We've talked a lot about scans without ever proving that any of them mean anything. You build a scanner, it hands you forty tickers, and you have no way to separate a good entry from noise.

Today we're shipping the Time Machine, in beta on every paid plan. It's phase 1 of a longer effort to put the best backtesting system in retail trading directly into Scanr.ai: first you find what the market looked like, then you find out what happened next.

Scan the market as it stood

Open a filter group, click the clock icon beside its header, and pick a date. The scanner evaluates that group against the market as it stood on that day. Anchor it to 23 March 2020 and you get the stocks that matched at the COVID low, with the indicator values the market saw at the time.

Run the same scan on a few dates and you can test a setup against every sell-off before this one. When we ran our Low RSI preset on 8 October, it matched 2,780 of 5,692 stocks on 23 March 2020, 3,280 on 8 April 2025 and 1,674 on 9 March 2009.

Each group keeps its own date

The anchor belongs to a filter group, not to the whole scan. Leave one group on today, point a second at five trading days ago, and set it to exclude its matches. The scan then returns stocks near a 52-week high today that weren't there five trading days ago: the ones that just arrived.

Pick the date in one of two ways:

Fixed date pins the group to a day on the calendar. The scan is a snapshot, so a saved copy won't refresh in the background or fire alerts. A scan pinned to March has nothing new to tell you in October, and we'd rather it stayed quiet than woke you up with a stale answer.
Days ago counts back in trading days and re-counts on every run, so the scan keeps refreshing and can still alert you.

Restated or as traded

Splits make historical prices ambiguous, so you pick the basis. Restated keeps prices on today's basis and matches the chart in front of you, so a 2019 anchor scans AAPL at around $100. As traded uses the basis the tape printed that day, so the same anchor scans AAPL at around $400, the number you'd have seen if you were sitting there watching it.

On the restated basis, a scan with a single anchor date also rewinds its result charts, so each one ends on the day the scan looked at.

The calendar tells you what it can reach

Green days have full data behind the filters in that group. Gray days are weekends and market holidays. Red days sit beyond the reach of the feeds your filters need, and we disable them with the reason attached rather than let you run a scan that comes back empty. Daily data reaches back to 2004.

What the beta doesn't do yet

Supply and demand zones and chart patterns can't be anchored to a past date. We store those per ticker without keeping history, so there's no past state to read. Adding it is on the roadmap.

Everything else that shipped alongside the Time Machine, including ten free Minis and five event scanners, is in the Oct 12 changelog.

Try it and tell us where it breaks

Open any filter group, click the clock icon, and pick a date. We want to hear what you find, especially the dates that behave in ways you didn't expect. File it at feedback.scanr.ai, or email me at [email protected].

— Eoin & The Scanr.ai team