Is it really possible to beat the S&P’s annual return?

Well, yeah. It is.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and you’d have to be a uniquely terrible investor to not beat the market at least once in your life.

But to beat it consistently? To keep putting up the big numbers year after year with only the odd unlucky annum? That’s another matter entirely. It takes more than just scouring SEC filings to find the best stocks to buy and sell.

We’ve subscribed to a bunch of different services over the years in hopes of finding one or more that can truly deliver the kind of research, recommendations, and actionable insights (also known as “good ideas”) that can elevate an average investor into a Buffett-esque wunderkind.

Over time, we’ve come to discover that all of these services fall into one of two different categories: stock picking platforms that tell you what to buy/sell and when to buy/sell it, and stock research platforms that provide the information you need for a more informed DIY approach.

There’s some overlap, of course, but every platform leans one way or another. Stock picking platforms may include some research and analysis, for example, and stock research platforms may have their own proprietary star rating or grading system, but they usually won’t tell you what to buy or sell.

Since all of these platforms and services fall into one of two distinct camps, comparing them all against one another would be like comparing AAPLs and ORANs, so it makes more sense to split them up—after we take a second to appreciate that AAPLs and ORANs joke. Man, sometimes we really impress ourselves.

So here are the rules: We’re going to talk about a bunch of different services and platforms that we split up by category. We’ll talk about what they are, what they do, what their pro/con lists look like, and throw in any kind of performance data we can get our hands on. We aren’t going to tell you what to buy or sell, but we are going to give you a nice, firm shove in the right direction.

Best Stocks to Buy Now List

We’re constantly evaluating the best places to get stock picks. Our list of stock pickers and stock research platforms below is reevaluated and updated monthly, so we can let you know about stellar services as soon as we do. These best stocks to buy now lists are current as of May 2023.

Let’s Hear It for Our Stock Pickers

First up is the stock picking services. These services tell you exactly which stocks to buy and sell, and when.

Motley Fool Stock Advisor

The Motely Fool is neither foolish nor particularly motley. The firm is staffed by a bunch of investors and finance professionals—hardly motley—and you wouldn’t think a bunch of fools would be able to pull off the kind of long-term performance that the talented folks at the Fool have put up over the years. It’d be like a professional basketball team calling themselves the Short Bad at Basketballs.

Ok, yes, the Motley Fool is named after a Shakespearean character who spoke truth to power even when that truth was deeply unpopular. And yes, they’ve dedicated themselves to providing the truth as they see it no matter how unpopular it might be. They buck trends. They value fundamental analysis and realistic thinking. They’re a bunch of smart, talented people who have put their considerable abilities to work in the service of providing investors with the best data, research, and analysis that their big old brains can muster. But none of that is funny. The Short Bad at Basketballs, though…also isn’t that funny.

What is it?

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor is one of the Fool’s flagship products. It’s essentially a managed stock portfolio that’s been updated on a twice-monthly basis since February of 2002, and its performance speaks for itself.

Not too shabby, right? Now, granted, these aren’t the actual numbers (they use some kind of time-weighed return calculation that makes their numbers seem even better), but the fact remains that the Stock Advisor portfolio has outperformed the S&P 500 by a considerable margin since its inception. 

The secret to the Stock Advisor portfolio’s success is as simple as it is nearly impossible to replicate. The Motley Fool’s people use some combination of guile, fundamentals, economic predictions, and plain old instinct to find companies with significant growth potential that have somehow flown under Wall Street’s radar. 

When you sign up for the Stock Advisor service you get access to all past and present stock recommendations, as well as a nice smattering of research, commentary, and community features. It isn’t cheap, but the service’s history strongly suggests that all you have to do is follow their advice, wait, and cash out when the time is right.

Pros

• Strong historical performance
• Two buy recommendations a month
• Tell you when to buy/sell
• Frequent discounts
• Not much interaction required

Cons

• Have to hold stocks for at least 5 years
• Kind of pricey for average investors

Is Stock Advisor Worth it?

The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor service is great value when you factor in the amount of money you can make off of their advice—especially when you can get the first year for just $89.

So go check it out!

Motley Fool Rule Breakers

The second service we’re looking at is the Motley Fool’s Rule Breakers. It’s their second most popular stock picking service—just behind Stock Advisor—and it’s been around for almost as long as its big brother. First established in September 2004, the Rule Breakers service ironically follows most of the rules that the Fool first set forth in Stock Advisor. The team follows the same ethos, picks two stocks each month, and is run and operated by pretty much the same folks.

The main difference between Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers is one of focus. Stock Advisor tends to pick companies that are flying under the radar but are still solid, well-established businesses. Rule Breakers, on the other hand, is primarily interested in companies that they believe have huge growth potential in emerging industries. Rule Breakers’ choices are a bit more risky on just about every level, though that risk is balanced out by the potential returns for any stock they pick that performs as predicted.

Case in point:

The numbers aren’t as great as Stock Advisor’s. Let’s just get that out of the way. But again, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Stock Advisor is meant to deliver slower, more even returns across all of its recommendations. Rule Breakers delivers more losses, true, but its best recommendations take off like rocket ships. A full 139 of the recommendations made in Rule Breakers have delivered 100%+ returns, and some of them have grown by a factor of almost 10,000%. That’s not too shabby.

 Pros

• Solid historical performance
• Easy to use and follow
• Recommendations are well researched/reasoned
• Currently discounted by $200

Cons

• Have to hold stocks for a long time
• Riskier recommendations than Stock Advisor

Is Rule Breakers Worth It?

The Motley Fool normally charges $299 per year for Rule Breakers, which is a little steep—but right now you can get a yearlong subscription for just $99. At that price point, there’s really no reason not to subscribe. The portfolio’s put up great numbers over the years, and it shouldn’t be too hard to make more than $1.90 a week using their recommendations. So yeah, it’s worth it.

Seeking Alpha Alpha Picks

Seeking Alpha’s Alpha Picks is a stock selection service that gives you two stock recommendations a month—much like the Motley Fool’s services. The people at Seeking Alpha use a proprietary data-driven scoring system designed to find stocks that will appeal to more conservative investors, with the general idea being to find long-term plays that can deliver significant returns over time without putting the principal investment at too much risk.

The process is guided by what they call their Quant model, which is essentially a big, complicated set of data-driven rules, algorithms, and a bunch of other complex stuff that all comes together to find the best stocks for any given investing style.

Stocks have to maintain a Strong Buy Quant rating for at least 75 days before they even qualify for Alpha Picks. They also have to maintain a market cap of over $500 million and a share price of over $10, must be traded as common stock only, and have to be the highest rated stock at the time of selection.

In other words, Alpha Picks aren’t picked all willy nilly. There’s an impressively rigorous process behind the service, and you can see how well it’s worked out for them in this graph:

The portfolio itself changes more quickly than the ones the Motley Fool maintains. They have the same “new pick every two weeks” formula, but they’re much more willing to let go of losers than the Fool. Alpha Picks checks and rechecks the Quant ratings of every stock in the portfolio at the beginning of each month. Any stocks that have dropped to Sell or Strong Sell ratings are sold off and have all the “cash” reinvested in the next portfolio rebalance (which is another whole thing), same with any accrued dividends. Stocks that are on Hold status for more than 180 days are also sold, which definitely helps reinforce the ideal of constant forward progress and price appreciation that Seeking Alpha follows.

When a stock in the Alpha Picks portfolio has more than doubled in price, it gets moved to a new category with a new set of rules. Stocks that make it to this “Good-to-Great” category sort of gain an extra life, so to speak—if their ratings fall to Sell or Strong Sell, they aren’t sold off entirely at the start of the month. Instead the portfolio only sells off the initial position and leaves the rest of it intact. If the stock gets another Sell or Strong Sell flag and doesn’t have twice the value of the initial investment, however, the initial rules take effect and the stock is sold off.

Pros

• Great for buy-and-hold investors
• Strong performance with minimal risk
• Fairly transparent quantitative rating system

Cons

• Returns aren’t quite as big as some other services
• Takes a bit more interaction than similar services

Is Alpha Picks Worth It?

Seeking Alpha is a great company with a lot of brainpower behind it. Their Alpha Picks portfolio hasn’t been around for all that long, and it hasn’t returned the kind of explosive growth that you can find elsewhere, but it’s still a solid bet. It’s definitely worth checking out, especially considering the fact that it’s only $99 for the first year right now. So go. Go now.

Zacks Home Run Investor

Zacks Investment Research is another firm that uses a proprietary set of algorithms and quantitative rating methods to find and recommend stocks. The firm was started by a guy with a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT way back in 1978, and it’s been doing its thing very successfully ever since.

According to their website, Zacks Home Run Investor is another managed portfolio-style service that “targets under-the-radar companies with over-the-top potential.” It sounds similar to both the Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha, but with a bit of a twist.

Unlike those other firms/services, Home Run Investor focuses on small- and mid-cap companies, not established ones. It tends to ride trends in industries for as short or as long a time as necessary, which means its time frame for holding/selling stocks is more like 6 to 18 months as opposed to Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha’s 5+ year timeframe.

Zacks uses its original (though presumably updated and upgraded) Zacks Rank system to find the stocks, which has historically worked out well for the portfolio and for Zacks as a whole. It’s anyone’s guess as to how the Zacks Rank system works, but the proof is in the pudding:

Zacks is fairly tight-lipped about their portfolios’ performance, though we do know that to be considered a Home Run Investor stock it has to be rated with at least 50%, 100%, 200%, or more growth potential. We also know that Home Run Investor has only been around since 2011, but in that time it’s already picked more than 100 stocks that delivered double and triple-digit gains while they were held by the portfolio.

And while we don’t have the exact performance data for all of Zacks Home Run’s picks, their money back guarantee shows just how confident they are. Zacks is so confident in its ability to pick winners that it will give you a full refund on your subscription fees if they don’t manage to outperform the S&P 500 during a given stock holding period.

Pros

• Active portfolio with quick turnovers
• Proven quantitative underpinning
• Includes a bunch of research and Zacks Investor Collection

Cons

• Active portfolio with quick turnovers
• Requires a lot of interaction
• Not great for long-term investors

Is Home Run Investor Worth It?

If you subscribe to Zacks Home Run Investor right now, you can get a 50% or 35% discount on a 1-year or 6-month subscription, respectively. That evens out to $149 a year or $99 for 6 months.

Zacks hasn’t stayed in business this long by being bad at what they do. And yes, the subscriptions are a bit pricier than a lot of other services—especially at full price—but you have to remember that the portfolio is meant for much shorter holding periods than the likes of the Motley Fool’s or Seeking Alpha’s. You might need to hold the Motley Fool’s picks for 5 years or more, whereas you’d only need to pay 1 or 2 years-worth of dues to realize returns with Zacks Home Run.

So GO. Go check it out. And get rich.

Research and Destroy

Now, let’s dive into our second category: Stock research platforms that utilize their proprietary stock ranking systems to help you with your research, but don’t tell you exactly what to put in your portfolio.

Seeking Alpha Premium

Sure, they’re Seeking Alpha, but are they finding it?

Yes. Turns out they are.

Seeking Alpha Premium is the bigger, better, more expansive version of their Alpha Picks service. Signing up gets you access to a ton of premium content including analyst ratings, analyst performance stats, stock Quant ratings, stock dividend grades, and a whole lot more.

Seeking Alpha’s main bread and butter is their crowdsourced stock research and analysis. Thousands of investors and financial professionals contribute their own analysis on whatever interests them every month—way more than any one person could read. That’s great on its own, but it barely scratches the surface of what Seeking Alpha Premium has to offer.

We could take a lot of time to talk about Seeking Alpha’s wide range of features. They have a lot going on. This is a piece about stock research platforms, however, so let’s just focus on that aspect of what Seeking Alpha does.

Take a look at the graph below. Remember those Seeking Alpha Quant ratings we talked about earlier? Well, this is what it looks like when you apply their Quant rating system across the entire market and graph the performance of the ones they rate “Strong Buy.”

As you can see, Seeking Alpha’s Quant ratings are no joke. They know what they’re doing. If you did nothing but follow Seeking Alpha’s ratings you’d stand to make some huge gains. It works the same way in the other direction, too.

The above graph shows how all of Seeking Alpha’s Quant-rated “Sell” or worse stocks significantly underperformed the S&P 500. In other words, when Seeking Alpha says “Sell,” you’d be smart to follow their lead.

Pros

• Highly accurate Quant ratings
• Huge amount of research and analysis
• Community features

Cons

• Way more information than one person can handle
• Tough to pick which “Strong Buy” stocks to buy

Is Seeking Alpha Premium Worth It?

Seeking Alpha Premium is currently on sale for $4.95 for 1 month, then $239/year after that. It’s not cheap, but it isn’t that expensive either when you consider the amount of useful information you’ll get from the site.

If the numbers are any indication (hint: they are), then subscribing to Seeking Alpha and following its recommendations is a terrific investment. Their Quant system is as accurate as it is complicated, and it’ll point you in the right direction no matter what kind of investor you are.

Zacks Premium

Zacks is proud to tell you all about how the picks using the Zacks Ranks system have recorded average gains of 24.52% per year between 1988 and 2023. That’s an average of almost twice as much as the S&P 500.

Zacks has a bunch of stock picking services, but those are more like branches sprouting off of the big old Zacks tree. There’s a lot more gold in them hills, and you have to pay to play.

If you want to subscribe to Zacks proper, you’re going to need to pick between two tiers: Premium and Ultimate. Premium is the cheaper of the two tiers, though you shouldn’t be thrown by its relatively low price point. Make no mistake, Zacks Premium comes with more than its fair share of goodies.

First and foremost: Zacks Premium gets you access to Zacks #1 Strong Buy list, which is exactly what it sounds like. Zacks #1 Strong Buy ranked stocks have beaten the market by over 23% per year on average since 1988, as you can see below.

Premium membership also comes with equity research reports, Zacks Industry Rank (a tool that divides stocks and ranks them within 250 different industries), earnings filters, pre-built stock screeners, and more. Like we said, it’s a lot.

Pros

• Lots of research and info
• Great stock screeners
• Industry rank list for specialized investing

Cons

• Not exactly cheap

Is Zacks Premium Worth It?

Zacks Premium is worth it. Right now it’s $249 per year, but you can get a 30-day free trial to see if it’s something you really want to spend your money on. Really though, is there a better use for your money than a service that’s proven to provide profitable research and recommendations?

Get it. Get on it.

Zacks Ultimate

This is the Ultimate Zacks experience, which means it’s basically just an upgrade to Premium. You get all the Premium and basic features, plus access to the full slate of Zacks Investor Collection portfolios (essentially just managed portfolios like Zacks Home Run and so on).

Most of what you get when you subscribe to Ultimate is the ability to check out a bunch of their more esoteric and successful managed portfolios. There are portfolios for alternative energy companies, an AI-driven portfolio called Black Box Trader, some blockchain, commodity, and counter-market portfolios, plus a bunch more.

Pros

• Lots of managed portfolios with a ton of ideas and research
• Access to all of Zacks’ content
• Bragging rights(?)

Cons

• Very expensive
• Doesn’t include enough to legitimize price point

Is Zacks Ultimate Worth It?

If you have a massive portfolio already and are just looking for new ideas then sure, Zacks Ultimate might be worth it to you.

If not? No. No way. Yes, there’s a lot of good info and recommendations in there. Yes, Zacks is very good at what it does. And yes, you’ll probably make money if your portfolio is big enough to absorb the expense.

What expense? Oh, just $299 per month or $2,995 per year. Granted, they are offering a 30-day trial for $1, so it’s worth checking out at least, but come on. 

Morningstar Investor

Morningstar is one of those companies that doesn’t need to advertise, because other companies do it for them. If you look through as many stock research and picking services as we have, you’ll find that most of that research comes from one place: Morningstar. That’s right. Other companies will sell access to Morningstar’s research and call it one of their very own perks.

If you subscribe to Morningstar Investor, you’ll quickly see why it’s such a big deal. They have over 150 independent analysts—all of whom are industry veterans—who are constantly cranking out deep, fundamentals-driven research and analysis on pretty much every stock you can think of.

Investor memberships give you access to all the current, past, and future research that they’ve produced, as well as a massive list of Morningstar ratings on securities, individual managers, socially and environmentally conscious investments, and pretty much anything else that’s remotely related to investing.

How good are these ratings?

That good.

Morningstar’s 5 star-rated companies don’t outperform the market by chance. Analysis has shown that their rating system is so good that they have statistically significant explanatory power for the future performance of stocks. Or, to put that in human words, they’re real good.

Pros

• Recognized for research and rating industry-wide
• Incredibly diligent and accurate research and recommendations
• Huge library of research and analysis to check out

Cons

• Mostly good for value investors
• Tons of information to sift through

Is Morningstar Investor Worth It?

If you’re a scholar, a value investor, a smarty-pants, etc. then Morningstar Investor is worth it. Right now, they’re offering a 7-day free trial—more than enough time to convince you—and then offer monthly and annual memberships at $34.95 and $249, respectively.

Stock Rover

Stock Rover is a stock screening and analysis platform that’s been getting a lot of attention lately. Why? Easy. Their screener functionality is unmatched across the industry, their portfolio management and analysis features are kind of insane, and—most relevant here—their Stock Rover Research Reports give you in-depth and up-to-date information on over 7,000 different stocks with just a couple of clicks.

They don’t do a whole lot of predicting or rating, so we don’t have any great performance charts for you, but that doesn’t mean you have to take our word for any of this. Their free memberships give you a remarkable amount of access to all their best features, so there’s no reason not to pop in and explore.

Pros

• Powerful screeners
• Advanced portfolio management
• Innovative interface

 Cons

• You’ll need to follow the tutorials to figure it out

Is Stock Rover Worth It?

A free membership to Stock Rover is absolutely worth it, and so is subscribing to one of the higher paid tiers. Right now you can get a Stock Rover Essentials membership for just $7.99/month or $59.99 for your first year, which is kind of insane considering how much you get for the money.

Conclusion

There are tons and tons of different stock rating, research, and picking services out there. A lot of them—like the ones on this list—are well worth your time and money. So go ahead and try some free trials and maybe a cheap membership or two so you can figure out which ones are the best and the best for you in particular. And the second we hear about any services that are better, we’ll be the first to let you know.

The post Best Stocks to Buy Now: May 2023 appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Sending money internationally can be a challenge.

Currency exchange rates, delivery difficulties, service fees, regulatory requirements, and other burdens can make it extraordinarily difficult to send even a nominal amount of cash abroad!

Remitly, like other international money transfer services, aims to simplify this process. As the name indicates, Remitly was originally designed for international migrants to send remittances home to their families, but it has evolved into a general money transfer platform.

What most people want to know is if Remitly is safe – the answer is yes, Remitly is a legit business that is well-known for providing international money transfer services!

Also, Remitly is a public company operating in the United States, making it subject to strong regulation.

Remitly stands out for having a lot of different delivery methods – including cash pick up! The platform also supports some countries that other transfer services do not.

However, Remitly is also known for somewhat higher fees than competitors like Xoom or Wise. But Remitly does offer first-time users discounts to entice them to use the service, which makes it a good option for new users.

Check out the intro discount applied to a potential transfer to Mexico below.

So, is Remitly the best money transfer service to use? The answer depends on a number of factors, including speed of delivery and recipient country.  

To better understand the platform, let’s start with a general overview, followed by answering some specific questions users are sure to have!

Overview

Remitly is a well-designed platform featuring a good mobile interface, which has made it a popular choice among younger users sending money internationally for the first time.

But what truly matters for a money transfer service is not the user interface. What matters is the speed, security, and cost of getting money delivered.

To better understand how Remitly performs in these areas, we’ll break down the most important features of the platform.

Pro Tip:

Remitly lets you send money to over 145 countries around the world, with plenty of options for transfer speed and delivery method. Get started with Remitly!

Sending Limits

First things first: how much can you actually send on Remitly?

Whether you’re a worker sending home money to your family, or an investor transferring money to a foreign bank, it’s important you understand how much money you’re allowed to send.

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer for how much you can send on Remitly – it depends on the country you are sending to, the timeframe of your transfers, and the amount of personal information you are willing to provide Remitly.

For instance, here is a transfer limit table for sending money to Brazil. As you can see, we can send up to $2,999 in a 24-hour period with our current tier.

If you want to transfer more, though, be prepared to provide identification documents and information about your use of the service!

Delivery Speed

Once we know our sending limits, we’ll also want to know how fast we can get funds delivered to where they need to go.

Unfortunately, like so many things with Remitly, there is no simple answer to how long deliveries will take. Different countries have different delivery options, which of course take different lengths of time.

Additionally, whether we choose to send an ‘Express’ or an ‘Economy’ transfer will impact the delivery time.

Express transfers are faster, but cost more money. Economy transfers are slower, but you’ll get Remitly’s best price.

Since Express transfers are funded with a credit or debit card, money can be transferred almost instantly via certain delivery methods. Economy transfers can be slower. For instance, if you are sending funds to India, Remitly says that money will be delivered in six days.

Delivery Methods

In addition to speed, of course, we also want to know how our money will ultimately get delivered to the recipient.

Not every person has easy access to a bank account, so Remitly offers several different non-bank options.

Delivery method options will ultimately differ by the country that funds are being sent to, but many users report choosing Remitly due to the variety of delivery methods the platform supports.

For instance, Remitly offers the following delivery methods for a transfer to India.

While we can choose a standard bank deposit transfer, Remitly also offers a number of other convenient options!

For instance, we could send funds via a UPI transfer, which is an alternate bank transfer platform specific to India. Additionally, we could select cash pickup, which allows our recipient to pick up the transfer in cash, typically at a bank. Of course, the recipient will need to show a valid ID to get the money!

Finally, Remitly offers mobile money delivery options, which can deliver the funds directly to a recipient’s mobile wallet.

Delivery Cost and Fees

Now, the fastest transfer service in the world with unique delivery options would not be worth it if the fees were astronomical. So how much does Remitly cost to use?

Fees come in two forms: an explicit fee listed on your transfer, and an exchange-rate markup (which is somewhat hidden on Remitly).

Fees will differ based primarily on the country you are sending to and the currency pair you are exchanging.

For instance, sending money to Indonesia costs a flat fee of $2.99, while sending money to Brazil (via Economy) will cost $1.99.

It’s important to model your transfer for free before sending it, as the only way to know exactly what the process will cost is to enter the specific transaction amount and destination country on Remitly!

Exchange-rate markups are difficult to determine, but the exchange rate listed on Remitly is not the market rate, so there is certainly an additional fee being paid by the sender. This is in contrast to a platform like Wise, which offers the mid-market rate.

Thankfully, despite these costs imposed on the sender, the recipient is not responsible for any additional fees to receive the money!

Pro Tip:

Remitly lets you send money to over 145 countries around the world, with plenty of options for transfer speed and delivery method. Get started with Remitly!

FAQ 

Clearly, Remitly is a platform with a lot of value, but the true value will depend on which country you are sending money to and what delivery methods you require.

With that being said, we can answer some common questions about Remitly to help figure out if this is the right money transfer service for you!

Is Remitly Legit?

Yes, Remitly is legit. It is a public company with a good track record of reliably sending money internationally via different delivery methods.

Some users have run into trouble with Remitly’s anti-money laundering requirements. These regulatory requirements, which require money transfer services to identify their customers and what they are using the platform for, often mean users have to upload specific documentation.

For most users, though, ensuring a valid government ID and answering some common risk questions should be sufficient to use the platform without trouble.

Remitly is regulated by a host of government agencies around the globe, most notably as a money services business by the US Department of Treasury.

Which Countries Can I Send Money to?

Remitly advertises that users can send funds to more than 150 countries around the globe.

The specific list of countries you can send to, though, will depend on the country you are sending from.

For instance, from the US, users can send money to Albania, Brazil, Bangladesh, China, Mexico, India, Nigeria, Poland, Turkey, Kenya, and a whole host of other countries. Check out Remitly’s site for yourself and enter your home country for the full list of available countries!

Is Remitly or Xoom Better?

Xoom is a competing money transfer service to Remitly, which can sometimes be a better fit for certain users.

Xoom is a PayPal service, so it might be especially useful for existing PayPal customers. Both Xoom and Remitly are reputable services, so safety is not a major difference between the two.

While most reports indicate that Remitly’s fees are higher than Xoom’s, this is not always the case. The fee you end up paying will depend strongly on the individual circumstances of the transfer. Therefore, your best bet is to model your transfer on both sites to determine the best fee structure for you.

Is Remitly or Wise Better?

Wise is another money transfer service. One thing that makes Wise great is they have much more exchange-rate clarity. Wise offers transfers at the mid-market rate, which is the fairest price you are likely to get from any money transfer service.

Wise does have a variable service fee, which can get large for bigger amounts. The platform may be best for small transfers, but since fees change all the time, it’s best to compare the current rates on the two respective websites.

One area where Remitly stands out compared to Wise is in delivery methods. Remitly has more varied delivery methods, making it easier to get your money where it needs to be!

Pros and Cons

While Remitly is a compelling choice to transfer money internationally, it’s important to consider the whole picture.

Here, we list the major pros and cons of using the platform.

Pros

• Variety of delivery options and speeds for most transfers, including cash pickup and mobile money deposit.
• Good introductory offers, including promotional exchange rates and no flat fees for initial transfers.
• Excellent UI and mobile-first approach makes it easy to send money from your phone or through the web app.
• Wide range of country and currency coverage that competes strongly with other services.

Cons

• Vague exchange-rate markup makes it uncertain whether you are getting a good price on the currency conversion.
• Some transfers will require additional documentation, including identification and statements of purpose.
• Limited sending countries, primarily restricted to the US, Australia, Canada, and Europe. This means transfers are typically one-way.

Pro Tip:

Remitly lets you send money to over 145 countries around the world, with plenty of options for transfer speed and delivery method. Get started with Remitly!

Final Verdict: Is Remitly the Best?

So, after reviewing all this information, can we say if Remitly is the best money transfer service?

Remitly may be the best if you are looking for a service that supports many different countries and currencies, while offering a variety of delivery methods. But if you are looking for a service with the lowest price and clear fee transparency, it may not be!

Therefore, which money transfer platform to use depends on your specific circumstance. But if you decide Remitly is right for you, they offer good introductory offers to make your initial transfer as cheap as possible!

If you’re living outside of the U.S. and are looking for more finance platforms, read our eToro review!

The post Remitly Review: Is Remitly the Best Way to Send Money? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

We all know how important it is to track our personal finances, but the truth is, managing your money can feel like a full-time job. Luckily, there are excellent personal finance software tools like Quicken which make the job much easier, saving us time and money!

Quicken is especially useful for entrepreneurs and the self-employed. The platform lets you manage business finances and personal finances separately so you always know where you stand.

Check out this sample dashboard which highlights the power of Quicken, including savings goals, profit calculations, and net worth tracking.

Combine this with Quicken’s archive of documentation and tutorials which help you use the platform, and you can see why this software is such a popular choice.

However, Quicken is not without some drawbacks. Before making the choice to use Quicken, it’s important to understand what the platform offers, and what it doesn’t.

Read on to find out key information about Quicken, including pricing, answers to commonly asked questions, and who we think the platform is good for. Let’s start with a general overview of Quicken features.

Overview

Quicken is built to make you better at the finance game, with the goal of saving more and making more.

For your personal finances, you can create a budget, manage your spending, and save for retirement. For your business finances, you can analyze profit & loss accounts, simplify tax prep, and create custom invoices.

Let’s take a look at some of the features that make Quicken a powerful option…

Automatic Expense Categorization

Ever want to know how much you’re actually spending on food each month? What about gym memberships or fitness products? Finally, what is your home really costing you, aside from just your mortgage payment?

Without Quicken, you might be stuck doing these calculations manually. This can involve hours of work, summing figures account by account.

Luckily, Quicken saves us a bunch of time by automatically categorizing our expenses. It does this by analyzing expenses from any account we link (including bank accounts and credit cards) and assigning them to the category it detects.

Pro Tip:

Quicken offers top-notch finance tools for individuals and business owners, such as business tax tools and rental property income reports. Right now, you can get started with Quicken for 40% off!

Budget Tracking

Once you know your spending, you can put that knowledge into action with Quicken’s budgeting tools.

If you’ve ever manually made a budget, you know that it can be tedious. Going account by account to find your expenses is a slow process, and it’s always possible to miss a surprise bill.

Quicken solves this problem by automatically proposing a custom budget based on your recurring expenses. You can then tailor this budget to fit your needs.

Once your budget is created, you can track it on-the-go with Quicken’s mobile app, making sure you’re always informed about your financial picture!

Retirement Planning

Do you have several retirement accounts scattered across different institutions? Over the years, it’s easy to end up with a 401(k), an IRA, and an individual account, all held with different companies.

Managing retirement accounts this way can make it hard to get an accurate understanding of your current status. That’s why Quicken lets you connect these different accounts to one, simple dashboard.

While this doesn’t move the underlying accounts to the same place, it lets you track your total portfolio, including current holdings and change in value over time.

Best of all, Quicken can use this information to help you make the best planning decisions.

You can create future models based on the projected contributions you expect to make, and analyze your current allocation versus a target allocation.

While understanding how best to use Quicken’s retirement tools will require some background in investments, it is far cheaper to use the platform than consulting a financial planner.

Property Management

One thing Quicken offers that few other personal finance tools do is a property management dashboard.

Managing rental properties is one of the most common side hustles there is, so this feature can be really valuable for part-time landlords!

The dashboard lets you track nearly every aspect of a property, including property value, rents received, lease terms, and more. Your tenants will appreciate Quicken too, since it makes rental payments easier with reminder emails and custom receipts.

Like other aspects of Quicken, tax planning is integrated into the dashboard, making tax time an easier hurdle to clear.

Pro Tip:

Quicken offers top-notch finance tools for individuals and business owners, such as business tax tools and rental property income reports. Right now, you can get started with Quicken for 40% off!

FAQ

Now that we have an understanding of the key features Quicken offers, let’s turn to some of the most frequently asked questions about the platform.

When evaluating any personal finance tool, it’s important to do your research. Here are some quick answers to common questions to help you make a decision.

Is Quicken Legit?

Yes, Quicken is legit. It is one of the most popular personal finance tools ever, with more than 20 million customers over 4 decades. At this point, Quicken is basically a household name, and it consistently ranks highly in personal finance software comparisons!

Is Quicken Secure?

Trusting a personal finance tool can involve risk, but Quicken appears very secure.

In addition to its popularity, which means many other people trust the service, Quicken advertises its 256-bit encryption security and ad-free business model. This means Quicken does not sell your personal data.

Is Quicken better than Simplifi?

Simplifi is a personal finance tool that is offered by the same parent company as Quicken. This means the two services are fairly similar in their offerings.

Simplifi is a bit cheaper than Quicken, but it lacks some of the functionality of Quicken, including many of the business-oriented tools. Whether or not Quicken is better than Simplifi depends on your personal financial situation!

Is Quicken Better than Mint?

Mint is a free budgeting app oriented toward budgeting and saving. While Mint is great for people trying to get a handle on their day-to-day finances, it does not offer robust retirement planning or investment tracking.

Despite its price, Quicken’s more advanced features make it a better choice for users who run a business or want to plan for years in the future. For users focused on day-to-day budgeting, Mint could make more sense.

Does Quicken Have a Free Trial?

No, Quicken does not have a free trial. It does offer a 30-day money back guarantee after purchasing, if there is any aspect of the platform you are not happy with.

Can I Invest Through Quicken?

No, you cannot invest through Quicken. While Quicken lets you link investment and retirement accounts, you cannot place trades or open up a new account on Quicken.

If you are interested in exploring investment platforms, check out our Robinhood Review!

Pricing

Quicken is a bit more expensive than other personal finance tools. This is due to the advanced features Quicken offers, which are valued by entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Quicken offers a couple different membership tiers, including Deluxe, Premier, and Home & Business. All tiers are covered by Quicken’s 30-day moneyback guarantee, although no free trial is available.

Quicken is currently offering 40% off to new users. Let’s take a look at the key features offered by each tier!

Deluxe:

• Quicken mobile companion app
• Automatic income and expense categorization
• Custom savings goals
• “What-if” analysis
• Suggestions based on spending history
• Checking, savings, credit card, brokerage, asset & loan account support
• Track bills & subscriptions
• Projected cash flow
• Basic tax reports
• Track complete investment portfolio across financial institutions

Premier:

• All the above, plus;
• Updated home value with Zillow
• Import tax info from TurboTax
• Automatic investment portfolio price updates every 15 minutes
• Model tax implications of planned security sales
• “What if” capital gains tool
• Morningstar portfolio X-ray tool
• Advanced tax reports

Home & Business:

• All the above, plus;
• Business reports
• Rental property reports
• Track business/rental income & expense with IRS categories
• Custom invoices
• Track accounts payable, accounts receivable, P&L, cash flow

Pros and Cons

While Quicken is very popular and offers a number of great features, it also has some limitations that users should be aware of. Here is a quick roundup of the platform’s biggest pros and cons.

Pros

• Automatic expense categorization and ability to customize proposed budget makes for robust, easy spending management.
• Ability to directly link investment accounts onto a single platform that includes scenario modeling simplifies retirement planning.
• Separation of business finances and personal finances, with strong functionality in both areas, is excellent for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and the self-employed.
• Very popular tool with high-grade security and an ad-free business model should bring peace of mind to the privacy-conscious.

Cons

• More expensive than other personal finance tools. While Quicken is not expensive overall, especially considering its target user base, it is more expensive than alternative tools like Mint or Simplifi.
• Advanced features might be overwhelming at first. Although Quicken has a robust suite of tutorials and guides, new users will likely have to take a bit of time to be able to fully utilize the platform.
• No free trial. A free trial would be a good addition to Quicken, as some users may not feel comfortable paying upfront and trusting the money back guarantee process. Still, a 30-day guarantee should bring some peace of mind to users interested in testing out the product.

Pro Tip:

Quicken offers top-notch finance tools for individuals and business owners, such as business tax tools and rental property income reports. Right now, you can get started with Quicken for 40% off!

Final Verdict: Is Quicken Worth It?

Overall, Quicken is a powerful and robust tool for managing your finances. If you want to understand your money and plan for the future, Quicken might be the right fit for you.

With that being said, our verdict is that Quicken is likely to be the best fit only for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and the self-employed.

Most of Quicken’s advanced features will not be useful for an average user looking to balance their budget. Therefore, Quicken is unlikely to be worth the price for standard users.

There are lower-priced (and even free) personal finance tools out there which could be a better fit. With that being said, anyone who needs advanced features will be well-served by Quicken!

The post Quicken Review: Is Quicken the Best Personal Finance Tool? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Simplifi’s aim is right in its name – a personal finance tool that helps you simplify the complexity of managing your money!

Unlike other tools that tack on unnecessary advanced features and a confusing interface, Simplifi is a platform focused on clear functionality and ease of use. In fact, the company says it can help you stay on top of your finances in under 5 minutes a week!

Simplifi is a great choice for busy professionals looking to get a handle on their spending and budgeting.

While some personal finance platforms require you to review hours of documentation to understand them, Simplifi’s mobile-first platform is intuitive and simple, meaning you can get started on building good money habits right away.

Best of all, Simplifi offers a great mobile app that lets you track your finances on the go.

While Simplifi has the design of a startup, it is actually an offering from Quicken, one of the most popular and reputable personal finance platforms! With Quicken’s strong security and ad-free business model, users can rest easy about their data privacy on Simplifi.

Simplifi is low-cost, at $2.99/month when billed annually. Additionally, a 30-day free trial is available so you can decide if the platform is right for you.

We’ll begin by diving into a platform overview to highlight the best features of Simplifi, followed by answering the most important questions you might have. Let’s get started!

Overview

Simplifi’s general aim is to help you achieve your financial goals by consolidating your accounts into a single platform with automated tools. This can save you a tremendous amount of stress when compared to manually updating your accounts and calculations in a program like Excel.

However, Simplifi is not without some drawbacks. Its simple nature also means it might be missing some important tools that people with a complex financial picture need.

To decide whether Simplifi offers enough for you, we’ll review the platform’s key features, detailed below.

Pro Tip:

Simplifi has some of the best personal finance tools out there, including savings, budgeting, and even portfolio analysis tools for only $2.99 a month. Plus, you can get started with Simplifi with a 30-day free trial!

Savings Goals

Do you have trouble setting aside enough money to make big purchases? Do you need help making a plan to fund a dream vacation or buying a house? Simplifi might just be able to help you.

Simplifi has a savings interface built right into the platform, which includes a savings goal, a timeframe, and contribution tracking.

For people with multiple bank and savings accounts, you can break down the amount in each account that should go towards a specific saving goal. Additionally, savings targets are built right into your budget, so you don’t forget to contribute to your long-term goals.

Budgeting

Simplifi has a straightforward budgeting method to ensure you don’t live beyond your means.

Starting with your income, Simplifi subtracts your bills and regular expenses to arrive at the amount you can spend each day for the rest of the month. By linking your accounts and calculating this figure automatically and on a rolling basis, Simplifi can save users hours each week!

Simplifi also gives you the option to ignore one-time expenses that you don’t want to be included in your budget. We all need to indulge every once in a while, after all.

Reports

One of Simplifi’s unique features is its reporting functionality. Users who prefer visualizations will get a lot of value from this new presentation of their financial picture.

Reports can be broken down by spending, income, savings, and more. In addition, for users who do a lot of online shopping, Simplifi can track refund status so you don’t forget to check on items that were returned.

To improve your financial situation, you must first understand it. Simplifi’s reports can help you do just that!

Investments

Achieving your financial goals, of course, is not just about the day-to-day. You need a long-term plan.

That’s where Simplifi’s investment tracking comes in.

Simplifi lets you automatically link your investment accounts in one place, so you can get a complete overview of your financial picture. That includes 401(k)s, IRAs, individual accounts, and other investment accounts.

Want to stay up to date on your investments? Simplifi offers a personalized news feed, so you never miss a critical headline.

Just made an investment in your friend’s startup? You can add private investments manually to ensure every aspect of your net worth is considered.

Alerts

Simplifi has a strong mobile app, ideal for users on the go.

Even better, Simplifi will alert you about important updates to your financial situation. Unusual transaction? Nearing a spending limit? Just got your direct deposit? Simplifi’s alerts have you covered.

These alerts are like having a personal assistant in your pocket, tracking your finances even when you’re not. They’ll also serve as important reminders to keep your financial picture in mind as you go throughout your day.

Pro Tip:

Simplifi has some of the best personal finance tools out there, including savings, budgeting, and even portfolio analysis tools for only $2.99 a month. Plus, you can get started with Simplifi with a 30-day free trial!

FAQ

There are a lot of personal finance tools out there, so it’s important to choose the right one for your needs.

If you’re busy, and looking for a simple tool to get your finances in order, Simplifi could be right for you. But let’s take a look at answers to some frequently asked questions to really understand the platform.

Is Simplifi safe?

Yes, Simplifi is safe.

Simplifi does not hold your money, so you don’t have to worry about their solvency. But as a personal finance platform, you might be concerned about their data security.

Simplifi is run by the same team as Quicken, which is a very popular tool trusted by more than 20 million customers. Simplifi uses the same 256-bit security as Quicken, and runs an ad-free business model, meaning they don’t sell your data.

In addition, Simplifi has been recommended by some of the most reputable news outlets in the world, including The New York Times.

Is Simplifi better than Quicken?

Whether Simplifi or Quicken is better will depend on how complex your needs are.

Simplifi is, as the name suggests, a very simple tool to use and understand. Quicken offers more advanced features for business owners and entrepreneurs, but it is more expensive.

The good news is that Simplifi offers a 30-day free trial so you can decide if it’s right for you.

Is Simplifi better than YNAB?

YNAB, or YouNeedABudget, is a popular personal finance tool that competes with Simplifi.

YNAB takes a unique zero-based approach to budgeting. Some people find this very helpful, but others will prefer the flexibility of Simplifi.

YNAB is also more expensive than Simplifi. Luckily, both platforms offer a free trial.

Can Simplifi help me invest?

Simplifi can help you track your investments, but you cannot make new investments through Simplifi.

Additionally, the platform has limited analytical tools to support your investment decisions.

Simplifi does include a newsfeed for your personal investments, but users interested in doing in-depth investment research should find a supporting platform. Check out our Seeking Alpha Review for one investment research service you should consider!

Does Simplifi have a desktop app?

No, Simplifi does not have a desktop app. Instead, everything is managed through the platform’s online web app.

Thankfully, this means users will not have to spend time fiddling with updates or dealing with login difficulties. Everything is managed right in the user’s browser.

Pricing

Simplifi is cheaper than other personal finance tools, including Quicken and YNAB. However, it is not free, like Mint.

Luckily, the platform offers a 30-day free trial so you can decide whether or not it is the right personal finance tool for you.

Simplifi only offers one tier, but users can save money by choosing an annual subscription.

Here are some of the features included with Simplifi, to help you decide if the cost is worth it:

• Automatic categorization of income and expenses
• Create custom savings goals
• Suggestions based on spending history
• Checking, savings, credit card, brokerage, and tax-advantaged accounts can be linked
• Automatically separate bills & subscriptions
• Projected cash flow analysis
• Track complete portfolio across financial institutions
• Banking, net worth, comparison, and spending reports

Pro Tip:

Simplifi has some of the best personal finance tools out there, including savings, budgeting, and even portfolio analysis tools for only $2.99 a month. Plus, you can get started with Simplifi with a 30-day free trial!

Pros and Cons

We’ve covered a lot of information about Simplifi, including its key features and some of the most important questions you might have. Let’s quickly summarize the platform’s pros and cons!

Pros

• Simple and easy-to-use interface will have you up and running immediately. Excellent mobile app will help you track your budget on the go.
• Strong budgeting and saving functionality. Ideal for users with medium-term and long-term goals they want to achieve.
• Made by the team behind one of the most popular financial tools of all time, Quicken, which features strong data security and a highly reputable brand.
• A 30-day free trial will help you decide if Simplifi is right for you. A low monthly price means users will likely find a lot of value in the platform given the time it will save them.

Cons

• Simple app also means advanced functionality is missing. No business reporting tools are available and there is limited tax functionality.
• Users looking for a strong investment platform should look elsewhere. Simplifi offers a portfolio overview, changes in value over time, and a personalized news feed, but not much else. This is disappointing because investments are an important part of a long-term financial plan.
• While the monthly price is low, there are free apps like Mint which offer similarly strong functionality.

Final Verdict: Is Simplifi worth it?

If you are a busy professional with a limited amount of time, then Simplifi is definitely worth it!

The platform will save you hours of fiddling with Excel formulas and manually updating account values. The easy-to-use interface will be a refreshing change from apps with very complicated dashboards.

However, if you are a business owner or an entrepreneur, you will probably not find Simplifi worth it. The platform will likely be too simple to provide the type of functionality you need.

Simplifi’s low price is attractive, and its ad-free business model and strong data security should alleviate privacy concerns.

But the only way to know for sure if Simplifi is worth it is to try it yourself – luckily there is a 30-day free trial just waiting for you!

The post Simplifi Review: Is Simplifi Better than Quicken? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

We all want to think of ourselves as stock gurus whose every pick is destined for quadruple-digit returns. So we scour SEC filings, stay abreast of every economic indicator, and stare at charts until the lines start to dance, but that still isn’t enough to guarantee the kind of big gains that’ll earn us a ticket to the upper class.

The fact is that there are just too many facts out there for any one person to parse. We’re living in a time where information is as prevalent as oxygen, and we can only take in so much before we get dizzy and need to lie down for a little while. Getting the right information is crucial if you want to be a successful investor, so what do you do if you think/know you’ve missed something?

There are almost as many sites and services that provide stock research and analysis out there as there are stocks to research and analyze. They all have their own unique selling points, specialties, and track records, and it isn’t easy sifting through the stack to find a service or two that really works for you.

Now, we don’t have time to talk about every such service out there, so let’s focus on two of the top dogs in the game: Seeking Alpha and TipRanks.

What do Seeking Alpha and TipRanks have to offer? What are their unique selling points? Are either and/or both of them worth shelling out for premium subscriptions? Let’s find out.

Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha bills itself as the world’s largest investing community. It’s got a lot of the same data streams, news feeds, market updates, and individual stock statistics that you’ll see on sites as basic as Yahoo! Finance, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The site is home to over 7,000 qualified contributors who provide regular investing ideas, research, analysis, and reports that cover every inch of the market. Its crowdsourced approach to investing has helped it grow from a tiny outlet back in 2004 to a global concern that attracts over 20 million unique visitors every month, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

On top of the (frankly ridiculous) amount of research and analysis continuously finding its way to the platform, Seeking Alpha uses a combination of industry expertise and quantitative algorithms to provide its users with actionable insights you can’t find anywhere else. Take all that, add in the ability to talk to and learn from investors all around the world, and sprinkle on some professional-grade investing tools, and you have a recipe for one of the best investing sites on the web.

Seeking Alpha offers three membership tiers:

Free

Premium:

$239/year

Pro:

$2,400/year

For more in-depth information on Seeking Alpha, read our Seeking Alpha review.

Pro Tip:

Seeking Alpha crowdsources investor sentiment and in-depth stock analysis to tell you which stocks to buy and sell to help increase your portfolio gains. Right now, you can GET SEEKING ALPHA FOR 58% OFF!

TipRanks

TipRanks does things just a little bit differently. It’s sort of a reverse-crowdsourced platform; instead of financial professionals contributing their own advice and analyses, TipRanks actively tracks and measures the performance of professionals across the financial spectrum and publicizes the information for their users. According to TipRanks, you can find over 96,000 different professionals’ performance records on the site. There are fund managers, financial bloggers, analysts, corporate insiders, and pretty much any other kind of financial professional you can imagine.

How do they get all that information, you ask? Great question. Let us know if you figure that one out. 

Having all that information on the performance of blogs, financial advisors, analysts, and so on is great if you want to compare your own portfolio’s performance to theirs for ego-boosting reasons, but the real value comes from the ratings that TipRanks assigns to every expert they track.

TipRanks takes note of every expert recommendation and transaction they get wind of, watch to see how it turns out, and assign each expert a star rating based on their success rate, average return, and statistical significance. Professionals with higher star ratings are right more often, which means finding the right advice is as easy as scrolling through a list or two.

TipRanks has two membership tiers:

Free

Premium:

$29.95/month for one year, $19.95/month for three years 

What They Have in Common

Seeking Alpha and TipRanks share some of the same functionality. For instance, both have:

• News feeds
• Live market data
• Some portfolio analysis
• Stock screeners
• Research and analysis
• Free and paid versions
• Stock ratings
• Community features

Some of these features are common to pretty much every stock research or investing news site out there. You can find news feeds, market data, stock information, etc on free sites like Yahoo! Finance and Google as well as the priciest stock research there, so the fact that the list of commonalities between Seeking Alpha and TipRanks is so long doesn’t actually tell you that much.

What’s the Difference?

If you look closer, you’ll quickly find that Seeking Alpha and TipRanks do things very differently, even when it comes to features that they have in common.

Take the two sites’ news feeds, for example. Most stock research and advice sites have news feeds, but most of those sites aggregate their feeds from a bunch of third party publications. Seeking Alpha and TipRanks don’t. Both sites have in-house (or freelance) writers who produce the content specifically for their respective news feeds, which means you’ll often get very different perspectives, opinions, focuses, and levels of analysis.

And speaking of analysis, the way the two sites approach research and analysis may be one of the biggest ways they differ.

Pro Tip:

Seeking Alpha crowdsources investor sentiment and in-depth stock analysis to tell you which stocks to buy and sell to help increase your portfolio gains. Right now, you can GET SEEKING ALPHA FOR 58% OFF!

Analyzing Analysts’ Analyses

Seeking Alpha sources analysis from any investors and analysts that are interested in writing about any given stock and its prospects. This often means you’ll find posts by trusted contributors who take deep looks into the stock’s fundamentals.

The length and depth of each analysis differs based on the writer’s perspective and how much they want to say, but you can usually expect to find very thoughtful and well-reasoned arguments as to whether the writer is bearish or bullish about the stock and why they feel that way.

TipRanks goes for more of a “quantity over quality” approach. They’re less concerned with giving soapboxes to analysts with something to say and more concerned with measuring the overall sentiment the market, professional investors, and TipRanks users feel about a company. They care about the fundamentals behind each stock, of course, but they care a lot more about how the most successful investors and analysts feel about each stock’s prospects.

If you don’t feel like digging into the data or reading the analyses yourself, both Seeking Alpha and TipRanks provide rough overviews of their findings in the form of Quant Ratings and Analyst Ratings, respectively.

To an untrained eye, the two different types of ratings may look quite similar. Both tell you the respective site’s overall opinion of a stock and how they think it will do, and both give you a sense of their price targets, but they arrive at their conclusions in very different ways.

Seeking Alpha’s Quant Ratings are proprietary and held behind a paywall, so it wouldn’t be cool to show you one of those, but take a look at this TipRanks stock forecast:

As you can see, the Moderate Buy rating comes from the opinions of two different analysts, both of whom have more or less agreed that its price should climb in the next 12 months. It’s not particularly scientific, though that may not matter when it comes to something as unpredictable as the stock market.

You’ll have to take our word for it or sign up yourself, but Seeking Alpha’s Quant Rating system is based almost entirely on data, quantitative analysis, historical trends, and prevailing market forces. It’s much more scientific, but it may not be a better predictor for the stock’s prospects than TipRank’s opinion aggregation.

In other words: Seeking Alpha goes all intellectual with it while TipRanks is more of a popularity contest. Which approach is more profitable? Great question. Again, let us know when you figure that out.

Other Strengths

Ok, we’ve established that Seeking Alpha’s main strengths are their Quant Ranks, their crowdsourced analysis, and their community of trusted contributors. They have some other things going for them like their stock screeners, relatively impressive charting features, and so on, but the analysis and crowdsourced wisdom is really their main selling point.

TipRanks is a little different. Their system of tracking, rating, and aggregating the performance of financial professionals is impressive, as is the way they weight their recommendations based on the relative success rate of the professionals making the recommendations. It’s all very cool, but they do other cool stuff too.

Their other biggest and probably most impressive feature is their Smart Portfolios. In addition to the stuff like setting up watchlists and giving you some basic performance and portfolio composition data, the Smart Portfolios loop in all that expert performance and recommendation data that we talked about a second ago.

Not only can you compare your portfolio’s performance against other members of the TipRanks community, you can also compare it against the portfolios of professional traders, see what moves similar investors have made, and generally harvest the best trade ideas from the top investors in the game. It’s almost like having over 8,000 different advisors coaching you without having to pay any of them a dime in commissions.

Pro Tip:

Seeking Alpha crowdsources investor sentiment and in-depth stock analysis to tell you which stocks to buy and sell to help increase your portfolio gains. Right now, you can GET SEEKING ALPHA FOR 58% OFF!

Conclusion

Seeking Alpha and TipRanks have both earned their reputations as sources for actionable insights, solid investing ideas, and the kind of research and analysis that helps you make big plays with confidence.

It’s hard to say which service is better. They both have their strengths, neither have many weaknesses, and you can make good arguments for and against either one.

If you really want to know which would be better for you, ask yourself this: Do you care more about fundamentals or sentiment?

If you care more about the fundamentals, Seeking Alpha is for you. They have all the in-depth fundamental analysis you could ever want, plus all the quantitative reasoning you need to make your inner value investor feel good about the trades you make.

If you care more about sentiment and market trends than underlying data, chances are you’ll have a better time with TipRanks. Their analysis isn’t nearly as thorough as Seeking Alpha’s, but that doesn’t really matter to investors who prefer to trade on prevailing opinions over underlying facts.  

The post Seeking Alpha vs. TipRanks: Which Is Better? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Composer is an exciting new investment platform that lets average investors trade like Wall Street titans.

With hedge funds and high-frequency traders dominating the market, it feels like everyday investors just can’t compete. Composer is changing the game by giving users access to the strategies used by the best of the best!

Now, the most important question is if these strategies will help make you money.

Not every strategy is flawless, but Composer offers automated portfolios that have a record of very high returns with low variance. Best of all, the platform lets you test strategies with historical data, so you know how your portfolio would have performed in the past.

On Composer, specific portfolio strategies are called ‘symphonies’. Check out this symphony that lets you invest like a hedge fund with levered stocks and bonds.

The Hedgefundies Refined Symphony beat the S&P500 over the past decade, with a cumulative return of 1,647.9% versus the S&P’s 482.2%. That’s more then 3X the return, using a standard symphony created by Composer!

If a basic strategy focused on levered stocks and bonds can beat the S&P 500, imagine what you could do with a custom-built strategy tested with historical data.

Not every portfolio will beat the market, but Composer offers some awesome tools to help find the strategies that will. Let’s take a look at the platform as a whole so you can decide if it’s right for you.

Pro Tip:

Composer lets you build your own automated investing strategies or use tried-and-true strategies created by other investors. Make sure to try the 14-day free trial to see if Composer is right for you!

Composer Overview

Composer is built to help investors achieve higher returns through smart algorithms and automated trading. With logic-driven trading strategies tested with historical market data, investors can leverage Composer to try and beat passive indexing.

Discover

The Discover tab is one of the most important areas in Composer. From this page, you can find different symphonies that fit your personal investing style.

There are strategies for long-term oriented investors, strategies that focus on specific sectors (like healthcare or tech), and even strategies that let you mimic the trading style of legendary investors like Ray Dalio or Warren Buffett!

If we click through to a specific symphony, we can get more detail from Composer to decide if it’s the right play for us. Also, if you want to keep track of a symphony you like, you can “Follow” it to see its performance over time.

I’ve always been interested in diversification strategies and international investing, so I’ll follow a couple symphonies I like and then we’ll head over to the “Follow” tab to see how it looks!

Follow

Now that I’ve followed some symphonies, they’ll show up on the “Follow” tab.

Every symphony I follow shows up side by side, which lets me quickly compare performance. Since I just added them, the return figures and changes appear as zero, but over time I will be able to see the performance of each strategy since following it.

You’ll be able to access the Portfolio tab once you decide on the symphonies you want to invest in. Before you do that, though, you might want to learn a bit more about how Composer works, and especially how to create custom symphonies.

Let’s click over to the Learn tab to find out more.

Learn

One of the best parts of Composer is the amount of knowledge you can access through the Learn tab. Composer includes articles not just on how to use the platform, but also information on the ways professional investors make decisions.

If you ever wanted to learn how backtests work or how to calculate a Sharpe ratio, both of which are tools used by the top hedge funds in the world, Composer has in-depth articles on these topics.

Outside of the Learn tab, Composer also has an ETF database, a blog, and tutorials accessible through the home page.

Now that we’ve learned a bit more about Composer, let’s dive into creating our own custom symphony to express our unique investment style.

Pro Tip:

Composer lets you build your own automated investing strategies or use tried-and-true strategies created by other investors. Make sure to try the 14-day free trial to see if Composer is right for you!

Custom Symphony Walkthrough

Head on over to the Create tab, and select New Symphony. We’ll walk through how to build a custom strategy that automatically trades based on market data, which is one of the most powerful tools Composer offers.

Step One: Name and Describe Your Symphony

I’ll name my custom symphony ‘Stock/Gold Momentum’ to describe the strategy I want to create. I’ll also add a description to describe the strategy in more detail.

Step Two: Create Your Custom Symphony Logic

To see the power that Composer offers, I’ll create a trading strategy with three distinct asset weights depending on two price signals.

If the current price of our stock basket is greater than the 30-day exponential moving average of the basket, then stocks appear to have some positive momentum, so we’ll weight our portfolio 70% toward stocks and 30% toward gold.

If this is not the case, then we can check if gold has any positive momentum. We set up our symphony to check if the price of gold is greater than the 30-day exponential moving average of gold. If this is the case, then we’ll weight our portfolio 70% toward gold and 30% toward stocks.

One of the great elements of Composer is the wide array of ETFs and stocks the platform supports – in this case, we can get exposure to the price of gold through an ETF, rather than needing to own the metal outright.

If no momentum is present, then we will weight equally between the two positions. Our resulting logic looks like this.

Wow! With just a couple clicks and no code necessary, we can create a complex trading strategy. Now let’s see how our symphony would have performed historically.

Step Three: Run the Backtest

We don’t have to rely on our intuition to check if this is a good trading strategy. On the right-hand side of the screen, click Run under the backtest preview, then scroll down to see the full results.

While our strategy did not outperform the return of the S&P 500 index, it had a lower standard deviation, which means its Sharpe ratio was actually higher than the market! This means our strategy might be a starting point for conservative investors to explore high-return, low-volatility strategies.

Pricing

Like other great investment tools, Composer charges for premium features. Its free tier is useful, but does not allow for live trading, meaning you won’t be able to put your symphonies into practice.

At $30/month with a monthly subscription, though, Composer Pro is fairly priced versus competitors. This is especially true because Composer Pro gives you access to Opus, a symphony managed by Composer’s investment committee.

Most other actively managed strategies charge investors a percentage of assets under management, which eats away at investment returns. By paying a fixed fee, investors save more money in the long run!

Luckily, Composer offers a free 14-day trial so you can decide if the platform is right for you.

Here are the features included in the Free version:

• Unlimited backtesting
• Symphony editor
• Follow list
• Symphony data and insights

Upgrading to the Pro version adds the following features:

• Invest in an unlimited number of strategies
• Fully automated strategy trading
• Real-time portfolio metrics
• Access to the member-only Opus strategies
• Weekly market analysis and performance updates
• Premium customer support

Pro Tip:

Composer lets you build your own automated investing strategies or use tried-and-true strategies created by other investors. Make sure to try the 14-day free trial to see if Composer is right for you!

Pros and Cons

Composer is a great tool, but it’s not without some limitations. Let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of using the platform.

Pros:

• Ability to create no-code custom trading strategies with built-in backtesting solutions.
• Strong regulations: Composer is a registered investment advisor regulated by FINRA. Composer’s brokerage partner is Alpaca, regulated by FINRA and member SIPC, meaning funds are secured against brokerage failure up to a $500K limit. Investments are custodied with BMO Harris, a bank.
• Unlimited backtesting, even at a free level, allowing you to see the historical performance of strategies.
• Easy-to-use interface and intuitive platform.
• Dedicated Discord channel.

Cons:

• Not available to non-US users. If you are an international investor looking for a stock trading platform, check out our eToro review!
• No mutual funds or cryptocurrencies. Some investors who want exposure to specific mutual funds or cryptocurrencies in their portfolio will be disappointed to find out that Composer only supports stocks and ETFs. However, ETFs can replace almost any mutual fund out there, and there are some ETFs with crypto exposure.

Composer Final Verdict: Is It Worth It?

Overall, Composer is definitely worth it if you are looking for an investment platform that allows you to simply implement cutting-edge strategies.

If you are the type of investor who likes to make money without needing to check their portfolio or manually trade, you will love Composer’s automated trading features.

Having access to professionally managed strategies for just $30/month is a great deal by itself. Combining this with industry-leading backtesting tools and custom strategies means you get great value for the price you pay.

With a 14-day free trial for the Pro version, you have nothing to lose by checking out the platform for yourself!

The post Composer Review: Is Composer a Legit Platform? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Trading stocks should be relatively simple. A good company with a solid balance sheet issues shares, investors buy them, and the share prices rise as the company’s prospects improve. Any college freshman coming out of a Finance 101 class could tell you that the stock market is the embodiment of logical capitalism, that investing is easy, and that a little math is all it’ll take for them to turn their birthday money into a sprawling investment empire. 

If those freshman had waited for a few semesters, they would’ve learned a few valuable lessons:

1. The stock market is rarely logical.
2. There’s a reason their finance professors don’t work on Wall Street anymore.
3. They should’ve used their birthday money to buy beer instead.

Security Analysis-style value investing is great and all, but you won’t be building an empire of any size on the back of low double-digit annual returns anytime soon. 

It is easy enough to find stocks with solid balance sheets and future prospects. All you have to do is check their SEC filings and do a little number crunching. It’s much harder to find stocks that haven’t had all that priced in already, and it’s even harder to find stocks that are undervalued and can deliver significant returns in the near- to mid-future. 

Picking stocks is an art and a science. It’s so hard, in fact, that people are willing to shell out big bucks just for recommendations from the right people. People like, oh, the folks at the Motley Fool, for instance. 

Motley Foolishness 

The Motley Fool makes its money by being one of the most reliable stock research and investment advice firms in the business. They don’t always get it right, obviously, but that’s true of literally everyone. When they do get it right—and they do so on a pretty regular basis—though, they don’t just swing for the fences. These Fools knock it right out of the park. 

Over the years the Motley Fool has expanded its team and its purview to cover a whole range of potential investments. You can get advice on options, retirement guidance, digital assets, and every flavor of stock from biotech to augmented reality to fintech and entertainment.

Pro Tip:

The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor stock picking service has MORE THAN TRIPLED the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. The Everlasting Stocks service is still new, but could also provide outstanding returns in the future.

That stuff’s great and all, but we aren’t here to talk about all of the stuff the Fool has going on behind the curtain. We’re only here to talk about two of their offerings, the Stock Advisor service and their Everlasting Stocks service. What are they? What kind of numbers are they putting up? Which one would be the best choice for a busy investor on the go like yourself? 

A Little Overview, Because Why Not?

Let’s take a quick look at what these two services are from a high level. 

What they are: 

Stock Advisor and Everlasting Stocks are actively managed portfolios of stocks hand-picked by experts at the Motley Fool. They’re helmed by the same people—Tom Gardner, co-founder of Motley Fool and Andy Cross, the chief investment officer—and they both employ elements of the Motley Fool’s investing philosophy. They also list the same Principles for Success on their pages:

Principles for Success: 

• Buy 25 or more companies recommended by the Motley Fool over time
• Hold those recommended stocks for 5 years or more
• Invest new money regularly 
• Hold through market volatility
• Let your portfolio’s winners keep winning
• Target long-term returns 

The two services do differ in some ways, most notably in the stocks that they recommend; but we’ll cover that in a little bit. 

How much they cost: 

• Stock Advisor: $199/year
• Everlasting Stocks: $299/year 

Pro Tip:

The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor stock picking service has MORE THAN TRIPLED the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. The Everlasting Stocks service is still new, but could also provide outstanding returns in the future.

The Motley Fool: Stock Advisor 

The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor service is exactly what it sounds like. If you sign up for the service you’ll receive a few things: 

• Access to the Stock Advisor page on the Motley Fool’s website
• Two new stock picks every month
• Regularly updated top 10 stock rankings picked from over 300 stocks
• A set of starter stocks recommended for new and veteran investors
• A bunch of educational materials and research 
• Access to the Motley Fool’s investing community 

If you’re a good investor, you’re probably thinking one thing: Is the Stock Advisor service worth $199 per year? And if you’re a really good investor you’re probably wondering something along the lines of: What’s in it for me? Why not just do my own thing? 

Here’s why.

Since the inception of the Stock Advisor service back in the ancient year of March 2002, the S&P 500 has delivered time-weighted returns of 117.35% as of writing. The Stock Advisors portfolio has returned time-weighted returns of 392% in the same period. 

How does the time weighting work? Great question. But because math is math, it’s pretty safe to assume that the stocks recommended by Stock Advisor have returned about 3.4 times as much as the S&P 500 as a whole. 

Let me ask a rhetorical question: What’s the point of hiring a financial advisor, paying for stock recommendations, or doing anything other than just buying an index fund and calling it a day? Oh, that’s right: To beat the market. That’s literally the whole point.

Given these numbers, it’s pretty clear that the Stock Advisor service is worth the price of admission—provided you actually follow the directions and hold onto the stocks for the long run. 

There’s just one issue: Things aren’t as clear-cut in the short run. 

Of the 15 most recent recommendations, only 8 have gone up in price since they were first recommended. Of those, only 6 are up compared to the S&P 500 over the same period. That doesn’t look great, but remember that the oldest of the 15 recommendations was only made back in September of 2022. You need to give these things time to appreciate in value, right?

The picture looks a lot clearer when we look at the first 15 recommendations made as part of the Stock Advisor service. Every single one of the first 15 recommendations is in the green since 2002-2004, and 13 of them are well over the S&P’s returns over the same period. 

In theory, the Stock Advisor service should be a bit more short-term than the Everlasting Stocks service (hence the whole “Everlasting” thing), but the portfolio is clearly more than capable of delivering outstanding returns over the long run. 

For more information on Stock Advisor, read our full Motley Fool Review.

The Motley Fool: Everlasting Stocks

The Everlasting Stocks service is, again, exactly what it sounds like. The whole point of the service is to pick stocks that Mr. Gardner thinks will be worth buying and holding for as long as humanly possible. When you sign up for the Everlasting Stocks service, you’ll get a lot of the same stuff as the Stock Advisor service: 

• Access to the Everlasting Stocks page 
• 15 immediate stock recommendations from Tom Gardner’s personal holdings
• Access to the Everlasting Stocks/Motley Fool investing community
• Proprietary research and reports
• Two new stock picks each month

The numbers for the Everlasting Stocks portfolio aren’t as compelling as Stock Advisor’s, though a big part of that is because the Everlasting Stocks service has only been around since September of 2018. That’s less than 5 years, which means the service hasn’t yet had time to reach its “hold for at least 5 years” threshold. That being the case, it isn’t all that surprising that the portfolio’s actually down 2.61% since its inception compared to the S&P’s growth of (time-weighted) 12.17% over the same period. 

It’s kind of hard to say what the actual practical differences between the two services are beyond their stock recommendations. Their philosophies and principles for success are similar, if not identical, they’re both run by Tom Gardner and Andy Cross, and they provide the same number of stock recommendations each month. 

Read our full Motley Fool Everlasting Stocks review.

Pro Tip:

The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor stock picking service has MORE THAN TRIPLED the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. The Everlasting Stocks service is still new, but could also provide outstanding returns in the future.

So, Which One’s Better? 

From a purely numerical standpoint, the Stock Advisor service seems like the better call. It’s cheaper, it has a longer track record, and it has a documented history of stellar returns. It’s also been recommending stocks for a long time, so there’s a ton of older recommendations that can still be of use to you if you’re looking to expand your portfolio. 

All that said, it’s probably not a great idea to bet against Tom Gardner and the rest of the Motley Fool. If they’ve chosen to put the Everlasting Stocks service out into the world—plus price it higher than the Stock Advisor service—then chances are that they’re pretty darn confident that it’s going to pay off. 

If you have the extra cash and really feel like covering all your bases, the Motely Fool’s Epic Bundle gives you access to both services plus their Rule Breakers and Real Estate Winners services. The whole Bundle is only $499 a year, which is a pretty great deal when you consider the fact that buying all four services on their own would be $1,046 per year.  

And if you’d like to learn more about some other Motley Fool services, read our Motley Fool Options review and Motley Fool Augmented Reality review.

The post Motley Fool Everlasting Stocks vs. Stock Advisor: Which Stock Picking Service Is Better? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Investing is hard. It seems so simple in theory—all you have to do is buy low and sell high, right? But there’s a reason those Wall Street bigwigs command the kind of salaries that would make King Midas himself blush. What’s the reason? We just told you like two sentences ago. Investing is hard. 

There are a few different ways you can make money on the stock market.

1. Get a degree in finance and work your way up to the trading floor at a bank or brokerage 
2. Get a degree in finance and work your way up to being a financial advisor/asset manager at a bank, brokerage, or financial advising firm
3. Teach yourself how to invest, get some capital together, and make some very well-placed investments 

You’ll notice that none of these paths seem particularly feasible for most people.

Option 3 seems the most reasonable…until you take a look at some of the sobering statistics about day traders and their (lack of) success. Most sources/surveys report that only around 1% to 15% of day traders turn a profit at all, and only a small sliver of those profitable traders made enough to live on. Again: investing is hard.

But hang on, don’t throw in the towel just yet. A good businessperson knows that sometimes you have to spend money to make money, right? And if you don’t have the expertise you need to make a profit, wouldn’t buying or borrowing some of that expertise be the next best option? 

Before we get down to the actual subject of this piece, do us a favor: try to keep one question in mind while you’re reading about the Motley Fool’s Everlasting Stocks service. Ask yourself, would the potential profits you could make by following the service’s stock recommendations be more or less than the price of the service?

In other words: is the Motley Fool’s Everlasting Stocks service worth it?

How Motley Are They, Really?

Let’s kick things off with a little background. 

The Motley Fool is a financial advice firm that’s named after a character from Shakespeare.

Their mission has remained the same since the firm was founded in 1993: to provide honest financial guidance to investors of all shapes and sizes. They pride themselves on their commitment to questioning conventional wisdom, acting in good faith, and doing right by their customers. 

The highly qualified people of the Motley Fool work their butts off to bring you and their other customers the best advice possible in the form of stock recommendations, actively managed portfolios, and expert analyses that cover all corners of the market.

You want to know which biotech companies to invest in? How about fintech? Augmented reality? Software as a service? Look no further. The Motley Fool has it all.

If you’re looking to rent yourself some expertise, well, here you go. The people at the Motley Fool don’t always get it right, of course, but they haven’t stayed in business this long by being bad at what they do. What is it they do? Chill, we’re getting to it.

Everlasting Stocks 

Price: $299/year 

The Motley Fool’s Everlasting Stocks service is a service that recommends stocks you can hold indefinitely. The recommendations are a result of intensive research and analysis by a team of professionals with years of investing experience, and each stock is personally approved by Tom Gardner, one of the Motley Fool’s founders. 

It’s never a good idea to pay random people for investing advice, but that isn’t the case with the Everlasting Stocks service.

Think of it this way: Tom Gardner put his name on the service knowing that he and the Motley Fool are directly incentivized to give good advice. That’s sort of the Motley Fool’s whole business. If they lose their reputation as a go-to for reliable investing advice they’re kind of screwed.  

That’s solid logic, right? Still, all the incentives in the world won’t make bad investors give good advice. So you know what’s better than incentives? Track records. 

It’s true that prior performance isn’t necessarily a guarantee of future returns.

Good investors make bad decisions, bad investors can make good decisions, and the market can do crazy things that literally no one saw coming. That said, prior performance doesn’t have to be a guarantee of future returns to be a useful metric when looking for good investing advice—especially when you have a track record as impressive as the Motley Fool’s.

Buying Tesla early enough to see a gain of nearly 10,000% is impressive enough, let alone seeing the potential in Netflix long enough ago to realize a return of 12,170% on their investment. And while these three are probably the most impressive feathers in the Motley Fool’s cap, they’re far from the only evidence that the folks at the Fool know what they’re doing. 

It’s worth repeating what’s on the above image for emphasis alone. The team in charge of Everlasting Stocks hasn’t just consistently beaten the market over the last two decades, they’ve delivered four times the returns that the S&P has seen over the same period. 

Think about that for a second. Most investors, financial advisors, traders, hedge funds, mutual funds, and all other participants in the market struggle to beat the market for a single year, let alone on a consistent basis over two decades. 

That the Motley Fool’s team has managed to deliver market-beating returns with such regularity means they have the combination of luck and skill that separates successful investors from failed day traders.

People pay big bucks for the privilege of riding on the coattails of investors with such illustrious records, and the Motley Fool is renting out their expertise for only $300 a year.

What Do You Get? 

When you sign up for the Everlasting Stocks service you immediately receive a few things:

• 15 timely stock recommendations 
• Access to a library of stock recommendations
• Future recommendations 
• Quarterly recommendations from Tom Gardner
• Friendly and knowledgeable customer service
• A 30-day refund guarantee (for credit on the Motley Fool, not cash)
• Access to the Motley Fool’s Portfolio Allocator tool
• Access to the Simulators tool

Everlasting Stocks: The Reality

The Motley Fool lists these as the principles for success with Everlasting Stocks. 

• Buy 25 or more companies recommended by the Motley Fool over time
• Hold those recommended stocks for 5 years or more
• Invest new money regularly
• Hold through market volatility
• Let your portfolio’s winners keep winning
• Target long-term returns

The service made its first recommendations in October of 2018, so we don’t have 5 years-worth of returns available for any of the recommended stocks. What we do have is a list of all the stocks that have been recommended since the service’s inception. 

It’d be a little messed up of us if we told you exactly which stocks the Motley Fool has recommended (plus it’d probably tick them off), so let’s keep this general. 

First Recommendations 

Of the initial 8 stocks that the Motley Fool recommended back in 2018:

• All 8 are up
• 7 are up compared to the S&P
• 3 have delivered over 100% returns since 2018 
• 1 is up over 1,000% since its initial recommendation 

Not too shabby, right? Now let’s look at the most recent picks.

Most Recent Recommendations 

Everlasting Stocks has put a more regular recommendation schedule in place since it first started, so let’s take a look at the first page of results. 

Of the 15 stocks on the first page of results:

• 10 are up since being recommended 
• 9 are up compared to the S&P 
• 5 have delivered double-digit returns 
• 1 is down nearly 100% 

Overall Performance

The Everlasting Stocks service has picked some very big winners, but it’s also picked enough underperforming stocks that the portfolio as a whole is actually down 0.01% since inception. 

The program hasn’t been around for long enough to realize its “hold for at least 5 years” threshold for any of its picks. That said, so far it’s been a real mixed bag. 

Downs

• 3 stocks are down over 90% since being recommended
• 40 of the picks have seen double-digit losses (compared to the price at which they were recommended) 

Ups

• 1 stock is up by over 1,000%
• 4 picks have seen increases in the triple-digits
• 13 picks have seen double-digit returns

Conclusion: Is Everlasting Stocks Worth It?

Is the Motley Fool’s Everlasting Stocks service worth it? Maybe. Its picks have seen huge gains and huge losses, and the portfolio as a whole hasn’t gone up or down since its inception. It’s almost impressive; if you’d followed every recommendation your portfolio would be almost exactly the same value today as it was when you started investing in the service’s picks. 

Recommending the Everlasting Stocks service is hard to do based on performance alone, but it also hasn’t been around for long enough to really judge it based on long-term performance.

So if you want to be cautious you may want to wait a few years before you sign up. If you’re the type to pick and choose from the recommendations instead of following them exactly, however, you might be able to avoid some of the losers and make a ton of money off the winners.  

If you want to learn more about other Motley Fool stock recommendation services, check out our Motley Fool Augmented Reality review and our Motley Fool Options review.

Did this Motley Fool Everlasting Stocks review help you make a decision on the service? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Motley Fool Everlasting Stocks Review: Is Everlasting Stocks Worth It? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Of all the industries that have been most affected by technology, entertainment may be the most visible and the most exciting. Sure, medical nanobots that can cure cancer are cool, and those Boston Dynamics robots can do some cool parkour, but let’s be real: that stuff’s for nerds. The cool stuff, the sci-fi stuff that we’ve all been waiting for exists somewhere outside or on top of our own reality. 

Now let’s say you’re a future-minded investor who has a lot of faith in the idea of augmented reality. No doubt you’d think there’s a lot of money to be made there, right? The trouble is, how do you figure out which companies have anything to do with AR and, more importantly, which ones are available for/worth investing in. 

Augmented reality asks the question: what if we layered holographic graphics over the real world instead of encasing our heads in those uncomfortable VR headsets? Pokemon GO gave us a pretty interesting use case when it hit the scene a few years back. If you recall, the game made you look around using your phone’s camera to locate colorful digital creatures for you to trap inside of balls and show off to your friends. 

The good news is that the Motley Fool’s Augmented Reality and Beyond service has already done all the heavy lifting for you. The bad news is that the service is pretty expensive for the average investor, and you can’t really tell if it’s worth it without shelling out the cash to check it out for yourself. Unless there were some really swell folks who took it upon themselves to find out whether the service is worth it or not.

You’re welcome in advance. 

The Motley Fool

The Motley Fool is a financial advice firm that was founded in 1993 and has been pumping out high-quality research and recommendations ever since. The firm’s name comes from a Shakespearean character who spoke truth to power regardless of the potential consequences, and the company has embraced that ethos in every aspect of their business.

The people at the Motley Fool spend their days poring over reams of research, toying with spreadsheets, and generally working their collective butts off for the sole purpose of bringing you the kind of honest financial advice that you can’t get anywhere else. 

What kind of advice, you ask? The full answer is pretty long, so let’s just say that they bring their customers the best financial counsel possible in the form of stock recommendations, actively managed portfolios, and expert analyses that cover every corner of the market.  

This article is about the Augmented Reality service, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re interested, the Motley Fool has guidance on everything from fintech to biotech, long-term plays and timely suggestions, and everything in between. 

Augmented Reality and Beyond

Price: $1,999/year

Like many of the products and services offered by The Motley Fool, the Augmented Reality and Beyond service is an actively managed portfolio of stocks recommended by the Fool’s team. 

The service lists these as its guiding principles, what it calls its principles for success:

• Buy at least 12-15 Augmented Reality stocks
• Plan to hold these investments at least 5 years
• Understand the market can be volatile, and stocks can move up or down in excess of 20%
• Know that Augmented Reality is intended to help build up the growth portion of an overall portfolio
• Understand that new stock recommendations will be added over time to further diversify the AR portfolio

The service makes new recommendations for augmented reality-related stocks on a regular basis. They don’t just recommend every single stock that has anything to do with the technology, however. The team lead Jason Moser determines what to buy and sell based on the following: 

• Staying Power: Stocks must show a clear long-term trend or short-term catalyst that will help create value. This service in particular is devoted to getting in on augmented reality at the bottom floor, as the technology is still in its infancy. 
• Competitive Advantages: Only stocks that have significant or the potential for significant competitive advantages will be considered for the portfolio. These factors include things like network effects, intellectual property, brand recognition, superior technology, and so on. The Getting Started page of the service lists Disney and Zoom as companies with competitive advantages that make them worth looking at. 
• Strong Leadership: This one’s a bit more nebulous. Moser and his team recognize that great leaders are rare and hard to identify, but promise to keep a lookout for leaders with the skill and foresight to guide their firms to financial success and outsize stock price gains in the future. Moser mentions Bernard Charles, the longtime CEO of Dassault Systemes, as one of the leaders with the vision and track record that makes them worth watching. 
• Fiscally Fit: If we haven’t left the era of unprofitable tech firms getting huge valuations based on the potential of their technology, we’re certainly approaching it. Moser and his team recognize that not all future-focused firms will start making a profit as soon as they’re founded, but they aren’t interested in making big investments in companies with bad balance sheets and no clear path to profitability. 

The team is also careful to note that augmented reality stocks should only be a portion of your portfolio. The technology is too new and the future too uncertain for augmented reality stocks to take up more than a sensible slice of your overall portfolio—unless you’re one of those adrenaline junkies who loves skydiving and swimming with sharks, then you just do you. 

The team behind the Augmented Reality service also notes that, while they believe in every stock they recommend, their recommendations are not indefinite. Ideally you’d keep every stock in your portfolio for at least five years, but if one of the recommended stocks starts tanking/is no longer able to beat the market the team will send out a sell recommendation as soon as is appropriate.

So that’s how the service works in theory. How does it work in practice? 

Augmenting Your Reality?

The augmented reality service costs $2k per year. If you’re supposed to hold each stock for at least five years, that means you’ll theoretically be on the hook for $10,000 over the same period. In other words, you’re going to need to make at least $2,000/year and/or $10,000/five years from the recommended stocks for the service to be worth it. That’s a lot of ground to cover. 

The portfolio is composed of: 

• 65.1% information technology stocks
• 11.6% healthcare 
• 9.3% communication services 
• 9.3% consumer discretionary
• 4.7% industrials

And by market cap:

• 55.8% large cap
• 20.9% mid cap
• 4.7% small cap
• 2.3% other

Now let’s take a look and see how the portfolio’s been performing since it was created back in 2019. 

Since June 2019 the portfolio is up 32.06%, while the S&P is up 31.98%. That’s a gain of just 0.08% over the S&P. 

Now, granted, the portfolio hasn’t even been around for the five years they recommend you hold each stock. Even still, $2,000 a year is a pretty steep price for 0.08% over the S&P. 

Of the 43 recommendations made since June of 2019:

• 28 have risen in price
• 15 have returned more than the S&P
• 5 have seen triple-digit price increases

That’s not great, but maybe the data’s a bit skewed because the newest recommendations haven’t had time to appreciate. Maybe the earlier recommendations are looking a little better. 

Of the 20 recommendations made in 2019: 

• 15 have risen in price
• 8 have appreciated faster than the S&P
• 4 have delivered triple-digit returns

That’s a bit better, though those numbers aren’t doing a great job of selling the service, especially at that price point.

Conclusion

It’s hard to argue that augmented reality will play a massive role in the future. It’s only a matter of time until firms in the space are making money hand over fist…but how much time are we talking? 

This service is hard to recommend as it is right now. The higher the price point, the better the performance has to be to legitimize it, and as of now the numbers just aren’t compelling enough. 

$2,000 a year is a lot for most investors. And until the portfolio starts taking off and delivering enough returns to make it worth the money, well, you might want to sit tight and put your money elsewhere. 

The post Motley Fool Augmented Reality Review: Is Augmented Reality Legit? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

It’s good to have options. That’s true of clothes, ice cream flavors, cars, potential romantic partners, and the contents of your portfolio. 

Options are some of the trickier and potentially riskier securities out there. A lot of investors don’t even bother with them, especially those that have heard the horror stories of people getting levered up to their eyeballs and suddenly owing $100,000 when the structured options transaction they put together falls apart. 

As risky as they can be, though, options are a perfectly viable and potentially incredibly profitable part of a wise investor’s portfolio.

That said, there’s a lot of daylight between learning what options are and actually having the knowledge to put them to good use. If only there was a good way to get some options knowledge and advice plus some great trade recommendations from professionals. 

Oh wait a second. 

The Motley Fool’s Options program is a subscription service that gives you all the information, education, and advice you need to master the art of options trading. The service boasts an 81% successful trade rate, and it’s administrated by some really talented folks, but it also costs $999/year. 

It’d be easy to recommend the service if it was free, but at a price point like that it’s a good idea to ask some questions before you open up your wallet. Questions like, say: 

Is the Motley Fool’s Options service worth it?

Read this Motley Fool Options review to find out.

What is The Motley Fool?

The Motley Fool is a financial advice firm that was first started in 1993 by Tom and David Gardner. The brothers Gardner named their firm the Motley Fool after a character from Shakespeare, a fool who told the king tough truths that no one else dared say.

That ethos—the idea of speaking truth to power regardless of popular sentiment or potential consequences—formed the foundation for all of the company’s operations. 

The Motley Fool employs a small but dedicated staff of traders and analysts who spend their days uncovering the truth about the market and passing their discoveries on to their customers. If you sign up for one of their services you know you won’t be getting any nonsensical happy talk or wishful thinking, just the raw and honest truth as the folks at the Fool see it. 

The Options service is just one of several managed portfolios and stock recommendation lists that the Fool maintains. If you’re interested you can find recommendations for stocks covering just about every corner of the market, not to mention recommendations for things like cryptocurrency, options, and other tradable assets.

But we’re not here to talk about all that. We’re here for one reason: Options. 

The Motley Fool Options Service

Price: $999/year

The Motely Fool’s Options service is a subscription-based service that provides insights, analyses, recommendations, and educational materials relating to options. 

The service operates under these Principles of Success:

Company first. Always. We’re investing via options, not trading.

Keep the risk of the option not working firmly in mind. Size your position accordingly.

Remember, options are leveraged instruments and leverage works both ways.

Pay attention to the strategy’s returns, not the return of any single leg.

Patience is your friend.

In addition to those general principles, the service cites these 7 rules for investing based on the Motley Fool’s philosophy:

First: Valuation first, options second: Using options as part of an investing strategy layered on top of a stock portfolio. They go into positions with a clear plan, including a thesis, a desired outcome, a predicted time frame, and a backup plan/exit strategy.

Second: We think long-term even as we use short-term strategies: The stocks that underly each option trade are held with long-term returns in mind. The Fool’s team makes sure they believe in the fundamental value of each stock before using options on/against it. They mix up their strategies between short and long-term transactions based on the underlying stocks.

Third: We’re option writers more often than option buyers: The Fool’s team most often sells options rather than buys them. This gives them a few advantages, namely the fact that the premium is paid and collected on day one, they get to choose an advantageous strike price, and they an use the underlying stock to buy their way into a profitable exit if a trade goes against them. Buyers have the potential for greater profits, however, so they sometimes mix up their strategies depending on the context. 

Fourth: Diversification if necessary, but not necessarily diversification: The Fool’s team prefers to act with or against underlying stocks that they understand, rather than expanding their scope to other industries that they may not be as familiar with. In other words, they’d rather use a number of different strategies on the same underlying stock than go outside their comfort zone. 

Fifth: We stay focused: No acting on emotions. Options are volatile, markets are unpredictable, and the only thing they can control is their reaction to material changes. As long as the initial plan is in place and the initial option strategy remains viable they’re likely to stick with it through even extreme volatility.

Sixth: We go our own way: The Options team doesn’t always agree with the Motley Fool’s main newsletter. They aren’t afraid to break from the main set of recommendations if necessary, though they don’t act in a contrary way just for the sake of it. If and when they break from the main list, they do so only based on extensive business analysis and valuation. 

Seventh: We believe in the power of community: The team is active on the Fool’s message boards. They answer questions, engage in debate, spread knowledge, and generally listen to what the community has to say. 

Learning About Options

Options aren’t the simplest things in the world, so the Motley Fool has been kind enough to provide a few different resources for your educational pleasure. 

The first is a reasonably in-depth set of lessons that the Fool calls Options U. There are three units, Essentials, Strategies, and Masters, each of which is broken into at least 8 different lessons. Most of the lessons are in written article format, though each unit does have a set of videos to compliment the written material. 

The next resource is the community message boards. These are pretty much what you’d expect. 

The Fool’s team also provides regular updates in the form of analyses and research reports, all of which have interesting information that can help you figure out how to handle options. 

Finally, if you click on one of the Fool’s options recommendations you’ll be taken to a page that spells out the specifics of the option(s) in question, as well as a set of instructions for how to follow along with the Fool’s actions. If you scroll down you’ll also typically find a whole writeup about the Fool’s thinking behind the option position they’ve taken. 

The instructions are nice to have, as they kind of take all the guesswork out of how to structure the transactions, but the real meat of it is in the reasoning you’ll find below the instructions. There are things like:

Key performance indicators and explanations

Detailed charts

Comparable situations and transactions from past Foolishness

Alternative positions on the same stock and how to make those transactions

A box with maximum gain, maximum loss, and follow-ups

The team member in question’s reasoning behind their position at every step of the way 

So whether you’re the type who prefers to learn from a more academic angle, by watching videos, or by example, the Motley Fool’s Options service has you covered. 

Fool’s Gold? 

Now let’s take a quick look at how the Options team has actually performed since they started the portfolio. 

The team has made a ton of transactions, so it’d take forever to go through each individual position they took. Instead, how about we look at some of the extremes?

Of the transactions in the Options portfolio, there have been: 

12 options that delivered triple-digit unlevered returns 

14 options that delivered triple-digit levered returns 

81.47% of transactions were profitable

6 options that lost 100% of unlevered value

9 options that lost all levered value 

2 options that lost more than 100% of levered value

That’s actually not too bad for options, especially when you think about how much of a pounding you can take on levered transactions that go belly up. 

So it seems like the Motley Fool’s Options service can show you how to make money and deliver on their promise of mostly positive returns. It is $999/year though, so let’s ask the question one more time:

Conclusion: Is The Motley Fool’s Options Service Worth It?

Let’s think about this for a sec. The Motley Fool’s Options service costs $999/year, meaning you’ll need to squeeze at least $1,000 worth of annual value from its offerings. Offerings that include:

Options U: A set of lessons that—let’s be honest—you can find elsewhere for free

Professional analysis from the Motley Fool: Regularly posted research and analysis produced by a set of qualified professionals. You can’t find work by those particular folks anywhere else

Recommended Options Transactions: An 81.47% success rate is nothing to sniff at. Depending on the size of your portfolio, you could very well make at least $1,000 extra each year just by following the Fool’s lead

Options Research and Reasoning: Something else you can’t find elsewhere. The Fool’s team is happy to walk you through the reasons why they took their positions, including comparisons to historical examples and (some of) the math that goes into their calculations. If you’re the type who learns by example you’ll have a field day with this feature. 

Community: It’s a message board. You can find any number of finance or options-focused chatrooms and forums around the net that don’t cost $1,000/year. 

All in all, the Motley Fool’s Options service offers enough value to be worth it to the right users. Whether you’re just learning, want to see some examples, or just want some recommendations for options plays, chances are you’ll be able to get more than your money’s worth if you sign up.

If you have experience with the Options service or have any questions about our Motley Fool Options review, let us know in the comments below!

The post Motley Fool Options Review: Is Motley Fool’s Options Service Worth It? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Today’s investors have an ever-growing list of sites and services to choose from when deciding where to get their information, run their screeners, chart their picks against technical indicators, and every other investing-related activity. If they actually want to trade on any of the insights they garner from all their legwork, however, they usually have to pop over to brokerages and trading platforms like eTrade or Robinhood. 

For whatever reason, it’s hard to find an easily accessible service or software that can do both trading and in-depth analysis, and it’s particularly hard to find one that can do it all with a sleek, modern interface. There really aren’t that many services out there, so you can imagine how nice it is when we do come across one. 

Moomoo, the thing we’re here to talk about, is one of those multifunctional platforms that can do both trading and analysis. And before we go any further: it’s worth a look at the very least. 

Also before we go any further, let’s talk about the name. Moomoo. Look, we get it, the logo is a bull, as in bull market or as in the big bull on Wall Street. Bulls moo, and young children sometimes call cows moomoos. But one look at moomoo’s interface will tell you that their platform is anything but childish. 

Inaccurate name aside, moomoo is an impressive piece of software. So let’s take a look at what it’s about, what it can do, and what it actually looks like in action. 

The Voodoo That Moomoo Do Do

Platforms

First thing’s first: moomoo is available pretty much anywhere but in a browser. You’re going to have to download the software if you want to use it. It’s really not a big deal, though it may raise some eyebrows for people who’ve gotten used to having a browser-based option. 

If you use moomoo on a desktop and feel like going all cyberpunk with it, the software supports up to 6 monitors at once. That’s 6 screens of charts, data, bid/asks, news feeds, or whatever else you want to have right in front of you. Just make sure you have a computer with a powerful GPU, or at least a monster of a CPU, and plenty of RAM. Oh, and monitors. You’re going to need a ton of monitors.  

Markets 

Moomoo users can trade all US stocks—exchange-listed and over-the-counter—ETFs, and options, plus a selection of American Depository Receipts, Hong Kong stocks, and Chinese A-shares. 

All US-based trades are commission-free, though there are some fees associated with international trades.

Market Data 

You may be limited to trading stocks, ETFs, and such on moomoo, but that doesn’t stop them from providing real-time data on a metric ton of other markets and asset classes. 

If you want to check out international markets, for instance, you can click around and find data from these countries:

• Canada
• Japan
• Australia
• Singapore

And that barely scratches the surface. You can also find up-to-date information on all kinds of different asset classes, including: 

• Cryptocurrencies
• Futures
• Foreign Exchange
• Bonds
• Warrants

Pro Tip:

Moomoo is a rare combination of a brokerage that offers COMMISSION-FREE U.S. trading as well as FREE level II market data and charting capabilities. Sign up for moomoo today to get started with this free, all-in-one trading platform!

Real-Time Data

Speaking of data, moomoo goes out of its way to provide its users with stock quotes and market movements in as close to real-time as possible. They proudly declare that they refresh the data from US markets (international markets have a time delay) every 0.03 seconds, which is pretty close to the fastest a 60Hz monitor can display the changes. 

In addition to those ridiculously quick updates, moomoo also provides access to real-time Level II data with up to 60 levels of bids and asks. In case you don’t know, Level II data gives you a much deeper look into the scope of the bids and asks that determine the price of a stock. 

If you mostly take longer-term positions and aren’t doing a lot of intraday trading, then Level II data probably won’t be that useful. If you are a day trader who does a lot of intraday trading, on the other hand, it can be an invaluable tool for determining the demand for any given stock and predicting short-term price movements. 

A lot of services only provide Level II data to paying subscribers, if at all, so moomoo providing it for free is low-key kind of a big deal. 

The News Feed

Moomoo wants you to have all the news. Their news feed is long and diverse, with stories sourced from over 200 different publications. It’s not just a single news feed, either. If you click on any given stock, bond, ETF, market, etc, you can navigate to its individual news pane for a list of recent relevant stories collected in one place. 

If you go to the main news tab, you can also find all the news stories relevant to stocks/assets on your watchlist, plus an interactive calendar that’s automatically populated with all the important events coming up in the economy and in your stocks’ futures. It’s just stuff like upcoming earnings announcements and new economic data like jobs numbers and such, but it’s still a nice little feature to have.  

The Community 

If you’ve ever wanted to talk to complete strangers about investing without leaving your trading platform, now’s your chance. Moomoo’s chatroom/social media-esque features let you access a number of different spaces for traders to hang out and talk. You can chat, make friends, and start groups and group chats with those friends if you so desire. Again, not a critical feature, but still pretty cool.

Chart-Topping Charts

Moomoo’s charts are not messing around. They have all the regular stuff like line graphs, candlesticks, multiple time frames, and market/stock comparisons, but they don’t stop there. 

No, seriously. They go hard.

Are you into technical analysis? Like slapping indicators on graphs and fiddling with moving averages and Bollinger bands like some kind of fiscal Nostradamus? Well, you’re in luck. 

Moomoo’s charts support a ton of different indicators—63 of them, to be exact—and you can apply, tweak, and cross-compare as many of them as you want at a time. You can even change the colors of each indicator to help you make sense of the tangled web of lines and sticks that you know you want to make. 

And if those preset indicators aren’t enough for you, moomoo comes complete with a custom indicator creator tool. You can choose from any combination of the 190+ preset functions to make your very own prognosticating tools for a truly bespoke digital tea leaf reading experience.  

Oh, and you know how most charts just sort of sit there all static and whatnot? Yeah. Moomoo does things a little differently. You can opt to make adjustments etc with all the little buttons on the sides of the charts, but that’s kid stuff. No, you want to open up the drawing menu and get all Beautiful Mind with it, don’t you?

Good news: moomoo has 38 different drawing tools for you to make your mark on any chart you please. You can draw your own trend lines, isolate and identify trends in certain time periods, and apply all of it against any technical indicators you want to apply on the chart alongside your own work. Think of it like a digital whiteboard for you to work out your thoughts and spot interesting patterns from the comfort of your desk chair. 

 Alternative Chart/Data Stuff

This is a quick section devoted to the features that didn’t fit neatly in the other categories. 

• Short Sale Volume: A set of charts that show short sale volumes. Gives you a visual representation of short signals, short interest, daily short volume, and other short-related data
• Institutional Holdings: Charts that, when data is available, show a visual representation of aggregated institutional holdings and provides some analysis
• Company Valuations: Charts and datasets that let you use PB, PE, and PS models to evaluate stocks and their valuations. Also lets you graph against historical data
• Financial Reports: Gives you a way to evaluate earnings reports and financial reports using charts, graphs, and key indicators like revenue and past growth rates

Pro Tip:

Moomoo is a rare combination of a brokerage that offers COMMISSION-FREE U.S. trading as well as FREE level II market data and charting capabilities. Sign up for moomoo today to get started with this free, all-in-one trading platform!

Great, But What’s it Actually Like? 

Now, let’s take a look at what using moomoo is actually like. For this example, we’re going to look up a stock (AAPL), take a quick look at its price and financial data, and buy a share. Ready? 

Step 1: Open up moomoo. Below you’ll see the dashboard of a sample account when logging on. 

As you can see, the dashboard automatically includes portfolio information in the center, general account information on the left, and data that we’ve looked up previously on the right for a stock called Futu Holdings. 

Our portfolio is missing something, though. How about a new stock?

Step 2: Look up the stock. Below, you’ll see the dashboard screen with the search function open and pointed toward AAPL.

There’s quite a long list of options, but the one we’re looking for is at the very top. Apple Inc. You know, the people who made the phone you’re probably using right now. 

Step 3: Take a look at the stock.

Now we’re on the default view that pops up when you navigate to AAPL’s page. It’s highly customizable—just about every bit of it can be tweaked, hidden, or expanded—and there’s a lot going on, so let’s break it down.  

The middle of the screen shows AAPL’s price changes in intraday trading today with a trend line to smooth things out. On the top right you’ll see some of AAPL’s historical price data, and below it you’ll see some of the bid/ask spreads from the trading day. Under that you’ll see the Level II data that shows multiple levels of bid/asks. 

To the left of the Level II data is what we’re looking for: the trading interface. The price is fine, so we’re going to need to change the “Style” to “MKT Buy.” There are a lot of other options for buying and selling, though, including stuff like “Limit,” “Market,” “Trailing Stop Limit,” and a bunch of other options. 

Here’s a closer look at the trading interface before we make the trade. 

So congratulations (to us)! One share of AAPL. Billionaire status, here we come. 

Pro Tip:

Moomoo is a rare combination of a brokerage that offers COMMISSION-FREE U.S. trading as well as FREE level II market data and charting capabilities. Sign up for moomoo today to get started with this free, all-in-one trading platform!

Is Moomoo Legit?

If this rare combination of trading capabilities and top-notch data sounds too good to be true, you might be wondering:

Is moomoo legit? Is moomoo safe?

Like most other legitimate investment platforms, moomoo is heavily regulated. Both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulation Authority (FINRA). The government agency (SEC) and government-authorized nonprofit (FINRA) make sure that moomoo is following the law and being honest with investors.

Moomoo is also a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), which insures the assets in your brokerage account in the event that your brokerage fails. You’re insured up to $500,000, including $250,000 for claims for cash. Keep in mind that the SIPC does not protect you in the event that a stock you’ve bought declines in value.

Conclusion

Moomoo is an inaccurately named stock trading platform that has a ton of great features. It’s relatively easy to use, jam-packed with features, and gives average investors the ability to trade in international waters.

It’s no wonder the platform has received awards from platforms like Fintech Breakthrough, Investing Simple, and Benzinga. (Read our Benzinga Review.)

So if you’re looking for a new place to trade or just feel like downloading something, why not give it a shot?  

The post Moomoo Review: Is moomoo Legit? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Eventually we’ll all be authorizing purchases by submitting to retina scans or letting the clerk at Kroger scan the chip Elon Musk wants to implant in all our heads. It’ll be a beautiful world where even using your Google Pay to buy stuff will get the same reaction that seeing an old woman write a paper check does today. But we aren’t there yet. 

As much as we’d all like to transition away from cash and cards, neither the technology nor the economy are ready for all that. We still need to get cash to pay for stuff without leaving a paper trail, many stores don’t have the equipment to accept smartphone payments, and we still need debit cards in case our phones die. 

These are (probably) the things that Block’s Cash App had in mind when they introduced their Cash App Cash Cards. If you haven’t heard of them, well, they’re pretty much just normal debit cards. Except instead being connected to Wells Fargo or whatever they’re connected to a payment app that Roddy Rich, 22Gz, Louie Ray, Doe Boy Feat. Key Glock, and a ton of other artists have rapped about. 

That’s right. Finance people can like rap, too. We contain multitudes. 

So what’s the deal with the Cash App Cash Card? How does it work? Is it worth checking out? Let’s take a look. 

It’s Actually Pretty Cool 

Jack Dorsey probably wasn’t thinking of helping un and underbanked people when his company launched Cash App. Any altruism was purely accidental, and we can say that with confidence. Why? Because Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter. That’s not the sort of thing a charitable person would do.

Regardless of initial intent, however, Cash App quickly caught on among people who were most likely to not have traditional savings or checking accounts. Before long the app had essentially become millions of people’s primary solution for storing their money in digital form, and the company clearly took notice. 

If you take a look at Cash App’s current slate of functionality (read our full Cash App Review) it’s pretty clear how their overall ethos has developed over the years. Quick and easy digital payments are still their bread and butter, of course, but their ancillary services have obviously grown from curiosities to actual selling points that are actually useful to the populations they serve. 

If you’re curious as to what we mean by all that, good. That means you have to keep reading. 

Pro Tip:

Cash App has a referral program that can earn you FREE cash in your Cash App account. All you have to do is sign up and refer friends!

Cash, Card or Cash Card?

Let’s start with the easy stuff. The Cash App Cash Card is just a debit card that’s connected to your Cash App account. You don’t get it automatically—you can’t download a physical debit card from your app, duh—but you can request it for free through a very visible link on the app. The site says it takes about 10 business days for the card to arrive, but that’s a very conservative estimate. 

Once the card arrives, all you have to do to activate it is open your Cash App and use the built-in QR code scanner to read the code attached to the card. And boom, there you go. It’s that easy. You can also pull up the card details in your app and immediately start using it through Apple Pay or Google Pay, but that seems wrong for some reason. 

After you activate it, the Cash Card acts just like any other debit card. It has a chip, a PIN that you select upon activation, and a strip for swiping at the card reader if the chip thingy isn’t working. 

Boosts and Such

If you browse through the tabs on your Cash App you’ll quickly stumble upon a bunch of “Boosts,” which normal folks know as “coupons” or “discounts.” 

These discounts, meager though they may be in most cases, are some of the perks that come built into your account. All the deals are pretty modest as far as we can tell, but it’s still nice that Cash App gives you the chance to save on products from participating stores. 

A careful digital coupon clipper can save a few bucks here and there on clothes, sporting goods, food, and so on, which can definitely add up to some decent savings over time…provided you were already going to buy those things, of course. 

Real Savings 

At some point Cash App added what amounts to an interest-free savings account insured up to $250k by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) into the app’s functionality. It’s not the most useful feature on its own—interest is really the only reason to keep a savings account instead of a checking account—but it does have a couple of neat things going for it. 

If you want you can turn on a feature that rounds up to the next dollar every time you make a transaction on Cash App and funnels the extra cents to one of three places: A savings account, a stock account, or a Bitcoin account. 

If you’re the kind of person who makes a bunch of transactions on Cash App, activating the rounding up feature and having it sent to a Cash App savings account can be very helpful. It’s hard for most of us to save considering how insanely low wages are and how ridiculously expensive everything is. But you know what’s easy? Saving money without changing your behavior at all. 

The savings accounts also let you do a things like setting savings targets—think “I want to save $X for a vacation,” etc—and the app will keep track of how far you are from your goals. Again, not really useful, but kind of neat and potentially helpful for some folks. 

Pro Tip:

Cash App has a referral program that can earn you FREE cash in your Cash App account. All you have to do is sign up and refer friends!

Deposits Made Easy

Cash App isn’t a bank, so they don’t have any brick and mortar locations where you can deposit cash into your account. What they do have, however, is partnerships with a ton of different vendors around the country. If you want to deposit cash all you have to do is go into a participating store and ask the person behind the counter to deposit it for you. It’s quick and easy—though you’ll want to look up which stores are participating in the program beforehand. 

Cash App also lets you use it as a direct deposit destination, something that only used to be possible with actual checking or savings accounts. If you get it set up properly—and it’s not exactly clear how to do it—you can also get access to your paycheck up to two days before it gets direct deposited. And sure, that just lets you borrow two days’ worth of money from your next paycheck, but it’s still kind of neat, right? 

Finally, if you have over $300 direct deposited each month Cash App will reimburse any withdrawal fees you incur when you use your Cash Card to withdraw money from in-network ATMs. It’s a nice feature, especially if you make frequent cash withdrawals. Those fees add up pretty quickly. 

More Finance, Please

And last but not least, Cash App offers a couple of services designed to help everyone get accustomed to and participate in the whole financial system. 

First: Taxes. No one likes doing or paying taxes, but we kind of need them if we want to have roads and schools and Tomahawk missiles. Doing your taxes can be kind of complicated and expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. Cash App knows all of this, so they were kind enough to build a tax preparation and filing feature into their app.

Cash App’s tax feature is available on either your phone or your computer, it doesn’t charge fees of any kind, and it even lets you fill out your information by snapping a picture of your W-2 with your phone. They claim it only takes five minutes or so, which must have enraged CPAs across the nation. You’re guaranteed a fee-free experience, a promise of the biggest possible refund, and you can get your refund deposited into your account up to six days early. Not bad, huh?

Remember that stuff about rounding up on every purchase and depositing it into a savings account? The money doesn’t have to go to a savings account. The app also has a built-in stock portfolio and Bitcoin wallet, both of which can be the automatic recipients of any rounded-up cents from your purchases. The functionality leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s a very nice little introduction into the world of investing for users who may have never bothered with it otherwise. 

Pro Tip:

Cash App has a referral program that can earn you FREE cash in your Cash App account. All you have to do is sign up and refer friends!

Conclusion 

Over the years Cash App has grown from simple digital payment app to pseudo-bank and introduction to the financial system. It still does payments, but now it’s also home to savings accounts, stock portfolios, Bitcoin wallets, free tax preparation services, and more. 

The Cash App Cash Card is really just a debit card connected to your account. There’s nothing too special about it. But that’s kind of the point. It’s not special. It’s a normal personal finance tool that many of us take for granted, and may have been long out of reach for others. 

There are still millions of Americans who don’t have any kind of bank account. Those people are essentially locked out of the financial system, and participating in the financial system isn’t optional in 2023. So let’s be grateful to Cash App for that, at the very least…and for all the awesome songs it inspired. 

The post Cash App Cash Card Review: Is the Cash App Cash Card Free? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Sometimes investing seems more like a crapshoot than an art, let alone a science. You can pore over data and manipulate charts for hours, read through every submission to the SEC, stare at the fundamentals and calculate ratios until your head starts throbbing and your eyes start bleeding and still make the wrong play. The market is just so unpredictable, so irrational, so infuriatingly volatile that you might as well just buy some index funds and call it a day…right?

It’d be one thing if there was some secret code to all of it. Some time-tested tactic that almost guaranteed results, a formula for moolah that worked better than all the technical analysis and tea leaf-reading in the world. Unfortunately, no such formula exists…or does it?

Zacks Investment Research may be the closest thing we have to an equity oracle. Their system—the Zacks Performance Rank—is a proven method for getting the kind of consistent above-market returns that most investors could only dream of. According to their studies (and math), Zacks has managed to deliver an average return of 24.5% in the decades between 1988 and 2023—well over twice the S&P 500’s average returns.

So how do you get in on this magic? Money, that’s how. Zacks will give you a little taste of what it has to offer for free, but you have to open your wallet if you want to get to the good stuff. There are a couple different membership tiers—plus some ancillary membership things—that you can sign up for. We won’t waste time talking about all of them today, though. We’re here for the good membership. The Glengarry membership. We’re here to talk about Zacks Ultimate.

Pro Tip:

Zacks #1 Strong Buy ranked stocks have more than doubled the market’s performance since 1988. When you sign up for Zacks Ultimate, you get access to all the features included in Zacks Premium, PLUS more than 15 actively managed portfolios that target returns in different sectors and asset classes. Click here to get a 30-day trial of Zacks Ultimate for just $1!

A Bit of Background

In case you don’t already know, Zacks Investment Research is a stock research firm that’s been in business since 1978. Its founder started the firm with nothing but a PhD in mathematics from MIT, ten years of experience as a quantitative researcher, and an idea.

The founder started Zacks because he saw something others hadn’t. Through his work and his research he found that one factor was more influential than any other when it came to predicting major stock price moves. Rather than trend lines or moving averages or prayer, the founder discovered that earnings revisions had the biggest effect on stock prices.

That one realization has served Zacks well. It formed the backbone of an enterprise that’s grown to be one of the preeminent players in the game some 45 years later.

Zacks Ultimate

Like we said, you need to sign up for a membership if you want to get at all the primo stuff that Zacks has to offer.

You can always go for the lower tier, Zacks Premium, which gives you a ton of great recommendations, analytical tools, equity research reports, and prebuilt stock screeners, but that’s baby stuff. Plus, we’ve already covered what comes with Zacks Premium in another piece – read our Zacks Premium review.

If you’re tired of the baby stuff and if you think it’s time to start playing with the big boys/girls, Zacks Ultimate may be just what you’re looking for. It is pretty expensive though, so you should really do your due diligence before signing up.

How expensive is it?

Pricing

This expensive:

• $299/month
• $2,995/year

That’s a lot, especially when you compare it to Zacks Premium:

• $249/year

And Zacks Investor Collection (which includes all of the features of Premium):

• $59/month
• $495/year

You don’t often see two membership tiers separated by such a massive price difference, but apparently that’s just how Zacks does things.

So what about Zacks Ultimate makes it so pricey? Let’s find out. And since Zacks Ultimate includes everything else that comes with other Zacks memberships, lets start with those.  

Pro Tip:

Zacks #1 Strong Buy ranked stocks have more than doubled the market’s performance since 1988. When you sign up for Zacks Ultimate, you get access to all the features included in Zacks Premium, PLUS more than 15 actively managed portfolios that target returns in different sectors and asset classes. Click here to get a 30-day trial of Zacks Ultimate for just $1!

Premium Features

If you subscribe to Zacks Ultimate, you also get everything that comes with Zacks Premium. That means you get the Zacks #1 list, their long-term plays, all the research, all the stock screeners, the exclusive commentary, the industry filters and intra-industry ratings, and all that good stuff. That’s a big benefit on its own, but even Zacks’ own math puts an annual value of $249 on Zacks Premium, which leaves about $2,746 of value on the table.

Zacks Investor Collection

Zacks Investor Collection is a set of actively managed portfolios and lists of recommendations compiled by Zacks personnel. Each portfolio is tailored to certain kinds of stocks and ETFs with different time frames and profiles, though they’re all aimed at the same thing: making you as much money as possible. Some of the portfolios include:

• ETF Investor: Uses Zacks Industry Rank, Zacks ETF Rank, and other factors to identify and ride emerging trends through select ETFs. Designed to target strong returns with smoother trajectories than individual stocks.
• Home Run Investor: A portfolio that identifies, compiles, and recommends smaller and mid-cap companies that have fallen under the radar in spite of their robust earnings growth momentum. Intended to deliver outsize returns from companies with repeated quarterly earnings surprises.
• Income Investor: Targets stocks with strong fundamentals and histories of consistent dividend payments. Designed to deliver strong, consistent returns with minimal risk.
• Stocks Under $10: Pretty self-explanatory.
• Value Investor: Uses Zacks Rank and value metrics to find underpriced stocks and recommend them before the market recognizes their potential. Designed to ride underpriced stocks to the top of the market.

The Investor Collection membership also offers access to two more things that could be useful: Zacks Confidential and Zacks Top 10 Stocks.

• Zacks Confidential: A set of private briefings and market insights delivered weekly by Zacks’ executive vice president that delves into the best and most successful trades in all of Zacks’ investment portfolios.
• Zacks Top 10 Stocks: Again, pretty self-explanatory. It’s a portfolio of 10 stocks hand-picked by Zacks’ director of research. Includes a blend of small, medium, and large-cap stocks picked for their combination of intrinsic value and growth potential. Stocks in this portfolio have delivered three times the returns as the S&P 500 since 2012

The Investor Collection is packed full of potential moneymakers, and Zacks has priced it accordingly.

Pricing

• $59/month
• $495/year

Now, if we subtract the price of Premium ($249/year) to isolate the value Zacks puts on the other Investor Collection, you get $246.

And when we subtract the Investor Collection (all $495) from the price of Zacks Ultimate ($2,995/year) you get $2,500. That means Zacks thinks its Ultimate membership minus the other memberships is worth $2,500 a year.

That’s a Lot. Or is It?

Zacks Ultimate includes a lot of stuff even if you take out everything from the two lower-tier memberships. You won’t find that many new features, per se, but you will get access to a ton more actively managed portfolios. Portfolios like:

• Alternative Energy Innovators: Tracks companies making strides in all forms of alternative energy.
• Black Box Trader: AI-driven portfolio that uses a secret blend of factors to find the 10 highest-quality stocks with the biggest potential price growth. Updated every Monday. Includes market commentary and automatic email buy and sell alerts.
• Blockchain Innovators: Tracks blockchain-related stocks and identifies opportunities for profitable trades. Includes commentary and alerts.
• Commodity Innovators: Uses Zacks Rank and other factors to find the best commodity-related stocks and ETFs to give you a way into the commodities markets.
• Counterstrike: Watches markets for selloffs caused by high frequency traders and buys affected stocks at the bottom of the market.
• Headline Trader: Watches for and trades on the back of breaking news.
• Healthcare Innovators: Finds the best and most promising stocks in the healthcare and biotech sectors.
• Insider Trader: Finds companies with lots of insider stock-buying (employees/executives buying) and identifies potentially undervalued companies.  
• Large-Cap Trader: Trades large-cap companies with significant upside potential.
• Marijuana Innovators: Targets securities related to the marijuana industry and identifies potential growth opportunities.
• Options Trader: Structures options trades for maximum potential profits and minimal risk.
• Short Sell List: AI-driven list of companies that are prime targets for short selling.
• Surprise Trader: “Listens” to chatter among analysts and identifies credible buying and selling opportunities.
• TAZR: Uses technical analysis and Zacks Rank to find the right stocks to buy and sell at the right time.
• Technology Innovators: Uses Zacks Rank to find tech companies with the right combination of earnings momentum and growth potential.

Pro Tip:

Zacks #1 Strong Buy ranked stocks have more than doubled the market’s performance since 1988. When you sign up for Zacks Ultimate, you get access to all the features included in Zacks Premium, PLUS more than 15 actively managed portfolios that target returns in different sectors and asset classes. Click here to get a 30-day trial of Zacks Ultimate for just $1!

Conclusion

Zacks Ultimate includes a wealth of trading ideas and insights. The data they have on hand shows that their methods work with startling regularity, and if the trend continues it seems like following their directions is a surefire way to boost your net worth.

Whether Zacks Ultimate will be worth it to you is largely dependent on how much money you have invested or are willing to invest, as you essentially need to earn an additional $3,000 every year if you want to turn a profit. It’s a matter of economies of scale. If your portfolio is big enough then earning an additional $3,000+ a year won’t be a big deal. If you’re like the rest of us, though, you might want to start with Zacks Premium and work your way up. 

The post Zacks Ultimate Review: Is Zacks Ultimate Legit? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

How do you pick the perfect stocks? What goes into the creation of the ultimate investing strategies? Does anyone know how to deliver the kind of consistent above-market returns that everyone wants but almost no one can provide? Where do investors turn for some of the best, most accurate information and insights out there?

Zacks. Duh.

Zacks Investment Research is one of many different firms that produces and provides research and analysis to traders of all shapes and sizes. They’ve been a major player in the space for decades now, and tons of investors rely on their insights to inform what they buy, when they sell, and how to squeeze the most profit out of every transaction.  

You can get some of Zacks’ info and insights for free, but the good stuff is locked behind a paywall. Zacks has a few different membership tiers that you can sign up for. They all have their pros and cons and price points, but we’re only here to talk about one of them today: Zacks Premium.

So what’s the deal with Zacks Premium? Keep reading to find out what it costs, what you get, and whether or not it’s worth it. But first, a little background.

Zacks Investment Research

Zacks is the brainchild of its founder. After getting his PhD in mathematics from MIT and spending a decade working as a quantitative researcher, he decided to leave the brokerage life and strike out on his own.

The founder had come upon a realization while he was toiling away on all that quantitative research. Part of his work was to use his considerable mathematical prowess to find patterns that could help predict changes in stock prices. The best players in the game tried and failed to find that elusive pattern, but Zacks’ founder was built different. He pushed through all the noise until he arrived at an important discovery: that, more than anything, earnings revisions were the most powerful forces affecting stock prices.

It didn’t take long for the founder to put his discovery to work. He published a paper on it, left his brokerage, and started his own research firm in 1978. His proprietary Zacks Performance Rank model became the foundation for what would become one of the preeminent research firms in the business, and for good reason. It works.

Zacks’ proprietary ranking systems have driven trades that returned twice as much as the S&P 500, on average. The picks made using Zacks’ system have recorded average gains of 24.52% per year between 1988 and 2023. It’s hard to argue with results like that, and it’s no wonder people keep coming back to Zacks for info and insights year after year.

For more overall information on Zacks’ services, read our Zacks review.

Zacks Premium

Zacks Premium is one of the two main membership tiers offered on the Zacks website. It’s the cheaper of the two tiers, but it still comes packed with features that should more than pay for themselves in no time at all. And speaking of paying:

Pricing

• 30-day free trial
• $249/year after trial

There’s a lot going on behind the Premium paywall, so let’s take a second to list it all out before we start breaking them down. A Premium membership includes these big features, and then some:

• Zacks #1 Rank List
• Equity Research Reports
• Zacks Industry Rank
• Earnings ESP Filter
• Pre-Built Stock Screens
• Focus List

Pro Tip:

Zacks #1 Strong Buy ranked stocks have beaten the market by over 23% per year on average since 1988. Zacks Premium gives you access to their #1 Rank List, Industry Rank, premium stock screens, and more. Click here to get started with Zacks Premium with a FREE 30-DAY TRIAL!

Zacks #1 List

Remember that thing about Zacks’ model being used to get an average of 24.5% returns from 1988 to 2023? Those numbers came from this list. The #1 list is the cream of the crop, the strong buy boys that Zacks hand picks for maximum upside potential.

If the trend of outsized returns continues, just having access to this list of stocks could make a Premium membership worth the money. Getting an average of 24.5% returns on your equity picks is much better than most investors can hope for—especially when you consider the fact that Zacks has achieved those stellar gains on a consistent basis for nearly 40 years now.

Equity Research Reports

If you’re more of a “trust, but verify” kind of investor/the kind of person who won’t just go buy stocks because Zacks said so, you’re going to want to check out the equity research reports they provide to their Premium customers. The reports cover over 1,000 stocks, giving you a deep and thorough dive into the fundamentals, growth prospects, challenges, and methodology behind Zacks’ ratings of some of the biggest and most newsworthy stocks on the market.

Every report is produced in-house by Zacks analysts and provides insights you won’t find anywhere else. In addition to tracking fundamental data and market forces, the reports also give you detailed reasoning behind why Zacks recommends buying, selling, or holding each stock. It’s the perfect complement to the #1 list.

Zacks Industry Rank

If the #1 list is too short or if you just want to do some digging on your own, the industry rank tool is for you. The tool divides stocks into over 250 different industries and ranks them using the Zacks Rank system to show you each industry’s prospects, but it doesn’t stop there.

If you want, you can use the tool to drill down into each individual industry to see how the Zacks Rank system rates each company, perfect for finding the best stocks in different industries to diversify your holdings. Apparently, the top-ranked industries have outperformed the lower-ranked industries by more than 2 to 1 over the last 10 years, so it’s safe to say this tool is worth a look at the very least.

Pro Tip:

Zacks #1 Strong Buy ranked stocks have beaten the market by over 23% per year on average since 1988. Zacks Premium gives you access to their #1 Rank List, Industry Rank, premium stock screens, and more. Click here to get started with Zacks Premium with a FREE 30-DAY TRIAL!

Earnings ESP Filter

The Zacks Earnings Expected Surprise Prediction (ESP) filter is a kind of screener tool that helps you find stocks with high probabilities of positive earnings surprises before the rest of the market gets ahold of them, thus maximizing your upside potential. The tool also lets you do the reverse, helping you identify stocks that are likely to report negative earnings surprises so you can sell them before their prices take a plunge.

The tool is pretty simple and intuitive, and it’s all based on the Zacks Earnings ESP metric that they’ve fine-tuned over the years. According to Zacks, the ESP metric has been proven to predict earnings surprises with over 70% accuracy over a 10 year period. That’s not too shabby.

Pre-Built Stock Screeners

If you’ve ever used a stock screener before you probably have a good idea of what this feature is all about. If not, all you need to know is that a stock screener is just a set of criteria used to find certain stocks. The criteria can be just about anything—earnings, industry, market cap, P/E ratios, etc—and can let you really narrow down your search for the right stocks without too much effort.

The Zacks stock screener is the same as any other, except it comes with 45 prebuilt sets of criteria that Zacks has put together over the years. Each prebuilt screener is designed using Zacks’ methodology specifically to find stocks that are likely to outperform the market, giving you the chance to put Zacks’ model to use to find stocks you might have otherwise ignored.

Focus List

This list is the longer-term counterpart to the Zacks #1 list. While the #1 list stocks may be held for a relatively short time, the 50 stocks on the Focus List are meant to be held for at least 1 to 2 years. Each stock is selected by Zacks’ director of research (so you know they aren’t messing around) and comes with a thorough equity research report that explains the methodology and reasoning behind its inclusion. This isn’t the most exciting feature, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with balancing your portfolio between short and long-term positions.

Pro Tip:

Zacks #1 Strong Buy ranked stocks have beaten the market by over 23% per year on average since 1988. Zacks Premium gives you access to their #1 Rank List, Industry Rank, premium stock screens, and more. Click here to get started with Zacks Premium with a FREE 30-DAY TRIAL!

Conclusion

You get a lot of bang for your buck with Zacks Premium. It’s one of the more reasonably priced services among the stock research/analysis platforms out there, it has a track record of success and outsized returns that’s backed up by actual numbers, and it’s packed with tools and features that will help you pick better stocks and make more money.

Look, it’s no fluke that Zacks has been one of the bigger names in the research game for decades. They’ve helped a lot of people make a lot of money. There’s no reason to believe they’ll suddenly stop being good at what they do, so do yourself a favor and check out that free trial. You never know, it could be just the silver bullet you’ve been looking for. 

The post Zacks Premium Review: Is Zacks Premium Worth It? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

The mobile-first brokerage and (Reddit-legendary) stock trading platform Robinhood recently launched a product that no one saw coming: Robinhood brand IRAs. It was a peculiar choice given Robinhood’s history as the number one choice for /r/wallstreetbets-style meme trading and poorly thought out options trades, but Robinhood’s gone and done it anyway.

There’s no shortage of places to set up an IRA—most banks, brokerages, and other financial institutions, for instance—so Robinhood throwing its feathered cap into the ring is kind of curious. Clearly they think they have some unique value proposition or see an opportunity to make money off of their new IRAs, but do you really want to turn to Robinhood for your retirement planning?

So what’s the deal with these Robinhood IRAs? Are they a good deal? Do they have some unique features or compelling reason for customers to invest in their IRAs, or would consumers be better off opting for an IRA from a more established financial institution?

Let’s dive in. But first, a little context.

It Stands for Individual Retirement Account

IRAs, or individual retirement accounts, are special investment accounts that help individuals save for retirement (hence the name). Much like 401(k)s, IRAs are essentially managed investment portfolios that enjoy certain tax advantages, though there are some differences. While 401(k)s are typically provided and managed by a person’s employer, IRAs and the investments they hold are usually managed by their owners. There are also slightly different tax implications between 401(k)s and IRAs, but we won’t get into all that here.

IRAs come in several flavors, though Robinhood only offers the two most common types: traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs.

Pro Tip:

When you sign up for a Robinhood IRA, you’ll get a 1% match for all funds you contribute to your retirement account up to the legally allowed contribution limit. Plus, you can earn up to $1700 per year in FREE STOCK through a Robinhood brokerage account!

Traditional IRA

A traditional IRA is essentially an investment portfolio that you can contribute certain amounts to every year. For 2022 the limits were up to $6,000 ($6,500 in 2023) for people under the age of 50 and up to $7,000 ($7,500 in 2023) for people 50 and above. Note that these contributions apply for all IRAs that you have, as in you can only contribute up to $6,500 in total across your IRAs, not $6,500 per IRA.

Contributions below and up to the limit are tax-deductible, as are any transactions and earnings that occur inside the portfolio. When you retire you can withdraw funds from an IRA and have them taxed as regular income, though there are additional penalties associated with taking out money before retirement.

You can start withdrawing money from your IRA when you turn 59 and a half. Any funds that you withdraw will be taxed like regular income. You can technically withdraw funds from an IRA before you turn 59 and a half, but you’ll pay a 10% penalty on top of any income taxes you owe. And while there are some circumstances that will let you avoid that 10% penalty, that gets into some thorny tax territory that would be neither useful nor interesting to get into.

Roth IRA

Roth IRAs are a little different. They’re structured and administered like traditional IRAs, any transactions that happen and earnings that accrue inside of a Roth IRA are also tax-free, and you can withdraw earnings after retirement without incurring a tax penalty.

There are two big differences between traditional and Roth IRAs.

1. You can’t deduct any contributions you make to a Roth IRA, but you can withdraw those contributions (but not gains) at any time without incurring a penalty
2. There are income limits associated with Roth IRAs
   1. For 2022 you can only contribute to a Roth IRA if your income is under $144,000 for a single person or under $214,000 if filing jointly
   2. For 2023 the income limits are raised to $153,000 and $228,000, respectively

Now that we know a bit about IRAs, let’s talk about what Robinhood has to offer.

Robinhood IRAs

Robinhood Retirement (Robinhood’s IRA program) offers both traditional and Roth IRAs. The process for setting up either and/or both is the same: just select the Retirement option in the menu on the site or in the app and follow the prompts, and before long you’ll have your new account(s) set up.

You can open one of each kind of IRA that Robinhood offers even if you have other retirement accounts elsewhere, though you’ll still have to abide by the contribution and income limits regardless of the kind and location of your IRAs.

Anyway, once you have your IRA(s) set up you can start transferring in money from your brokerage account and/or external bank accounts. If you don’t want to wait for the money to arrive you can also opt into the IRA Instant program, which lets you instantly deposit up to $1,000 and start trading while you’re waiting for your money to arrive from the bank.

That’s all the basic stuff covered. Now let’s talk about some of the other features of Robinhood IRAs, starting with the biggest one.

Matching Funds

Robinhood’s biggest selling point for their IRAs is that they’re willing to provide a 1% match on every dollar you contribute to one of their IRAs. You don’t need an employer or anything to receive these matching funds, and they also don’t count toward your contribution limits for the year.

You’ll start earning the 1% matching funds as soon as you start contributing money to your IRA, but only if the money comes from an external bank, not your Robinhood brokerage account. It’s not clear why the funds have to come from an external bank. Maybe they want to make sure the money isn’t just being transferred around in their system, or maybe they only want fresh new money instead of the same old money you gave them when you opened your brokerage account. Who knows.

Whatever the case, you’ll only get that 1% matching funds if you make contributions to your IRA from an external bank. It’s a fairly nice thing for Robinhood to do for its customers. That said, they only match 1% of your contributions. That’s a penny per dollar. In 2023 you can earn up to $65 or $75 in matching funds if you’re under or over 50, respectively. That’s not nothing…but it’s pretty close. Either way, it’s free money!

Pro Tip:

When you sign up for a Robinhood IRA, you’ll get a 1% match for all funds you contribute to your retirement account up to the legally allowed contribution limit. Plus, you can earn up to $1700 per year in FREE STOCK through a Robinhood brokerage account!

IRA Portfolios

If you open an IRA with Robinhood you’ll be given the choice between a pre-built recommended portfolio or a more self-directed experience.

The recommended portfolios are comprised of five to eight ETFs that are chosen by Robinhood’s algorithm based on the answers you give on a short questionnaire. It’s not exactly clear what their criteria or methodology are for choosing the ETFs to populate your portfolio, though you can probably assume it has something to do with your investment goals, risk tolerance, and whether or not you have ESG-style priorities for your investments.

If you go to the self-directed route, on the other hand, you have a choice of pretty much everything that you can trade on Robinhood. That means you have a whole ton of stocks, ETFs, and options to choose from, but it also means you only have stocks, ETFs, and options to choose from.

Now, stocks, ETFs, and options are great. No one’s disputing that. But for the more risk-averse clientele out there, Robinhood’s limited and volatile selection of securities may leave something to be desired. There’s no fixed income, no currencies, no alternative assets, nada. And as much as those more volatile assets can appeal to younger investors with greater risk tolerance, a huge swath of potential investors may choose to open an IRA at a bigger institution with a more varied offering.

Is Robinhood Retirement Safe?

With all the recent commotion around the banking system (we’re looking at you, SVB), you might be wondering: are Robinhood IRAs safe?

In short: yes, Robinhood IRAs are safe.

The accounts are backed by protection by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), which protects your account up to $500k, half of which can be uninvested cash in your account.

Keep in mind that the SIPC does not protect you from losing money if your stocks go down in value. It protects you if your brokerage fails and you are unable to claim your rightfully owned securities and cash in your brokerage account.

Pro Tip:

When you sign up for a Robinhood IRA, you’ll get a 1% match for all funds you contribute to your retirement account up to the legally allowed contribution limit. Plus, you can earn up to $1700 per year in FREE STOCK through a Robinhood brokerage account!

Conclusion

Robinhood’s foray into the world of individual retirement accounts is interesting, to say the least. It’s easy enough to open an IRA, roll over any existing retirement accounts, and manage an IRA using Robinhood, but it may not be the best place to turn for your retirement planning.

Sure, Robinhood’s 1% match is nice. It’s more than most IRA providers would give you. At the same time, though, those matching funds also come with the industrial-sized caveat of not being able to invest in anything beyond equities and options. If you’re okay with being limited to just those securities, great! You’ll probably have a great time with Robinhood’s IRAs. If you’re more interested in having a well-diversified portfolio that doesn’t hinge on some of the most volatile securities out there, on the other hand, you may want to stay away. 

To learn more about Robinhood’s other offerings, check out our articles:

• Is Robinhood Safe?
• Robinhood Free Stock
• Is Robinhood a Scam?

The post Robinhood IRA Review: Is Robinhood Retirement Safe? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Seeking Alpha and Morningstar are two of the bigger names among the legions of sites that provide data, charts, and analysis for investors looking to build and better their portfolios. Sure, some services have more impressive charting tools or cover more types of securities or use AI to find trading opportunities, but there’s a very good reason why Morningstar and Seeking Alpha keep finding their way to best of lists all around the net. 

To the untrained eye, Seeking Alpha and Morningstar look like they do a lot of the same things. Both have tons of information and research available, both are pretty big names in the industry, and both cover a lot of the same assets and securities. They seem pretty similar, but are they? Surely one has more going for it than the other, right? And more to the point, which one’s better?

Free Versions

Seeking Alpha 

Seeking Alpha has a lot of the same stuff you’ll see on sites like Yahoo! Finance or any number of different sites that provide information on stocks and ETFs. They have real-time updates on stock prices and market performance, some charting functions with historical data and technical indicators, and some basic portfolio management features. 

Stock price updates and basic charting are great, but they’re just the tip of Seeking Alpha’s iceberg. Their real value comes in the form of the tens of thousands of analyst reports and opinions sourced from their contributors. Thousands of analysts, traders, investors, and other financial professionals share their insights and expertise in the form of articles, reports, and comments posted on Seeking Alpha. 

There’s been at least one study that showed the value in Seeking Alpha’s content. The study analyzed over 100,000 articles and commentaries between 2005 and 2012 to measure their accuracy. To everyone’s surprise (except Seeking Alpha, presumably), the analyzed materials managed to predict both stock prices and earnings surprises over time periods from one month to three years. 

Now, things may have changed since that study, but there’s still every reason to believe that Seeking Alpha’s contributors know what they’re talking about. 

Morningstar

Morningstar also has a lot of the same basic financial data and charting capabilities that you’ll see on a number of different sites. You’ll only spot the big differences if you start clicking around in the news feed. Where most sites aggregate links to actual publications, the vast majority of what you see on Morningstar was produced in-house by their ultra-qualified staff, much like what you’d see on Seeking Alpha.  

Since its inception in 1984, Morningstar has made a real name for itself as one of the best sources of research and analysis on everything from stocks to bonds to mutual funds and more. Morningstar’s team cranks out some of the most thorough, most well-researched reports that you can find on the web. They’re so good, in fact, that many paid subscription services offer access to Morningstar reports as one of their perks. That alone speaks volumes. 

Morningstar’s rigorous quantitative analysis models have earned it a rare position in the business. Its commentary, reporting, and ratings are influential enough that they can practically make or break the funds in question. Good reviews are posted and paraded around by fund managers, but bad reviews can lead to major shakeups in the funds’ personnel and asset mix.  

What They Have in Common (Free Versions)

Seeking Alpha and Morningstar have a lot in common. They both have news feeds and real-time market updates, for instance, and both have basic charting functionality for markets and individual stocks. They both let you use a limited number of technical indicators to measure against stock prices, they both let you delve into stocks’ surface level fundamental data, and they both let you track the stocks or assets you’re looking at. 

Both free sites have limited portfolio management capabilities—basically just letting you build and watch over portfolios with some simple analysis features—and both will give you access to a small subsection of the analysis and/or reports that you’d otherwise have to pay for. Really, they’re quite similar if you just stick to the surface level and don’t subscribe to their paid tiers. 

Finally, both sites have a lot of free content written by staffers and/or contributors that you can access right from their front pages. Both sites do a surprisingly good job of keeping abreast of the most recent news, and it can be fun to see how the two sites’ takes differ on any given issue or event.

How They Differ (Free Versions)

The biggest differences between the sites’ free versions is a matter of scope. 

Seeking Alpha primarily deals with stocks and ETFs. They have a bit of analysis on bonds as well (really just a small collection of articles), but stocks and ETFs are their bread and butter.  

Morningstar’s purview is a bit more expansive. They cover stocks and ETFs, of course, but they also have significant portions of their operation devoted to researching and reporting on mutual funds and bonds as well. 

Paid Versions

Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha has three membership tiers: Basic (free), Premium, and Pro. The prices and benefits are taken straight from their subscription page:

Premium: $4.59/first 30 days, $239/year after trial 

• Access to premium content
  • Over 1 million investing ideas and contributor analyses 
  • Earnings call transcripts and recordings for thousands of stocks 
• Seeking Alpha author ratings
  • Contributor ratings on a scale from ‘very bullish’ to ‘very bearish’
• Seeking Alpha author performance
  • Tracking how well any given author’s performed 
• Stock quant ratings
  • Quantitative ratings on stock’s growth, value, profitability, etc vs industry peers
• Stock dividend grades
• Data visualizations 
• Peer comparisons 
• Ten years of downloadable financial statements

Pro: $499/year 

• Top ideas
  • Exclusive hand-picked investment ideas  
• PRO content and newsletters
  • Exclusive alerts with potentially actionable investment ideas
• Short ideas portal
  • Ideas for shorting stocks
• Idea screener/filter
  • Search for ideas by theme, industry, company size, and other parameters
• VIP customer service

Morningstar 

Morningstar has two tiers: Free and Morningstar Investor. 

Morningstar Investor: $34.95/month or $249 annually 

• Access to premium content
  • Read reports by over 150 independent Morningstar analysts
• In-depth ratings
  • Professional ratings on securities, managers, ESG, prospects, and more
  • All backed by transparent methodology 
• Powerful investment screener
  • Lets you screen for securities by filtering based on a wide range of metrics
• Portfolio X-Ray
  • Evaluates your portfolio by a number of factors including asset allocation, sector weightings, fees and expenses, stats, and so on 
  • Personalized content, insights, and analysis based on your assets and watchlist
• Account integration
  • Connect all accounts to Morningstar for centralized asset monitoring 

What They Have in Common (Paid Versions) 

Morningstar and Seeking Alpha’s paid versions have a few things in common, or at least common-adjacent. 

The primary similarity between the two is that much of their respective value propositions come in the form of premium reports, commentary, and analyses from their analysts/contributors. You’ll find all kinds of insightful content on both sites, as well as things like ratings, newsletters, email alerts, and watchlists. 

How They Differ (Paid Versions) 

You can see the obvious differences between the two sites’ paid services in the lists above. Seeking Alpha doesn’t have the same robust portfolio management or analysis features as Morningstar, for example, and Morningstar doesn’t have the kind of data visualizations or ten years of historical financial statements on file. 

The most profound differences are a little less obvious. Seeking Alpha and Morningstar both produce their own analyses and reports, but they’re produced in a different way. Seeking Alpha’s content is produced by contributors who may or may not be paid, while Morningstar’s reports are produced by a smaller roster of hand-picked analysts. 

In theory Seeking Alpha’s reliance on crowdsourced contributions should mean it’s less reliable than Morningstar, but it’s cleverly built a couple safeguards into the process to mitigate the risk. The fact that readers can track the individual authors’ performance and give them ratings does a lot to filter out the duds. Morningstar’s hand-picked group obviates the need for such filtration, but they also can’t put out the same sheer volume of analyses that Seeking Alpha does. 

Conclusion

Seeking Alpha and Morningstar are two of the biggest players in the investment research game. Morningstar is more traditional, with a staff of qualified analysts pumping out financial journalism and research in an orderly fashion. Seeking Alpha and its crowdsourced model does things a bit differently—and obviously more chaotically—but its best contributors are every bit as skilled as Morningstar’s staff. 

You can’t really go wrong by subscribing to either one of the two sites, it’s just a matter of taste.  

The post Seeking Alpha vs Morningstar appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

The Holy Grail of investing is as obvious as it is elusive: A winning formula for managing investments that returns above-market returns year after year. It’s the kind of pursuit that seems perfectly feasible for new investors fresh out of Finance 101 classes armed with basic formulas and a half-read copy of Security Analysis, but looms ever larger and more insurmountable as they put their money where their mouths are.

It’s not that earning a good return on your investments is that difficult. Anyone can get lucky and place a big bet that delivers an even bigger payoff. The markets would be calm and predictable if not for the possibility of such lucky breaks. And of course it’s possible to develop a homebrewed investing strategy that manages to beat the market for at least a few years. 

The trick is consistency. 

A strategy that delivers above-market returns with any kind of long-term consistency is a rare thing indeed. Even the best investors, the most prestigious hedge funds, and the brightest financial advisors in the business have bad years sometimes. It seems like an impossible dream. 

Zacks may have found the Holy Grail, and Zacks Home Run Investor may be just what you need to get those market-beating returns you want with the consistency you need. 

What is Zacks?

Leonard Zacks founded Zacks Investment Research in 1978 armed with a PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He’d spent much of the last decade working as quantitative researcher in a brokerage firm, during which he’d come upon a major discovery: that earnings revisions are the most powerful forces affecting stock prices. 

Zacks used his considerable skill and experience to develop the Zacks Performance Rank, a quantitative model that’s formed the basis of a stock research and recommendations empire that’s spanned four and a half decades. 

According to Zacks themselves, the stocks picked using the Zacks Rank system have returned more than twice as much as the S&P 500 over the same period. It’s hard to argue with an average gain of 24.52% per year between 1988 and 2023, and it’s no wonder Zacks is still such a powerhouse in the world of stock research. 

Zacks Home Run Investor

The Zacks Home Run Investor service is a subscription-based program that identifies small and mid-cap companies with the potential for explosive growth. A stock only qualifies for the Home Run Investor portfolio if it’s already been evaluated using the Zacks Rank system and identified as having growth potential of 50%, 100%, 200%, or more. The list itself is kept to about 25 to 30 stocks that are held for a period of 1 to 2 years, with about 2 or 3 trades per month to cut losers and add new opportunities. 

Zacks Home Run Investor has only been around since 2011, but in that time it’s already picked more than 100 stocks that delivered double and triple-digit gains in the period they were held. 

Zacks is so confident that the Home Run Investor program will be worth the money that it even offers a money-back guarantee if the Zacks portfolio underperforms against the S&P 500 during the stock holding period. Actually claiming the refund has some big stipulations attached—minimum number of timely stock purchases, full brokerage documentation, comparisons against he S&P over the same period, etc—but it still speaks to their confidence in their service. 

Neat. How Much is It?

If you click around on Zacks’ website you’ll eventually find yourself at the Home Run Investors Page. Once there you’ll notice two things: first, there are a couple buttons that promise a 30-day trial for $1. Second, the actual price of the service isn’t listed. 

Now, 30 days for $1 is a pretty decent deal. It’s just a little weird that the actual subscription price is only listed in a small paragraph on the page where you actually sign up for the trial. 

The price, as it turns out, is $59 per month, though you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t go digging through the expandable FAQ menu at the very bottom of the page or read everything on the subscription page. It’s kind of an odd move, and not something you’d expect from Zacks. 

Pricing: 

• $1 for first 30 days
• $59 per month after trial 

What Do You Get? 

A subscription to Zacks Home Run Investor—which is apparently an inseparable part of the Zacks Investor Collection package—gets you a few things: 

• Zacks Home Run Investor itself
• Access to Zacks Investor Collection
• Zacks’ 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days

Zacks Home Run Investor

Run by Zacks Aggressive Growth Strategist Brian Bolan, the Home Run Investor program targets low-profile stocks with exceptional growth potential. The actual modeling is complex, but it essentially looks for stocks with high earnings momentum that will hopefully lead to a bunch of quarterly earnings surprises and significant share price growth. 

Here’s how it actually works in practice: 

Once you sign up for the service you’ll get access to the Home Run Investor portfolio. This will give you a look at the current portfolio—usually between 25 and 30 stocks—how long they’ve been held, how much they’ve returned, and other pertinent information. You’ll also be able to access exclusive market commentary that will help keep you up to date on the latest developments with each company and how to trade accordingly. 

The portfolio only sees 2 to 4 trades per month, but each one of those trades is both important and highly time-sensitive. As such, you can enter your email address and/or phone number and receive instant alerts as soon as stocks are added or removed from the portfolio. 

One of the stipulations of receiving a refund on your subscription fees is that you follow the alerts and make your trades within 24 hours of receiving the email or text. Zacks wouldn’t put that on the list if the timeliness of the trades weren’t important, so the alerts feature is more important than it might seem at first blush. 

Finally, the subscription to Home Run Investor comes with a quick start guide for helping you get set up as quickly and painlessly as possible. 

Zacks Investor Collection 

Home Run Investor is just one of the portfolios included in the Zacks Investor Collection. It also includes portfolios like: 

• ETF Investor
• Income Investor
• Stocks Under $10 
• Value Investor
• Zacks Top 10

It also includes: 

• Exclusive market insights
• Zacks Premium research and research tools
• Zacks’ exclusive stock insights and strategies
• Access to a member-only website with open positions and live performance
• Daily briefings on key developments and portfolio changes
• Real-time buy and sell alerts from all private long-term portfolios

This is where the majority of your $59/month is going to. Getting recommendations from Home Run Investor is great, but getting the full range of insights and analyses from Zacks is even better. If the claims of Zacks’ historical performance are true (and the math says they are), the subscription will more than pay for itself in no time at all. 

Bonus Report

The last thing the subscription gets you is a copy of a nice little bonus report called Zacks’ 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. The site doesn’t go into too much more detail than that, but it really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the report includes. 

Conclusion

Zacks Investment Research has made a name for itself as one of the better stock research and recommendations firms out there. It’s not hard to see why; their ranking model delivers impressive above-market returns with remarkable consistency and shows no signs of slowing down. 

Zacks Home Run Investor is just one of the portfolios that Zacks actively manages according to their models. It doesn’t always find every low-profile stock with huge growth potential, but the extraordinary share price growth the winners enjoy is more than enough to justify the $59/month subscription price. 

The post Zacks Home Run Investor Review appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Robinhood is a mobile-first stock and ETF trading platform that’s made a name for itself as a straightforward yet surprisingly powerful investing tool. You, like millions of other users, may already be familiar with Robinhood’s free version, but you may not be aware that they offer a paid membership called Robinhood Gold. 

So what is Robinhood Gold, anyway? How much does it cost? What does it bring to the table? And most importantly, is it worth it? 

Keep reading to find out whether Robinhood Gold is worth the price of admission. 

What it Costs

Robinhood Gold is pretty cheap. At the moment it’s just:

• First 30 days for free
• $5 per month after free trial ends

So you’ll pay at most $55 for the first year, then $60 for each year afterwards. 

For reference, $5 per month is the same it costs to subscribe to a number of different streaming services, including:

• Apple TV+
• Discovery+
• Peacock
• Indieflix

As well as a ton of subscription boxes, newspapers, magazines, and many, many other things. 

So that’s the bar for what you should get for $5 a month. Now keep this question in mind while we go through the benefits of Robinhood Gold: does it provide at least as much value, enjoyment, and/or utility as being able to stream Ted Lasso or Parks and Recreation whenever you want?  

The Big Deals 

Robinhood Gold comes with these major benefits:

• 4.15% interest on uninvested brokerage cash
• Bigger instant deposits
• Professional research from Morningstar
• Level II market data from Nasdaq 
• Margin investing at an interest rate of 7.25% 

Since Robinhood Gold is only $60 per year, there’s a good chance that any one of those benefits (with the possible exception of bigger instant deposits) could provide more than enough value to cover the cost of a subscription. Let’s dig a little deeper into each benefit and see what they bring to the table. 

Interest on Uninvested Cash 

When you start using Robinhood the first thing you do is deposit some cash into your account. You usually use that cash to buy stocks, options, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies; whichever ones you think will go up in price and make you the most money. 

If you don’t feel like buying anything at the moment for whatever reason—maybe you cashed out at the top of the market, or you think the market’s going to stay in negative territory for a while, etc—you can either transfer that cash out to your bank account or just leave it in your Robinhood account. 

If you decide to keep your uninvested cash in your Robinhood account, you can choose to opt into Robinhood’s brokerage cash sweep program. Once you’ve opted in, Robinhood will sweep your uninvested cash to one of its partner banks, where it will be used (and insured) like any other deposit. 

Normal Robinhood members can earn 1.5% annual interest on their uninvested cash. That’s not great. At 1.5% APY you’d only earn $15 in interest on a $1,000 deposit, which is well under the rate of inflation. You’d literally lose money by doing that. 

Robinhood Gold members, on the other hand, earn 4.15% annual interest on their uninvested brokerage cash. That’s $41.50 a year on a $1,000 deposit. It’s still not great, and doesn’t come close to beating the inflation rate, but it’s better than nothing. 

Is it Worth It? 

Leaving out the inflation considerations, in today’s dollars you’d need to let Robinhood sweep $1,446 at an annual rate of 4.15% to earn over $60 in interest, as 

$1,445.78 * 0.415 = 60

Math.

Bigger Instant Deposits

Instant deposits are pretty much exactly what they sound like. Normally it takes some time for a transfer from your bank to make it into your Robinhood account, but instant deposits let you skip all that waiting and get right to investing. 

If you don’t have Robinhood Gold you’re limited to a maximum of $1,000 in instant deposits. So if you were to transfer $10,000 into your account you’d have $1,000 available right away but have to wait on the other $9,000.

Robinhood Gold raises that instant deposit limit by an almost absurd degree. With Gold your instant deposit limit is raised to a max of $50,000 IF your portfolio is already worth at least $50,000. Presumably that works for numbers less than $50,000—you can instant deposit up to $20,000 if your portfolio is worth at least $20,000, etc. 

Is it Worth It?

Sure, if you absolutely need to deposit money in your account right now for fear of missing a lucrative opportunity. Otherwise this is more of an ancillary benefit than a real selling point. 

Professional Research from Morningstar

Morningstar is well known around investing circles. Their research is thorough, timely, and generally top-notch, and many folks subscribe to Morningstar for well over $60 per year for the research alone. Robinhood’s free version doesn’t have the best research and analysis features included, so getting access to Morningstar research can be a big help.

A subscription to Robinhood Gold gets you access to in-depth research reports on around 1,700 different stocks, including up-to-date information about important events, fundamentals, data, and future prospects. There’s a reason people pay Morningstar big bucks for these things.  

Is it Worth It?

This really depends on the kind of trader you are. If you’re the kind of trader who does more trend following and technical analysis/prognostication than fundamental investing, you probably won’t get too much out of this feature. 

If you’re the kind of person who likes poring over dry reports and drilling down into the fundamental factors behind stocks, their prices, and their prospects, you’ll get a lot out of Morningstar research. 

From a pure dollar value perspective, $60 a year is a great deal for getting access to the product of Morningstar’s stable of professional traders and analysts.

Level II Data from Nasdaq 

This is kind of a weird feature. Level II data is all the real-time information from the Nasdaq’s order book, which basically means you’ll get a much more in-depth look at the transactions driving changes in stock prices. 

You’re already familiar with Level I data. It’s just the bid and ask prices, both of which are available on most platforms. Level II data goes a bit deeper. It shows you what’s driving those bid and ask prices, essentially showing you the supply and demand behind stock price levels. It’s great for getting a super granular look at what’s driving stock prices, but that’s about it. 

Is it Worth It? 

This is a tricky one. Most people won’t ever want or need to dive into the Level II weeds. All that intraday data is only useful to people who are actively trading day in and day out, and that just isn’t most people’s bag. 

On the other hand, you’ll probably get a lot of value from this feature if you’re one of those day traders looking for really detailed price information. 

Margin Investing at 7.25% Interest 

If you want to buy stocks, ETFs, options, or crypto, but you don’t have enough money to do it right away, you can ask Robinhood to lend you money on margin.

The general idea is that you’ll borrow the money on margin at a set interest rate, invest the money, and make enough off of the investment to repay the principal and interest with some profit leftover. The higher the interest rate you pay, the harder it is to cross that profitable threshold. 

Normal Robinhood margin is currently lent out at an interest rate of 11.25%. That’s a lot of interest to pay off.

If you sign up for Robinhood Gold, though, your first $1,000 in margin is interest-free, then at 7.25% for any amounts above $1,000. That’s 4% less than with the free version, which is a lot more than it sounds like. 

Is it Worth It?

Again, it depends. If you’re a savvy trader who’s already comfortable using margin then yes, it probably will be worth it to you. 

This feature probably won’t be too valuable to you if you aren’t the kind of person who likes to play with borrowed money. Why? Simple: you won’t use it. 

Is Robinhood Gold Worth It?

Robinhood Gold costs $5 a month. For that price you get a small but diverse set of features that can very well pay for themselves. 

If you want to earn interest on your uninvested cash, it’s worth it. 

If you want to deposit tons of money and have it available immediately, it’s worth it. 

If you’re a value investor and want interesting research from Morningstar, it’s definitely worth it. 

If you’re a day trader looking for more granular price data, it’s worth it. 

And if you want to invest on margin it’s absolutely worth it. 

Long story short: Robinhood Gold is probably worth it. 

The post Is Robinhood Gold Worth It? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Square Inc (now Block, Inc) launched Cash App back in 2013 for one purpose: to be an app. For cash. It wasn’t a guaranteed win at the time. Their biggest competitor, Venmo, had already been on the market for four years, and Cash App had a lot of ground to cover if it wanted to supplant Venmo as the leader in the peer-to-peer payment game. But here we are, ten years later, and Cash App is neck-and-neck with the biggest players in the space.  

Over 70 million people use Cash App on a regular basis. What started as a simple electronic payment app has grown by leaps and bounds, accumulating feature after feature along the way. Now you can receive direct deposits and ACH payments, use a Cash App debit card for purchases and ATM withdrawals, and even buy and sell stocks (and Bitcoin, if you’re into crypto). Block, Inc has negotiated for discounts and special deals for users of their debit cards. It’s built social media-like features into the app and turned it into a pseudo social network. 

Cash App does a lot of things for a lot of people. But how well does it do those things?

It’s An App. For Cash 

Cash App was originally built to be a peer-to-peer payment network, so let’s start there. 

There’s a reason Cash App is one of the most popular payment apps: It’s good at what it does. If you’ve used Cash App you already know how easy it is to use. If you have someone’s phone number, email, or $cashtag (i.e. username) you can just punch it in, select the amount to send or request, and bam. Done. The app also generates QR codes that you can scan if you don’t feel like typing. 

You can hold any money you receive or deposit into the app indefinitely, transfer it to your bank, use it to pay other people, or use it as a sort of checking account for use with a Cash App debit card. It’s all pretty simple and seamless. 

Oh, and speaking of debit cards…

Cash or Debit 

Cash App isn’t limited to digital purchases. You’ve always technically been able to pay businesses using the app, but now you can actually get a physical Cash App debit card linked to your account. You can also use the QR code feature to make payments IRL, but you might as well go for the debit card. 

Not only does the debit card function exactly like any other debit card, it also comes with the chance to earn discounts on all kinds of different stuff. The “Boosts” (discounts) are always being updated and added to, and some of the deals can be pretty appealing. The only downside is that you can only have one Boost active at a time, so you have to actually manually swap them out if you want to get discounts at different establishments. 

Pro Tip

When you sign up for Cash App and refer your friends, you get a CASH bonus deposited to your Cash App account.

Banking (Sort Of)

Cash App partners with a handful of banks to offer rudimentary banking services. You can basically turn your profile into a sort of checking account. It’s a free service with no monthly minimums or fees associated with it, and it comes with a bunch of features you’d normally only find at an actual bank. 

A Cash App account isn’t just a place to park your money. You can set up direct deposits straight to your Cash App account, pay bills, use any ATM (with automatic fee reimbursement if you direct deposit more than $300 a month), and even enjoy the same FDIC protection as accounts at major banks. You can even choose to round up to the nearest dollar on every purchase and direct the extra cents to a Cash App savings or investment account. 

The savings accounts that you can open on Cash App aren’t as impressive as their checking-type accounts, unfortunately. Sure, you can set up automatic deposits and set personalized savings goals that track how much money you need to pay for a phone or a vacation or something, but that’s pretty much it. As far as we can tell, they don’t pay interest, they aren’t FDIC-protected, and they don’t have any other features you’d expect from an actual savings account. Still, though, it’s nice to have the option if you don’t feel like opening a savings account with a real bank.  

Investing on Cash App

You can do some basic investing on Cash App, though it’s limited to trading Bitcoin, stocks, fractional stocks, and ETFs. The investing functionality is fairly barebones, but it’s pretty clearly meant for novices, not veterans. You can start an investing account with just a few taps, for one, and you can start investing with as little as $1 in your account. 

Cash App isn’t bad as far as basic investing platforms go. There are no commissions, the interface is easy to use and understand, and there are (primarily picture-based) tutorials available to help people of all ages and levels of sophistication understand how the stock market works. 

You may not find in-depth research or interactive charts with customizable metrics and technical indicators, but you will find all the basics a newbie would need to start getting into investing. The app will show you lists of the top movers of the day, collections of stocks by industry and general category, a small collection of relevant news stories, and a list of the stocks that Cash App users have traded the most that day. 

The stock data itself is similarly basic. Charts with a few different time frames, some fundamental information like market cap and earnings, and a few other tidbits. There’s some analysis and very general opinions available, and you can set up alerts for price surges etc, but that’s about it. It’s pretty basic stuff. That said, Cash App does have a few interesting stock-related features going for it. 

First: Cash App is one of the few platforms of its kind that lets you buy fractional shares of stock. That means you can buy bits and pieces of really expensive stocks without having to shell out hundreds (or thousands) for the pleasure of buying into the business. 

Second: You can set up automatic purchases on a schedule, when the stocks hit a certain price, or even when you round up on a purchase using your Cash App debit card. 

Finally: You can send stocks to other people using the app. You can send stocks as gifts (if you’re one of those weird uncles/aunts), transfer them to another account, or even buy things using stocks or ETFs instead of money. 

Oh, and you can also trade Bitcoin (and no other cryptocurrencies). It follows all the same rules as stocks and ETFs. Not a whole lot more to say about that. 

Pro Tip

When you sign up for Cash App and refer your friends, you get a CASH bonus deposited to your Cash App account.

Pay Your Taxes on Cash App

The last big feature we should cover is the—kind of bizarre—ability to pay your taxes using Cash App. It’s a free service, it includes free audit defense, and has some neat features like being able to populate the information using pictures of W-2s. Cash App also has something called a “Max Refund Guarantee,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Finally, you can also have Cash App deposit your refund directly into your account up to six days earlier than you’d get it if you didn’t use the app. 

Conclusion

Cash App is a great payment app. It’s streamlined. It’s easy to use. It’s packed with features that help get un- and underbanked people engaged with the financial system. If you’re someone who already has bank accounts and an investment portfolio you probably won’t even bother with most of Cash App’s secondary features, and that’s fine. The important thing is that those features are there for people who want or need them. 

The post Cash App Review appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Introduction

Healthcare just keeps getting more expensive.

Insurance premiums shoot up year after year, employers are willing to cover less and less of the cost, and there’s no sign of anything changing anytime soon.

Americans are increasingly turning to high-deductible plans to save money on premiums, but they don’t call them high-deductible plans for nothing.

Millions of Americans are just one illness or injury away from thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket expenses that could push them off a financial cliff.

So far no solution has been found to our healthcare system’s outrageous affordability problem, but at least one has emerged as a relatively efficient way to prevent unexpected health events from completely wiping out people with high-deductible plans: health savings accounts (HSA).

HSAs are essentially savings accounts designed to help people with high-deductible insurance plans reduce their out-of-pocket costs.

An HSA owner can contribute a certain amount of pre-tax income to their account each year—$3,850 for individuals and $7,750 for families as of 2023—and can use those funds to pay for eligible medical expenses tax-free.

Individuals and families are eligible for HSAs if they select health plans with deductibles of at least $1,500 or $3,000, respectively.

There are a few more conditions and caveats that come with HSAs, but that’s the gist of it.

Now to the important part: Even though HSAs come with your health plan, they aren’t actually provided or administered by health insurance companies. Instead, insurance companies partner with third-party trustees to manage their HSAs, and those trustees can vary greatly in terms of the services they provide, fees they charge, investment options they offer, and so on.

Your experience can differ greatly depending on the HSA and HSA provider you pick. It’s important to give this some thought before you pull the trigger, so here are a few suggestions to get you started.

5. HSA Bank

HSA Bank doesn’t have that many fancy features or physical locations. What it does have is HSA expertise, a 10-minute signup process, and a pretty decent array of investment options.

Pros:

–          Incredibly easy to sign up

–          Investment options from TD Ameritrade and Devenir

–          No fees…IF you keep your balance above $3,000

–          24/7 client assistant center

–          Can also opt for standard savings account interest rates if investing isn’t your thing

Cons:

–          $2.25/month account management fee if your balance is below $3,000

–           Some investment options have associated fees

–          Can be charged an investment fee if your balance is below $5,000

–          Charges $25 to close your account

4. Fidelity

Fidelity offers two different HSAs: the Fidelity HSA and the Fidelity Go HSA. Both are excellent choices, though for slightly different reasons.

Fidelity HSA

Pros:  

–          No minimum amount required to open an account

–          Self-directed investments with commission-free trades for US stock and ETFs

–          Includes investment tool and professionally curated list of mutual funds

–          Can set up automatic investments

–          Can spend funds with Fidelity HSA debit card or Fidelity BillPay

–          Simple reimbursement process for expenses paid out of pocket

Cons:

–          Some investment options have underlying fees

–          Fees can range up to 1.33% or higher

–          Can charge your employer up to $48/year for “recordkeeping” fee; employer will probably pass that on to you

Fidelity Go HSA

Pros:

–          No minimum amount to open an account

–          Fidelity manages your investments

–          Investments go to Fidelity Flex mutual funds that don’t charge management fees

–          Similar reimbursement process as Fidelity HSA

–          Easily transfer money to Fidelity HSA account for paying medical expenses

Cons:

–          Annual 0.35% fee for accounts with more than $25,000

–          Can take up to 10 days to receive withdrawn funds

3. HealthEquity

HealthEquity doesn’t find its way onto so many “best HSA” lists because of bribery (that said, we are open to it). Employers and individuals alike choose HealthEquity HSAs because they offer a great product, good service, and pretty decent number of investment options.

Employers like HealthEquity because of their fast onboarding process, easy HSA transfers, and streamlined administration features, but we aren’t really here to talk about how employers feel. The features individuals care about are:

Pros:

–          Well-designed mobile app with spending tracking and simple dashboard

–          24/7 support and extensive FAQ/help guides

–          Wide range of low-fee Vanguard mutual funds

–          Includes investment advisory tools

–          Robo-advisor available for hands-off investing

–          Debit card provided for spending on medical expenses

Cons:

–          Some annual maintenance fees, may be as much as $36/year

–          Annual investment fees of 0.25%

2. Bank of America

Bank of America’s HSAs are as good or better than the rest of the services they offer. The sheer scale of the bank opens up a lot of doors, and their physical footprint means you can go talk to them in person if you need to, which can be comforting for some people.

Pros:

–          Access and manage account via mobile app or web portal

–          24/7 customer support online or on the phone

–          Debit card included for paying medical bills

–          Long list of Merril Lynch mutual funds available for investing

–          Can set up automatic investments/cash transfers

Cons:

–          $1,000 minimum investment threshold

–          Low savings account interest

–          Small account management fees (about $2.50/month)

–          Some mutual funds carry additional fees

1. Lively

Lively is fairly new to the scene, but what they lack in experience they make up for with a customer-first ethos and an HSA experience designed to make everything as easy and painless as possible. And while they may not have as many investment options as some of the bigger players, they have literally everything else you need in an HSA.

Pros:

–          No account opening fees

–          No management fees

–          No fees period

–          Simple online portal and app

–          Debit card included

–          Streamlined money transferring, reimbursement, investing, etc processes

Cons:

–          Only two investment options

–          Some small associated investment fees

–          Not as established as other companies

If you’d like to learn more about Lively, check out our Lively HSA Review!

Conclusion

There are a lot of options out there when it comes to picking an HSA. Some are great, some are okay, and some aren’t even worth mentioning.

If you aren’t convinced by any of the five HSAs listed here, hopefully they’ll at least be a good place to start.

Just remember to do your own research and take your time—though you can always transfer one HSA to another provider if you feel like it, so the stakes aren’t that high. 

But seriously, go with Lively. They really know what they’re doing over there.

The post Best HSA Accounts appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.