gap. It’s a gold mine of data for traders who want to try to identify patterns.

That said, Flash Research doesn’t offer any news analysis, so you’re really trading based on probability. Without knowing what’s causing a price gap, it’s hard to say whether this gap will play out similarly to the last one. However, since Flash Research tracks this data for thousands of stocks over many years, you can use the filters and backtester to find subsets of stocks for which trading on probability is likely to work.

What Type of Trader Is Flash Research Best For?

Flash Research is best for analytical traders who want to focus on market opening gaps. Traders using this platform need to have a keen eye for identifying patterns and be comfortable experimenting with the backtester to develop a set of strategies that are consistently profitable. At the same time, since the strategies that Flash Research helps you develop are entirely based on probability, it’s important that you have an appetite for risk and build strong guardrails into your strategy.

Is Flash Research Worth It?

Flash Research is a very unique platform and a potentially powerful tool for traders who want to develop probability-based strategies for gap trading. It’s relatively expensive, especially for the Elite plan, but you may only need to subscribe to the top-tier plan for a few months to develop strategies that can last you long beyond that.

Pros

20+ years of data about market open price gaps

Many filters to help you analyze specific groups of stocks and gap patterns

Historical data analysis for probability-based strategy development

Strategy backtester enables custom entry and exit conditions

Free plan includes full access to gap screener

Cons

Doesn’t include news feed or information about why stocks are gapping

No data export or AI tools for pattern analysis

Probability-based gap trading strategies are high-risk