5 Best Investing Sites

Best Investing Sites: Anyone can trade stocks. It’s a simple matter of opening an online brokerage account, transferring some cash, and placing a bet. Of course, making a profit is far more complex.

For the most part, buying assets based on gut instinct or media hype is a recipe for financial disaster. By the time stocks make the news, it’s too late to realize gains. Fortunately, gut instinct and media hype aren’t the only options for picking the best stocks.

There is more than a century of data available detailing market behavior, and nearly all of that information is in digital format. Experts have developed methods of analyzing how asset prices move over time, and they have created automated tools that display the data according to users’ specifications.

This type of technical research gives investors an edge, so they can find promising stocks before the rest of the market catches on. Other useful resources for getting ahead of the market include market and company news, as well as in-depth analysis of earnings reports. Gaining that edge is where the profits are – taking long positions before an upward trend or short positions just before prices drop.

A variety of platforms offer access to market and asset-specific data based on proprietary algorithms. However, the number of options makes it tough to choose the best investing site. Ultimately, it comes down to user preferences, level of comfort with particular tools and methods, and the class of assets being considered – for example, stocks, options, bonds, futures, commodities, and so forth.

These are five of the best investing sites available for technical research.

AlphaResearch.io

AlphaResearch is on a mission that speaks to overwhelmed investors. It offers “insights in a world of chaos.” The platform uses advanced artificial technology (AI) to pull in data from an array of sources, some of which aren’t typically included on other investing sites.

Unlike traditional tools, AI can “read” text documents and record relevant details. For example, in addition to financial reports, AlphaResearch gathers insights from earnings call transcripts and press releases.

The technology detects and reports on differences between business executives and analysts, whether and how much retail investors are discussing a stock online, and when the tone of a transcript changes from positive to negative – or vice versa.

In other words, users can see into the minds of business leaders without spending hours with dry reading material – plus, more traditional tools are there, too. Among other things, users can also customize reports to view market data, fundamental data, stock research, news, and analysts’ estimates for financial modeling.

There are three levels of membership:

• Basic – $49.99 per month – covers the US market, document alert and filings screener, document searches such as press releases, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, trending topics and sentiment analysis, insider transactions, institutional ownership analysis, news watch, ETF and mutual funds holdings

• Professional – $99.99 per month – all of the above, plus global access, additional document searches such as Sedar, Company House, and international filings, global equity screener, global fundamentals and estimates, Excel and Google Sheets add-on

• Enterprise – custom pricing – all of the above, plus access to premium research reports, SLA, API access, dedicated account manager, account and invoice management for multiple accounts

Financhill.com

It’s one thing to have the tools and resources to research stocks and other assets. That can help, but there is something even better: a site that pulls the information together into a comprehensive dashboard for easy viewing, then adds a Stock Score that combines the data into an objective rating.

Financhill Stock Scores are calculated using a proprietary algorithm that measures fundamental and technical factors, as well as data related to sentiment, seasonal influences, economic conditions, and derivatives.

Because the Stock Score is completely objective, investors don’t have to worry about errors in data interpretation and issues with bias that are unavoidable when humans conduct an analysis.

Investors who like to look behind the Stock Score and examine the underlying data need only review their dashboards. The fundamental, economic, technical, sentiment, and seasonal analysis is there, along with a variety of additional metrics. This makes it simple to screen for opportunities to generate income and grow portfolios.

Value investors aren’t left out with Financhill’s tools and resources. The platform identifies the most promising undervalued companies – specifically, the ones that meet the eligibility criteria championed by the world’s best value investors.

Best of all, Financhill doesn’t pass all of the costs of collecting and analyzing information to its members. The site allows advertising, which serves to defray the fees charged to users.

Get started with Financhill here >>

Finbox.com

The founders of Finbox.com have lots of investing experience. They got their start in stifling cubicles as investment bankers for major financial services organizations. They soon tired of the tedium and thought there must be a better way to use their skills. Eventually, they built their own investing site to share automated tools for managing investing research and analysis.

Clients were enthusiastic about the financial models available on an early version of Finbox, and the former bankers decided to work on the site full-time. They brought an engineer onto the team and, together, they built a robust “robo-analyst” tool.

Today, Finbox.com offers stock screeners, fair value estimates, idea generators, and other resources, along with a collection of risk metrics and valuation models. The site leverages a partnership with S&P’s Market Intelligence to cover more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

There are three levels of membership:

• Free – whitelisted metrics, whitelisted screener filters, unlimited watchlists, idea portfolios, chart creation, and financial models

• $25 per month – all of the above, plus additional data from the US and Europe, premium screener filters, premium metrics, and data export

• $66 per month – all of the above, plus access to all six global regions, additional premium screener filters, and additional premium metrics

Finsheets

Timely information is key to profitable trading – particularly for investors who make many transactions throughout the day. However, short of watching the ticker stream non-stop, there isn’t an efficient way to monitor multiple stocks and other assets in real-time. At least, not until the launch of Finsheets.

Finsheets gives users a fast, easy way to access stock, ETF, forex, mutual fund, and crypto prices without special software. It works with Excel and Google sheets to display information. Depending on the level of membership, the data sets can include everything from daily market closing prices to historical intraday prices and stock fundamentals.

The best part of the Finsheet platform is that it is exceptionally user-friendly. There’s no coding involved, and there are no more than three functions required for each asset class. Anyone who is familiar with Excel or Google Sheets (or both) can start using Finsheets immediately.

There are four levels of membership:

Free – US stocks, three years of historical price information, end-of-day data, short-term fundamentals, crypto and forex access

Basic – $20 per month – stocks for one region, ETFs for one region, all of the above, plus ten years of historical price information, intraday data, ten years of fundamentals

Plus – $45 per month – global equity and ETFs, all of the above, plus 20 years of historical data, real-time price data, ETF holdings

Pro – $90 per month – all of the above, plus 30+ years of historical data, mutual funds data, futures data, bonds data, alternative and third-party data

SumZero.com

A SumZero account doesn’t replace other investing sites – it complements them. This platform offers an entirely different type of research. SumZero is touted as “the world’s largest investment community,” because it takes the best features of social media and market analyst publications to deliver insights from a massive community of experts in the field.

Essentially, SumZero offers professional investors the opportunity to publish individual research and analysis on the site. Most members are analysts from the mutual fund, hedge fund, and private equity analysis side of the business. Authors who meet publication requirements are exempt from the membership fee, though there is a “read-only” option available for those who prefer to pay rather than publish.

Articles are peer-reviewed to ensure every piece is high-quality, and all research is from the “buy-side” perspective. Sell-side analysts and day traders can certainly participate through “read-only” status, but their perspective isn’t included in the library of content. The expectation is that articles include defined price targets and timeframes, along with discussion of valuation, analysis of risks, and a detailed review of catalysts.

Users can find the publications most relevant to their interests by using SumZero’s powerful search function. Many SumZero members choose to create highly specific searches, for example by using a combination of market cap, price-to-earnings ratio, region, sector, etc. Searches can be saved and notifications enabled so that members see the newest articles that meet their search criteria as soon as they are published.

Some members have indicated that the best feature of SumZero isn’t the articles at all. Instead, they are thrilled with the tight-knit community and the networking opportunities that come with it.

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The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Financhill has a disclosure policy. This post may contain affiliate links or links from our sponsors.