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Gap Scanner
Gap Up Scanner: Premarket and Morning Gappers, Live
A stock that opens well above yesterday’s close has news, buyers, or both. Trade Ideas ranks those gap ups before the bell and keeps watching them after it.
Free account, just an email. No card. Live access for a limited time.
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Real Top List with filters, recorded.
Build a gap up scan from four filters
Real Top Gap Movers window from 10/12/2026. YMAT opened up 97.7%, with gap %, volume and sector right there in the row.
A gap up scan is mostly about leaving things out. Start wide, then narrow it:
Size of the gap.Gap (%) with a minimum of 4 keeps gaps of 4% or more. Gap ($) does the same in dollars when you trade higher-priced names.
Volume behind it.Relative Volume with a minimum of 2 means twice the normal pace for this time of day. Volume Today (Shares) counts shares from the premarket on.
Supply.Float sets how many shares are out there. Small floats often move farther on the same news.
Follow-through.False Gap Up Retracement fires when a gap up gives back part of the gap, then turns and keeps going higher.
Example numbers, not a real trade
Gap up scan: what each filter keeps. Example numbers, not a real trade.
Want it ready-made? The Premarket channel on the Channel Bar opens a full layout of premarket alerts and Top Lists (Screeners) in one click. Streaming Alerts (Scanner) run in TI Pro, our desktop app for Windows (on a Mac, through Parallels).
A morning routine that holds up
Trader tip
Most gap up traders we talk to run the same few steps every day, and they do them in the same order so nothing gets skipped when the bell is close.
8:00 a.m. ET, cast the net. Gap of 4% or more, price between $2 and $50, at least 100,000 shares traded premarket. That usually leaves 20 to 60 names on a normal morning.
8:45, read the reasons. Click each symbol and check the news line. Earnings, an FDA decision, a contract, an upgrade. A gap with no story behind it often has a hard time holding.
9:15, cut to five. Keep the ones with the heaviest relative volume and a clean premarket high you can draw a line at.
9:30 to 10:00, let the alerts work. You are not staring at five charts. You wait for the false gap up retracement alert or a break of the premarket high, then decide.
Key point
Here is how that played out on a made-up but typical morning. A $14 stock reports earnings after the close and prints $15.40 at 8:00, a 10% gap. Premarket volume is 600,000 shares, about four times normal. At the open it pushes to $15.70, dips to $15.10 by 9:41, stays above the $14 close, and turns higher. The retracement alert fires at $15.45. Your stop goes under the $15.10 dip, so you know your risk before you click anything.
The part that trips up new traders is size. A 10% gap in a $3 stock and a 10% gap in a $300 stock are different animals. If you trade higher priced names, switch the main filter to dollars and set the minimum where a gap actually means something for those stocks, like $3 or $5.
Settings
One more habit worth stealing: save the scan as its own window and give it a plain name like “Morning gaps 4%.” Next morning it is already there with the same settings, and you can tweak one number at a time and see what changed. That beats rebuilding it from memory at 8:55 with your coffee going cold.
Mistakes we see a lot with gap ups: buying the first green candle at 9:30 before the open settles, holding a gapper that already lost yesterday’s close because it “should” come back, and running a list so wide that nothing gets real attention. Tight list, clear line, stop decided ahead of time. That covers most of it. The scanner does the looking so you can spend your energy on those three things.
Free account, just an email. No card. Live access for a limited time.
Gap up scanner questions
Trader tip
Short answers to what traders ask most about gap ups.
What is a gap up?
A gap up is when a stock opens, or trades premarket, above the prior day’s close, leaving an empty space on the chart. A $20 stock that opens at $21.60 has an 8% gap up.
What is the best time to scan for gappers?
Many traders build the list between about 8:00 and 9:30 a.m. ET, once premarket volume shows up, then trim it in the first 15 minutes after the open. Gaps found at 4:30 a.m. often look different by 9:30.
Gap up vs gap and go: what is the difference?
A gap up is the opening move. Gap and go is a setup on top of it: the gap holds and the stock keeps going instead of filling. See the gap and go scanner for that part.
How many gap ups should I watch at once?
Most traders do better with three to five. The scanner can show fifty, but you can only plan a handful of trades well in the first half hour.
