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.

Introduction

America has some of the best doctors, nurses, healthcare facilities, and medical technology in the world.

Our universities and research institutions churn out medical breakthroughs on a daily basis, and our healthcare professionals make medical miracles happen.

There’s no denying that the American healthcare system is capable of incredible things.

It’s also incredibly expensive.  

The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) found that 19% of US households carried at least some amount of medical debt as of 2017, and there’s little hope that the situation has improved since then.

Some two-thirds of bankruptcies are caused by medical debt.

Policies like the Affordable Care Act were intended to make health insurance more accessible and affordable, but they’ve done little to curtail the costs of care or slow down the meteoric rise in premiums we see year after year.

High-deductible health plans (HDHPs) have become increasingly popular over the years, particularly among younger consumers who value lower premiums over lower deductibles.

Enrollment in HDHPs without health savings accounts (HSAs) among the roughly 60% of Americans between the ages of 18-64 with employment-based healthcare rose from 10.6% to 24.5% between 2007 and 2017.

Barebones HDHPs do have lower premiums than other plans, but that comes with the massive caveat of deductibles that could easily drain the accounts of HDHP subscribers should they ever need more than basic care, leaving the financial situations of millions perched precariously between health and bankruptcy.

Though no perfect solution has been found to control the country’s out-of-control healthcare costs, pairing HDHPs with health savings accounts has emerged as one of the better ways to minimize premiums while providing a financial cushion in case of unexpected health events.

Health savings accounts have been growing in popularity—HDHPs with HSAs comprised 18.9% of employer-supported health insurance plans as of 2017—though uptake is still relatively low compared to HDHPs without HSAs.

Although the idea behind HSAs is simple, finding a company to provide and manage HSAs isn’t quite as straightforward.

It can be hard to tell which firms in the HSA space are deserving of your business, and it isn’t a choice that should be made lightly.

Take Lively, the subject of this article, for instance. How well do they do what they do? How do they stack up against the competition? And most importantly: Do they deserve your business and your trust?

Health Savings Accounts

Health savings accounts are tax-exempt accounts that holders of HDHPs can use to set aside funds for future medical expenses. As of 2023, individuals and families are eligible for HSAs if they select health plans with deductibles of at least $1,500 or $3,000, respectively (so, you know, almost everyone).

Contributions to HSAs are made on a pre-tax basis by eligible individuals—IE plan holders—or on their behalf by employers or family members.

Any funds contributed to an HSA, aside from those provided by employers, are deductible from the individual’s tax return whether or not they itemize deductions.

The government sets limits for how much one can contribute to their HSA every year, with 2023’s maximum contributions being capped at $3,850 or $7,750 for individuals and families, respectively.

Money kept in an HSA can be used to pay for deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and other eligible medical expenses (though typically not insurance premiums) at any time.

Unused funds roll over to the next year, and an HSA will stay with its owner if they change employers or leave the workforce altogether.

HSA funds can be withdrawn for nonmedical purposes after the owner turns 65, but will incur a 20% penalty and income taxes on amounts withdrawn for nonmedical purposes before then.  

Lively HSA

Lively is bringing the HSA into the modern era to make it easy to save costs of health TODAY and plan for the costs of tomorrow.

Moreover, like many Health Savings Accounts…

…Lively makes it easier to manage rising costs through Health Savings Accounts (HSA).

All HSAs are provided and administered by trustees like banks, insurance companies, and other IRS-approved entities.

Some trustees treat HSAs like savings accounts and pay (tax-free) interest at market rates, while others take a more active approach and invest HSA funds on behalf of their owners.

Every trustee has their own set of costs, benefits, and considerations, all of which should be considered before opening an account with them. Some of the more important criteria are:

• Fees
• Account management costs
• Investment options
• Minimum account requirements
• How hard it is to open an account
• Debit card access

Here’s how Lively stands up to those criteria.

Fees

Lively doesn’t charge any fees at all for individual HSAs.

No startup fees, no maintenance fees, no management fees, nothing.

They do charge a small 0.5% fee to access a HSA guided portfolio, and an annual $24 fee for a Schwab health savings brokerage account, but both of those features are completely optional.  

There aren’t many other HSA providers that offer what Lively does without imposing at least some fees.

It’s so rare, in fact, that it actually begs the question: How does Lively make money?

A cynical person might assume that there actually are some hidden fees or some other catch, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It seems like Lively makes its money by charging fees for additional services and charging employers $2.95 per employee per month for HSAs—effectively using institutional dollars to subsidize individual savers.

It might actually be a case of genuine altruism in the business world. Go figure.

Ease of Use and Account Creation

Lively wants to make opening and managing an HSA as easy as humanly possible, and it seems like they’re pulling it off.

Their all-online account creation process is quick and easy, the interfaces of both their browser-based platform and their app are streamlined to the point of being self-explanatory, and there’s a whole library’s worth of tutorials and FAQs to help you through any confusing aspects of the process.

And if you really can’t figure out how to do it, you can always reach out to Lively’s support staff and have them walk you through it.

The platform’s commitment to ease-of-use doesn’t end when your account is up and running.

It just takes a second to connect your HSA to your bank account, perform a one-time transfer, or set up sweep or recurring transfers at any amount or interval that’s most convenient for you.

They’ll even take on the lion’s share of the work if you want to transfer an HSA to Lively from another provider.

Managing your account is just as simple as the rest of the experience you’ll get with Lively.

Both the web and app dashboards provide itemized records of all incoming and outgoing transactions that are updated in near real-time.

Spending and Reimbursement

You have a couple options for paying for care, deductibles, and other eligible medical expenses from your Lively HSA account.

The first payment option is the physical and/or digital (via Apple Pay or similar) debit card that Lively provides its account holders.

The cards are functionally identical to any other debit cards save for the fact that they’re connected to HSAs and are intended only for use on deductibles, care, and other eligible medical expenses.

Though there’s nothing exceptional about them, it’s really hard to beat the convenience of being able to pay medical expenses directly instead of via a bureaucratic tangle of paperwork and red tape.

If you don’t pay for your expenses using the provided debit cards, Lively has a robust and nearly effortless reimbursement process in place to make sure you get repaid in a hurry.

It’s hard to say exactly how long it’ll take to get reimbursed without actually trying it for yourself, but submitting the reimbursement requests themselves shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes.

Investments

Lively lets you invest your HSA funds in either a Schwab Health Savings Brokerage Account or a HSA Guided Portfolio from Devenir.

The Schwab option gives you a lot of control over where your HSA funds go, with a long list of options encompassing stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds to choose from. What you do with your portfolio is up to you, though they also let you give your financial advisor access to your portfolio to handle the investments for you.

The Schwab brokerage account comes at the price of $24 annually. It’s also subject to a number of transaction costs and other fees, though you can avoid most of those fees by investing $3,000 or more.

There’s no minimum investment size for the Devenir guided portfolio option, but it does come with an annual fee of 0.50% of invested assets. This option lets you select from a list of funds to choose from, some of which may also come with their own management fees.

Lively HSA Customer Service

You can reach Lively Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM PT.

Phone: 1 (888) 576-4837

E-mail: hello@livelyme.com

There is also a Support Center with HSA Guides, FAQs, and an HSA calculator.

The HSA Guides will cover topics like:

• Terminology 101
• Benefits of an HSA
• How to maximize your savings
• Health savings account vs. Flexible savings account
• Using your HSA funds
• And much more!

That is right – the HSA guides cover everything that financial experts have to say about:

• Getting a health savings account; and
• Using it effectively to save for medical expenses and reduce your taxable income.

The HSA Calculator can show you:

• Your HSA savings and investments potential over time.
• How much you are eligible to contribute to your HSA.
• How one health plan cost compares to other health plans costs.

The Lively HSA FAQ section can answer questions like:

• What records do I need to keep to justify spending money on a qualified medical expense?
• Why should I put money into my HSA over some other savings vehicle (e.g., 401(k))?
• What happens if I use my money to pay for a non-qualified expense?
• If I have a family, can I still have an HSA?

So, if you have any questions – Lively will likely be able to answer those for you.

Conclusion

Lively is an excellent choice for individuals looking to open an HSA.

Their signup process is short and sweet, their interface is clear and easy to use, and they’ve gone to great lengths to make what could be an obnoxious experience into a no-brainer in every sense.

It would be nice to see some other investment options, particularly if those options were as fee-free as the rest of Lively, but it’s really not that big a deal when you take the rest of what Lively offers into account.

If you’d like to check out some other HSA options, read our list of the Best HSA Accounts!

The post Lively HSA Review appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

There are tons and tons of services out there that promise the best research, the best advice, the best proprietary algorithms and advice, and the best investment tools that can do everything but tuck you into bed at night.

Some of them are reasonably priced, but a lot of these services seem to think that it’s okay to charge a mortgage payment’s worth of subscription fees.

The average independent trader doesn’t need, want, or have the spare cash to subscribe to more than one of these services, so it’s important to do your due diligence before you enter any credit card details.

You’ve read the title already, so you know we’re here to talk about Benzinga Pro.

What does it offer? What does it do best? Is it better for some investors than others? And, most importantly:

Is Benzinga Pro worth it?

Let’s dive into our Benzinga Pro review to find out.

What is Benzinga?

The Detroit-based Benzinga.com was launched in 2010 by a man named Jason Raznick with the goal of empowering a new generation of investors and helping people build wealth.

The site has financial news, tickers, statistics, and a wide knowledge base on personal finance and investing/trading just about every security under the sun.

Raznick intended the site to be a comprehensive resource for individual investors by offering the information they need to make informed decisions, rather than providing direct financial advice.

The site has expanded over the years to encompass additional asset classes as well as becoming a source for original financial journalism, as well as offering numerous paid services including stock picks, trade alerts, and educational programs. (Read our review of Benzinga as a whole here.)

Oh, and Benzinga Pro. They have that now, too.

What is Benzinga Pro?

Benzinga Pro is an offshoot of Benzinga that was originally meant to be a fancy news feed.

Over time, however, the browser-based service has added services like an event calendar, stock scanning and screening, watchlists, detailed analysis, custom alerts, real-time daily gainer and loser tracking, signal tracking, live training, and the ability to get your own trading mentor.

In other words, it does a lot.

You can access Benzinga Pro from any browser on desktop or on mobile.

You can also download the Benzinga Pro app if that’s more your speed.

You can try out Benzinga Pro for free, though you’ll have to shell out a subscription fee if you want to keep using it after the trial lapses.

How much is the subscription, you ask?

Great question.

Can You Put a Price on Useful Information? (Yes)

There are four different membership tiers of Benzinga Pro: Free, Basic, Essential, and Options Mentorship.

Free Tier

• $0 Monthly

• $0 Annually

Features:

• Nasdaq Basic 15-minute delayed news quotes

• Bazinga BZ Wire newsfeed – search, no filters

• Watchlist

• Current session’s movers

• Details tool with key stock stats

• Charts

Benzinga Pro’s free tier is surprisingly robust considering its price.

You get charts, you get free key stock stats, you get a functional if stripped-down newsfeed, and you even get a watchlist for keeping an eye on securities you’re interested in.

Basic Tier

• $27 Monthly

• No Annual Option

The Benzinga Pro Basic tier includes all the Basic features in addition to:

• Full newsfeed (but no advanced filtering)

• Chat feature

• Movers from all sessions

• Watchlist alerts

• Access to Benzinga Premium offers on Benzinga.com

This is kind of a weird tier.

On the one hand, it’s a lot less expensive than the Essential and Options Mentorship tiers, but on the other hand you may not think it offers enough value to justify the $27 subscription.

The full newsfeed is great, as is the access to the Benzinga Premium articles.

You’re basically getting a subscription to a great digital newspaper.

That’s definitely worth something, at least.

The rest of the stuff may not be quite as valuable to you unless you really want to chat with other Benzinga Pro users, get automatic alerts from your watchlist, or find out what the biggest movers were in prior trading sessions.

Essential Tier

• $177 Monthly

• $1,404 Annually ($117/Month Paid Annually)

The Essential Tier includes all the features from the two cheaper tiers as well as:

• Nasdaq Basic real-time quotes

• Advanced newsfeed (filter by price, volume, float, and other technical indicators)

• Audio squawk for equities and options

• Calendar

• Signals

• Unusual options activity (additional $27.97 monthly)

• Unlockable bonuses

• Options trading newsletter starting on 3^rd month

• Enhanced options trading newsletter starting on 6^th month

This is apparently the most popular tier, and it isn’t hard to see why.

The Essentials tier includes all kinds of important features that you can’t get in the Free or Basic tiers, plus a bunch of features that may be more than worth the price of admission.

Real-time Nasdaq quotes combined with the charting tool and key stock stats will give you the power to watch stocks and make decisions with lightning speed (great for you day traders out there), and that’s barely scratching the surface.

Benzinga’s newsfeed has always been one if its biggest selling points, and the version you get with the Essential tier has all the information and the advanced filtering features you need to chase down your hunches and get pertinent information as soon as it’s available.

The calendar is a calendar.

The signals, real-time scanning, and audio squawk features will help you stay clued in and on top of the market while you scour the data to find investing opportunities—again, great for day traders.

The unusual options activity feature comes with an extra premium, but anyone who knows how to take advantage of the feature will definitely get their money’s worth.

Tack on the additional options trading newsletters that come after your 3^rd and 6^th month of subscribing and you’ve got yourself a recipe for success.

Options Mentorship

• $347 Monthly

• $3,372 Annually ($281/Month Paid Annually)

The Options Mentorship tier includes everything from the other tiers as well as:

• Trading mentorship and education from Nic Chahine, leading trader

• Access to options inner circle chat room

• Regular market overview to match Nic’s winning trading strategy

• Unusual options activity

The Options Mentorship tier is not messing around.

This tier is designed for individual investors who’ve reached the limit of what they can teach themselves and want to truly immerse themselves in the art of trading.

This tier gives you exclusive live training from an experienced trader (hence the price. Guy’s gotta eat).

If you pay attention and take good notes you may even find yourself making a hell of a lot more than $347 per month after Nic’s through with you.

The options inner circle chat room could be cool, but it’s hard to say without joining and saying what’s up.

Presumably you and the other people in the chat room will be able to talk about all the unusual options activity that’s happening, so that might be neat.

Well? Is it Worth It? Benzinga Pro, I Mean

Let’s do this in order, shall we?

• Free: Worth it. Duh. It’s free.

• Basic: Maybe. You get some good stuff, true, but it’s 100% up to you whether it’s worth the price.

• Essential: Worth it. This tier is popular for a reason. It’s more than worth the price of admission, especially if you’re into options trading.

• Options Mentorship: Probably worth it. In theory, the advice and education you get from the mentorship and the regular market overview could be worth their weight in gold, but again, it’s hard to say from the outside.

Conclusion/Recommendation

Benzinga Pro has a lot to offer, and hopefully reading this Benzinga Pro review has helped illuminate some of the valuable features the platform provides.

Every one of the subscription tiers brings its own kind of value to the table, and you’ll probably be happy with any of them.

That said:

We recommend you start with the Free tier to get a sense of what the platform is like.

If you don’t like it you can move on without spending a dime.

If you like what you see (and if you can finagle your way to a free trial of the higher tiers) you should go ahead and leapfrog over the Basic tier and right to Essential.

You’ll spend more than you would if you stuck to Basic, true, but it’ll be worth it.

Then, once you’re ready, make the switch to the Options Mentorship tier.

And if you do end up on the Options Mentorship tier, do us a favor and tell Nic we say hi. 

The post Benzinga Pro Review: Is it Worth It? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

The world of finance and investing is one of high stakes and constant change.

Prices rise and fall, companies come and go.

Investing used to be the exclusive purview of small groups of pinstriped men with slicked-back hair and BMWs they paid for by selling junk stocks to rubes and charging exorbitant fees to manage the portfolios of the well-to-do.  

Things started changing when the internet started looking less like a toy for nerds to play with and more like a game-changer.

E*Trade was the first of the digital self-serve brokerages.

It promised a service it couldn’t yet provide: to give regular Joes the ability to trade like Wall Streeters from anywhere in the world.

Traders and asset managers from Manhattan to San Francisco laughed and shook their heads. At first.

The Great Recession threw another Lehman Brothers-sized wrench into the financial machinery underpinning the economy.

A huge chunk of the professional investor class found themselves unceremoniously kicked to the curb over the course of a few short months.

An entire industry crumbled in the blink of an eye, but from the rubble rose something new.

And that’s where Benzinga comes in.

This Benzinga review will tell you how Benzinga changed the game.

The Who, the What, and the Why

Benzinga.com launched in 2010.

The site was the brainchild of a man named Jason Raznick, a prolific businessman and investor who saw an opportunity in the new class of independent investors that arose in the wake of the Great Recession.

Raznick recognized the need for real-time, in-depth financial news, actionable trading ideas, and analyst-quality information for new and newly independent investors.

He wanted to help independent investors navigate the markets with the same access and fluency as the traders still employed by the big banks and investing firms, and he envisioned a website that could provide everything an investor would need on one website.

And thus, Benzinga was born.

The Value Proposition

Benzinga has grown from a small financial outlet to a one-stop digital shop for all things finance.

Over 25 million readers visit the site every month, drawn by Benzinga’s mix of original content, curated news feed, and wealth of investing ideas for everything from options to cryptocurrency and back.

Unlike some similar sites, Benzinga is more than willing to shift its focus in response to its users’ preferences.

When an asset class like crypto or NFTs rise in popularity, Benzinga responds by adding a whole new section on their front page with bespoke coverage from their writers supplemented by carefully curated content sourced from reputable sites around the net.

Benzinga’s much-vaunted news feed—even the 100% free version you get without signing up for a subscription—is both wide and deep.

You can spend half of your day reading through the content on Benzinga’s front page alone, and that barely scratches the surface.

You want news about certain sectors or industries? Analysis and news coverage of specific companies? How about reports on company earnings, dividends, buybacks, management, and IPOs? How about mergers and acquisitions, legal issues, the implications of government policies, and even a bit of politics here and there?

Benzinga has you covered. And again, that’s only scratching the surface.

Monitoring Markets

One of Benzinga’s biggest benefits is its expansive coverage of just about every market you can think of from all manner of altitudes and angles.

The site has a semi real-time ticker at the top of the page that tracks the biggest movers and most interesting trades of the day, plus a search bar that lets you find specific companies by name or stock symbol.

Speaking of specific companies, if you click on any of the tickers or search for a stock you’ll be taken to a page that’s absolutely packed with information on that company/security.

There are important statistics like the daily and 52-week range, a chart that you can adjust to show the performance from as little as 1 day to as long as 10 years.

And yes, you can find a good bit of that info on Yahoo Finance or similar services, but Benzinga doesn’t stop at the surface level.

Each stock/security’s page has stats and charts, sure, but the real value comes from all the extras that Benzinga throws in.

Each page has a collection of related news stories and press releases, a set of frequently asked questions, links to buy the stock or security, and lists of stock ideas and short interest provided by both analysts and community members.

The fact that Benzinga provides all of this for free is incredibly impressive, to say the least.

Investing Ideas

Benzinga doesn’t want to tell you what to do with your money.

They’re more interested in helping you become fluent in all things finance and investing so you can grow as a trader by providing actionable information and letting you make your own decisions. Hence the trading ideas section.

The front page of the trading ideas section of the site is home to an ever-changing lineup of stories on individual stocks and all the important events that may help or harm their share prices, plus stories on cryptocurrency, cannabis, penny stocks, and anything else that may present an opportunity for profitable trades.

Once you’re done with the articles, however, you’ll soon click your way into a very different kind of trading ideas.

The Covey analyst metrics page gives you a selection of trades made by the best 10% of a huge, open community of analysts, complete with a chart comparing their performance versus the S&P 500 (hint: it’s higher than the S&P).

The long ideas section is home to stories that may help inform long-term strategies (duh), and the short ideas section has a similarly descriptive name.

There are pages for technicals, for ideas based on external press, for Jim Cramer-based ideas, and even for rumors. And then there are the lists of the best penny stocks, ETFs, swing trade stocks, blue chips, and so on.

Finance Gets Personal

The last free services that Benzinga offers are a collection of options for comparing stock, forex, bond, etc. brokers, lists of top stocks, offers for all kinds of insurance, and links to help you find a mortgage broker.

There’s even a list of alternative investment pages that help you get into investing in things like art, gold, watches, real estate, and land.

One-stop shop indeed.

The Verdict

As our review has shown…Benzinga is awesome.

The sheer amount of content, information, analysis, and investing ideas dwarf most other similar services out there, and all without spending a dime on a subscription.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or a veteran, Benzinga has something to offer you that you can’t find anywhere else.

It may be the exclusive coverage. Or the broad range of subject matter. Or the strength of the analysis that Benzinga gets from its partners.

Whatever the case, you should give it a shot. It’ll be worth your time. 

The post Benzinga Review appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Now you know a little about mutual funds and how to find the ones that best fit your investing strategy.

But all the knowledge in the world won’t change one immutable fact:

Researching mutual funds is boring.

You could spend hours, days, or weeks doing research and comparing every mutual fund with every other fund, sure, but wouldn’t it be nice if you had a handsome genius pointing you in the right direction?

The 411 on 401(k)s

Pensions are by far the best retirement plans (for workers).

Unfortunately, we don’t have that option anymore, so most of us have had to accept 401(k)s instead.

A 401(k) in the right hands can be a very effective tool for saving for retirement; it lowers taxable income, defers taxes on capital gains, and is relatively easy to set up—relatively being the key word.

The average 401(k) plan offers you a choice of mutual funds with investment strategies that range from safe and predictable to risky and subject to the whims of the market.

Whether a fund is right for you depends on a few different factors.

• Years to Retirement: Younger workers have more time to invest and earn back any money they might lose in the market, so they can generally pick riskier investments. The opposite is true of older workers.

• Risk Tolerance: Are you okay with the idea of losing money and/or watching the value of your portfolio bounce up and down? If yes, consider riskier investments. If no, stick to safer investments.

• Target Amount for Retirement: Use a retirement calculator (like one from Personal Capital) to figure out how much you need to have saved before you retire and work backwards until you know what kind of returns your 401(k) needs to generate.

What to Look for in a Fund

There are a couple of things to keep in mind regardless of your investing strategy:

• Plan for being in it for the long haul: If you want to get the full tax benefits of a 401(k), you’re going to have to sit on it until you’re at least 59.5 years old. That pretty much rules out day trading and short-term investing.

• Avoid funds with high fees: Some fees are unavoidable. Even the most passively managed funds have to pay for themselves somehow. That said, there are entirely too many funds out there that charge the kind of fees you’d expect from Ticketmaster that turn a $20 ticket into an $89.99 ordeal.

No Fees Please

As a general rule of thumb: actively managed funds impose more fees than index funds and other, more passively managed mutual funds. The reasoning is fairly straightforward.

Actively managed funds are, well, managed. Actively.

As in, there are actual human beings doing research, picking securities, and making trading decisions.

Do those people really earn a full 1% or more of every shareholder’s investments every year? Of course not. But that’s the deal.

Other Factors to Consider

Once you have an idea of your risk tolerance, the amount of fees you’re comfortable with paying, and a general sense of the returns you need to reach your retirement goals, it’s time to take a look at the actual mutual funds on offer.

While you’re perusing the lists, keep these things in mind:

Asset mix is an important factor when you’re considering how you want to invest your money.

It’s usually not a great idea to put all your money into one asset class or industry, so take a second to familiarize yourself with each mutual fund’s portfolio.

Most mutual funds specialize in certain asset classes or industries.

Some are pretty well diversified by design, but you may have to split your investment between two or more funds to achieve the coverage you want. Remember: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

A mutual fund’s past performance should also be one of your prime considerations, especially if you’re looking at actively managed funds.

It’s one thing if you’re just plunking your money in an index fund that tracks the S&P 500, but it’s another thing entirely if you’re trusting a human being with a less-than-stellar track record with your hard-earned cash.

A Penny Saved is…Not Enough

The best time to start saving for retirement is right now.

Yes, it’s hard to put money aside when the economy is this whacky and wages are this low.

Still, do it. You’ll be glad you pinched a penny or two when it’s time to leave the workforce.

All mutual funds aren’t created equal. And while you don’t have to stick with the funds you pick for the rest of your career, it’s still worth it to take the time to examine your options and make an informed decision. 

The post What Mutual Funds Should I Add to My 401(k)? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

So now you know a bit about mutual funds: what they are, how they work, how they can benefit your portfolio, and how they can sometimes charge fees that border on the absurd.

But don’t go thinking you’re a mutual fund master just yet.

There’s a lot of daylight between knowing the basics of mutual funds and actually profiting off that knowledge.

We can’t tell you what to buy, how much to spend, or what you want to do with the shares, but we can help you identify the funds you want to buy, or at least get you started.

The next step is to talk about how to research mutual funds.

Tools Are (Not) For Fools

There are currently around 7,500 mutual funds operating in the US at the end of 2021.

Finding the right mutual funds for your portfolio is like trying to find a needle in a haystack: it’s going to take forever if you do it by hand.

The right combination of tools can make finding good mutual funds significantly easier in the same way that a metal detector and a magnet turn haystack-searching into a 10-minute chore instead of a days-long ordeal.

There are dozens of companies that offer research, recommendations, and search tools you can use to sift through the lists of mutual funds—it’s just a matter of finding the right ones.

For example:

• Zacks: Has a free search tool that lets you search by category and rank, displays a smattering of stats, and includes rating reports produced by Zacks themselves. Read our Zacks review here.

• Fidelity: Lets you search by fund rating, family, fee structure, asset class, and so on.

• Morningstar: Has tons of research on all kinds of different securities. Offers an incredible range of reports and ratings. Some are free, but most are only for subscribers. Read our Morningstar review here.

• Merrill Lynch: Gives you access to educational materials and a comprehensive screening tool that lets you filter by fees, dividends, asset classes, social responsibility, and other variables.

What to Look for in a Mutual Fund

You should keep a few different criteria in mind when you’re deciding whether or not a mutual fund is right for you.

First: Your personal criteria. What’s your risk tolerance? Are you looking to make money in a relatively short time or are you going to hold onto your portfolio for the foreseeable future? What kind of tax burden are you willing to accept?

Having the answers to these questions will make filtering mutual funds much easier.

Second: The fund’s metrics. Consider things like:

• Assets under management (AUM): The size of the fund’s portfolio

• Historical performance: How the fund has performed in previous years

• Performance versus benchmarks: Seeing if the fund has beaten the stock market and other common benchmarks

• Performance relative to similar funds: Comparing the fund’s performance to that of funds with similar focuses, asset mixes, etc.
• Performance of fund manager: Checking out how well the fund manager’s other funds (if any) have performed in the past

• Fee structure: How much the fund charges in yearly fees and commissions

• Portfolio composition: What kind of assets the fund holds

• Portfolio turnover: How often the manager sells assets

Have Fun(d) With It

You can spend days or even weeks perusing all the American mutual funds, let alone the thousands of international funds you can buy into.

It may be tempting to just buy whatever firms like Morningstar or Fidelity recommend, but make sure you do your own due diligence before making the purchase.

It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take some time. At some point your eyes will glaze over and the numbers will stop making sense.

But after you take a nap and grab some coffee you’ll start to see things in the data that you never expected and, if you’re lucky, you’ll stumble on the exact mutual funds that you need to round out your portfolio and help you on your way to an early retirement.

Now that you know how to research mutual funds on your own, let’s put that knowledge to work in your 401(k).

The post How to Research Mutual Funds appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

You’ve probably heard the term “mutual fund” mentioned on CNBC or thrown around by one of your more financially savvy friends at some point.

You know they have something to do with finance, but that’s about it.

In this intro to mutual funds, we’ll break it down for you.

So What the Heck Are Mutual Funds?

Mutual funds are basically big, professionally managed portfolios that you can buy shares of.

They pool together money from their initial investors (usually an investment firm) and shareholders, then use the money to buy all kinds of different securities.

Each share represents a commensurate slice of the whole portfolio, letting you buy a piece of a bunch of different securities instead of buying each security individually.

Each mutual fund is overseen by at least one fund manager who chooses what to buy and sell and when to do it—sort of like a financial advisor who doesn’t have to listen to you.

Why Do People Buy Mutual Funds?

Mutual funds are great for investors who want to diversify their portfolios but can’t or don’t want to buy each security individually.

Different funds also specialize in different securities and industries, so buying shares in a few funds can give you exposure to huge swaths of the market.

Not only do mutual funds give you exposure to a wide range of markets and industries, they let you buy into securities that you couldn’t afford otherwise.

For example, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) is currently sitting at over $400,000 per share.

It’s a bit out of the price range of the vast majority of individual investors.

But what if a bunch of individual investors pooled their money together and bought the stock?

Suddenly that $400,000+ price tag looks a lot less daunting.

Each investor would only own a portion of the stock—for example, pay in $4,000 for 1%, $40,000 for 10%, etc.—and would be entitled to an equivalent portion of any dividends or profits that the stock generated.

Mutual funds are a lot like this arrangement, just a lot bigger and a lot more diversified.

How Do I Make Money on Mutual Funds?

There are a few ways you can make money off of mutual funds.

Funds can be bought and sold like any other security at a price that reflects the net asset value (NAV) of the securities owned by the fund.

That means you can buy into a mutual fund, wait for its shares to become more valuable, and sell them for a profit.

The whole buy low/sell high thing works a lot like it does with stocks and ETFs, though there are a few differences.

Unlike stocks, mutual funds require a minimum investment of a specified dollar amount, and you can only trade them after the stock markets have closed.

The next way you can make money off of mutual funds comes in the form of interest and dividends.

Many mutual funds specialize in bonds, dividend stocks, and/or other securities that make regular payments.

Some funds hold onto the money they receive, but most pay it out to their shareholders as either a check or additional shares in the fund.

Finally, fund managers sometimes sell assets that have gone up in price since they first bought them.

The profit (capital gain) from those sales is also divvied up and distributed to the shareholders.

Neat. So What’s the Catch?  

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s definitely no such thing as a free mutual fund.

The first downside of mutual funds is the yearly fees and/or commissions that they charge on top of the initial buy-in.

Passively managed funds may only charge you 0.2% of your overall investment each year, but actively managed funds may charge anywhere from 0.5% to 1.5% or even 2.5% on the high end.

Some funds even charge yearly percentages and additional fees and commissions.   

The other big downside is the opacity of the average mutual fund.

You may have a hard time figuring out what any given mutual fund has in its portfolio, and that may be a dealbreaker for some investors.

That opacity also makes it tough to compare mutual funds. You’ll have to take a lot of funds at their word and put a lot of trust into the managers of the funds you do buy.

It’s Mutual

Mutual funds are interesting investment vehicles with both upsides and downsides.

You get to buy slices of diverse portfolios and gain exposure to way more securities than you could on your own, but you may not know exactly what’s in each fund’s portfolio.

There are multiple ways to make money with mutual funds, but you may have to pay fees that eat up your returns.

So now that you know the basics, let’s talk about how to find the right mutual funds for your investing strategy. 

The post Intro to Mutual Funds appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Scanz claims they have built the premiere stock discovery platform for traders. But with this newly evolved subscription stock scanning service’s commanding price premium, everyone has just one question:

Is Scanz worth it?

It’s never been easier to become an investor. With all the tools, trading platforms, apps, and investing sites, all you need is an hour or two to set up an account and start trading. Being a successful trader, however, takes as much or more effort as it always has. Hunches and hot tips aren’t enough to produce the kind of returns you need to go from dabbler to full-time day trader anymore; you need some serious computational help.

You need three things to be a successful trader: information, timing, and luck. There aren’t any tools or services that can increase your luck—other than voodoo, of course—or guarantee timely trades, but information is another story.

There are tons of services, websites, and investing tools out there that promise to keep you up to date on all of the most important data and news stories that might affect your portfolio. Some of these resources are free, browser or app-based services. Others are standalone programs that cost as much as the average phone bill. All services and tools aren’t created equal, and figuring out which one is right for you can be a hard and potentially expensive process.

One of the higher-end stock scanners out there comes to us from Scanz, previously known as EquityFeed. Keep reading to find out more about what Scanz does, how well it does it, and how it stacks up to the competition.

What is Scanz?

Scanz bills itself as “the ‘all in one’ market scanning platform made for day traders and swing traders.” Their standalone software platform combines customizable stock scanners—both “Pro” and “Easy”—a news scanner, a “Breakouts” feature that delivers real-time trading signals, advanced charting features, and access to real-time Level II data.

Features Summary:

• Pro Scanner
• Easy Scanner
• News Scanner
• Breakouts
• Charting
• Level II data

Before we get into the specifics, let’s take a look at Scanz’s pricing.

Scanz Pricing

Scanz offers a 7-day free trial to its service. After that, a membership to Scanz will run you $169/month. Memberships include full coverage of the Nasdaq, NYSE, and AMEX markets, real-time market data, the Pro, Easy, and News scanners, Level 2 quotes, (some) broker integration, ETFs, SPAC’s, Warrants, and Preferred shares, a pre and post-market scanner, and more features that aren’t listed on the page.

You aren’t alone if you think $169/month is an aggressive price point. Reviews and user testimonies almost all list the price point as the main downside to Scanz, and there’s wide agreement that only high-rolling traders with big portfolios and a lot of experience will get enough value out of it to legitimize the price.

But before you write Scanz off or give them your credit card information, let’s break down the features and services they offer.

Scanz Features and Services

Pro Scanner

Scanz lists the Pro Scanner at the top of its Features page, and for good reason. The Pro Scanner, as its name suggests, lets you scan several different stock markets to find trading opportunities and track stock performance in real-time.

The Pro Scanner’s interface is straightforward, flexible, and designed with customization in mind. It’s surprisingly easy to set up scans, and its wide range of options lets you filter for stocks by type, price, liquidity, fundamentals, and technical indicators like moving averages, MACD, and Bollinger bands. It’s a very self-directed experience, and will undoubtedly be more useful to veteran traders than newbies.

Real-Time Scanning

• Scans markets from 4am to 8pm daily
• Scans markets individually or all at once
• Scans based on stock type, ETFs, foreign stocks, preferred shares, etc
• Auto-sorting function for identifying stocks with high volatility, liquidity, etc

Filters

• Price filters by over 50 variables including last price, bid, ask, net change, highs, and lows
• Liquidity filters for scanning by volume, dollar volume, # of trades, and other variables
• Technical filters for scanning based on a library of technical indicators
• Fundamental filters for scanning based on financials, share structure, float, etc

Customizable Scans

• Easy-to-use interface for setting up simple or multi-rule scans
• Unlimited saved scan profiles for easy access to previous scan profiles

Easy Scanner

The Easy Scanner is Scanz’s answer to people who are intimidated by the sheer number of options the Pro Scanner offers. Instead of meticulously setting up scans with extremely specific criteria, the Easy Scanner lets you start scanning for actionable insights within a minute or two.

You obviously can’t get the same kind of granularity with the Easy Scanner as you will with the Pro Scanner, but it still offers an impressive array of filters and features. You can filter by market, stock type, sector, index, ETFs, and other criteria, plus get real-time data on all your watched stocks in one window.

Zero Effort Scanning

• Only takes a minute or two to set up
• Displays real-time data in one window
• Auto-sorting/ranking feature lets you scan for volatility, liquidity, momentum, and other factors with just a couple clicks

Sector Scanner

• Lets you narrow down scan to certain sectors and industries

Short Squeeze Scanner

• Gives you a list of potential short squeeze candidates

Index Scanner

• Focuses specifically on certain indexes

Filters

• Filter by market, including by stock exchange and OTC penny stocks
• Stock type filter lets you narrow down to ETFs, foreign stocks, bankrupt stocks, regular stocks, etc
• ETF scanner for finding top performing ETFs in different sectors
• Customizable filter for scanning by price, volume, market cap, float, etc

Custom Data Columns

• Lets you add custom data columns to your interface that display technicals, fundamentals, short interest, and other quantitative factors

Breakouts

The Breakouts feature is the name Scanz gave to its built-in alert system. It’s a useful feature for day traders who want to be able to act on signals and thresholds in real time, but it takes a good deal of setup to get anything useful out of it. That said, it is a fairly flexible system that offers a lot of options for customization.

Breakouts

• Price alerts
• Block trade alerts
• New high/low alerts
• Volume breakouts triggered when stocks experience above average volume
• Watchlist alerts
• Alert count tracking notifies you when a stock triggers multiple alerts

Customization

• Specify by market
• Specify by stock type

Instant Sorting

• Lets you sort alerts by time, quantity, etc

Custom Filters

• Lets you tailor alerts to your personal investing strategy

News Scanner

Scanz isn’t the only news aggregator out there, nor is it the best. The News Scanner isn’t bad, however, and it’s definitely a nice bonus on top of the other features Scanz offers.

Real-Time News

• Over 60 news providers
• Over 50 financial sites/blogs

Real-Time SEC Filings

• Picks up relevant SEC filings as soon as they’re filed

Customizable Interface

• Sleek, easy-to-parse interface with options for changing everything from form to function

Custom Filters and Keywords

• Keyword customization makes it easier to find specific stories
• Filters let you narrow down news to stories involving penny stocks, certain indices, etc

Montage

The Montage feature is basically a customizable window that lets you squeeze as much pertinent information into one window as possible. Instead of flipping back and forth between open charts, Level 2 data, news, and other information, Montage lets you combine them all into one window. It’s a useful feature, particularly for traders who like having the whole picture in front of them, but it’s nothing too exciting.

Modular Window

• Lets you look at multiple sources and types of data at once

Chart Drawing Tools

• Lets you look at live charts
• Tools for drawing in annotations, trendlines, Fibonacci retracements, moving averages, RSI, and a ton of other indicators.

Integrated Trading

• Lets you connect to your brokerage (if you use TD Ameritrade or Interactive Brokers) and make trades right from the Montage window

Multiple Tabs

Lets you make and click between multiple Montage windows

Level 2

Any old service can display live Level 1 data like bid, ask, and order size data. That’s enough for most investors. Scanz, however, goes another level deeper. Its Level 2 feature gives you real-time access to the data behind the data, letting you track order books, monitor which orders are actually executed, and lets you set up alerts for when a market maker makes significant changes to their orders.

This is the kind of feature that can be either useless or invaluable, depending on how you trade. New traders will have no idea what they’re looking at. Veterans may be able to leverage the insights it provides to time their trades and recognize risks and opportunities before anyone else.

Order Book Summary

• Designed to let you gauge order supply and demand at a glance
• Time and Sales Window
• For tracking which orders are actually executed and when

Market Maker Activity Log

• Scanz’ proprietary Level 2 service that alerts you to big changes in the Level 2 window

Conclusion

Scanz has a lot to offer traders who already know what they’re doing, so their free trial, why not try it?

It’s less of an enabler than an accentuator; you wouldn’t want to use it if you’re just getting started as a trader or if you’re more of a long-term and/or value investor, but for veterans and day traders, Scanz is totally worth it.

The post Scanz Review – Is Scanz Worth It? appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Investing is a game of informed risk taking.

You have to pay close attention to the markets, price in changes in sentiment or economic conditions, and take in as much information and as many perspectives as you possibly can.

It’s impossible to predict the future, of course, but the investor’s job is to use everything at their disposal to narrow down the possibilities to a profitable few.

An investor needs impeccable instincts.

They need a wide, deep knowledge base encompassing a thousand different subjects.

Most of all, though, they need a constant stream of high-quality information to help them make the decisions that will bring them and their clients the largest returns possible.

There are dozens of services out there that purport to provide the best, most potentially profitable investing advice.

Some are free, while others charge an arm and a leg for the pleasure.

Every one of them has their own roster of elite investors and thought leaders that share their thoughts on everything from Treasuries to cryptocurrencies, and every last one of them claims to be the best.

As many investment advice and research firms there are, only a few have the kind of cachet to give them a legitimate claim to the crown.

One such firm was founded in May of 1984.

It Called Itself Morningstar

Joe Mansueto founded Morningstar alone in his apartment 38 years ago.

Today, it’s a billion-dollar enterprise with over 6,000 employees and provides in-depth research for over 620,000 different investments.

Morningstar is known as one of the top providers of investment research in the industry, and they show no signs of slowing.

This Morningstar Investor review will tell you about Morningstar’s flagship service, what it offers, and how much it costs.

What Morningstar Offers for Free

Morningstar’s website has a lot to offer for free users.

There are trackers for about any market and security you can think of, high-level financial news and market updates, general investing advice, insights from some of their analysts and advisors, and a selection of stories and insights for mutual funds, stocks, ETFs, bonds, and other categories of securities.

There’s a lot on offer on Morningstar.com, maybe even more than you’d expect from a free service.

It’s all pretty surface-level stuff, though; Morningstar’s real insights and advice are tucked behind a paywall.  

Morningstar Premium

Morningstar has a whole range of memberships broken into three categories: Professional Products, Managed Investment Products, and Individual Investor Products.

Their flagship product, Morningstar Investor, is aimed at providing the research and tools that individual investors need to make informed decisions and maximize their returns.

The plan offers a free seven-day trial for new users, an ongoing subscription for $34.95 per month, and an annual plan for $249 per year.

Budget-conscious investors willing to pony up $249 up front will save about 41% over a monthly plan, so it’s highly recommended if you have the money.

It also might not be a bad idea to take the free trial and maybe one or two months before committing to an annual membership, just to be sure it’s the right product for you.

What Morningstar Investor Has to Offer

Morningstar Investor offers a lot of value to active traders and value investors.

An Investor membership will get you full access to research and analysis from over 150 independent analysts, all of whom are industry veterans with proven track records on Wall Street.

The analysis encompasses a range of investment types and is geared toward being as actionable and up to date as possible.

Investor memberships also give you access to a frankly insane list of Morningstar ratings on all different kinds of securities, individual managers, socially and environmentally conscious investments, and pretty much anything else that you can think of.

Morningstar also makes their methodology available to subscribers, so you can go ahead and run the numbers yourself if you aren’t convinced of any given rating.

In addition to all the research and ratings, Morningstar Investor also comes with a full suite of portfolio management and analysis tools.

You can evaluate potential investments based on a comprehensive list of performance and valuation metrics, access pre-filtered investment lists that meet your preferred criteria, and tailor your portfolio to your exact specifications with just a few clicks.

Finally, Morningstar Investor enables you to evaluate your portfolio from any angle using their Portfolio X-Ray tool, which provides a set of user-friendly tools that make it easy to check a number of metrics like asset allocation and sector weightings.

You’ll even be given special analysis, commentary, and news that’s tailored to your specific portfolio.

Is Morningstar Investor Worth the Price?

The short answer seems to be: Yes. It is worth the price according to a whole slew of financial websites.

–          Wallet Hacks: Worth it

–          Well Kept Wallet: 4.3/5

–          Credit Donkey: 3.8/5

–          NerdWallet: Worth it

–          Investor Junkie: 8/10

–          Money Under 30: 9/10

–          Day Trade Review: 4/5

You get the picture. The consensus is that Morningstar Investor provides a ton of valuable research and analysis—more than enough to justify the price—and that it mostly loses points for its somewhat cumbersome tools and less than stellar mobile app.

Who Would Benefit the Most from Morningstar Investor?

Morningstar is aimed primarily at more active value investors.

You won’t find many technical analysis charts on Morningstar.com, so technical analysis wonks probably won’t want to spend the money.

Fundamental investors, on the other hand, will find a wealth of easily accessible and in-depth analysis on the fundamentals underpinning an absolutely crazy number of stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, and other securities.

Conclusion

Morningstar Investor is kind of pricey.

Even the reduced $249 price for an annual membership will be hard to justify for most casual investors, and even more experienced traders may want to find another service that caters to their particular brand of investing.

You won’t find much analysis on cryptocurrencies, technical analysis tools, or prescriptive advice if you go with Morningstar Investor.

If you want someone to tell you exactly how to invest you probably won’t find much to love about Morningstar Investor. In that case, you might want to look at a service like the Motley Fool instead.

But if you like the idea of getting all the fundamental information and in-depth analysis that you need to make informed decisions, however, Morningstar Investor may be just the ticket. 

After reading this Morningstar Investor review, what are your thoughts on the product? Let us know in the comment section!

The post Morningstar Investor Review appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Overstock.com is not a stock website, though it is a website with a stock (NASDAQ: OSTK).

The site has made a name for itself as something like an online outlet mall that initially specialized in home décor but has expanded to sell everything from jewelry to electronics and sporting goods.

The brand is known for its deep discounts and low price points compared to other retailers, and it seems to have a pretty decent reputation.

But the question is: How good is Overstock.com really?

This Overstock.com review seeks to tell you just that.

The History of Overstock

Originally a company named Discounts Direct, Overstock got its semi-misleading name when it was purchased by a man named Dr. Patrick M. Byrne back in 1999.

Overstock did brisk business under—and perhaps in spite of—Byrne’s tenure, including going public in 2002 and reporting its first billion-dollar year in 2010.

By the time Byrne announced his resignation and claimed the FBI made him engage in an intimate relationship with a notorious Russian spy, Overstock had established itself as one of the premier online sources for closeout and discount home furnishings.

The company is currently headed by CEO Jonathan E. Johnson as Byrne, its former head, pursues a new career in peddling misinformation and ridiculous conspiracy theories.

Overstock’s Product Offering

Overstock.com started with furniture and home décor, but its catalog has ballooned in the 23 years since it was founded.

In addition to their array of interior and exterior furniture and décor, Overstock now sells bedding (including mattresses), appliances as small as blenders and as large as gas ranges, grills, trampolines, swing sets, tents, exercise equipment, and products from dozens of other categories.

Some of Overstock’s inventory is manufactured specifically for the site, but most of it comes from the roughly 3,000 third-party vendors that partner with Overstock to sell goods on their site.

Most of Overstock’s revenue comes from the sale of third-party goods on their site.

Overstock’s Product Quality

Most of Overstock’s inventory comes from reputable manufacturers and suppliers.

There are plenty of name-brand goods available on the site, and there are very few reviews or reports available claiming that any of the products were fake or lower quality than what you’d find at another retailer.

The low price points and steep discounts on Overstock.com may give some buyers pause.

Normally when you see a product available for significantly less than on another site you’d assume that there was some kind of scam involved.

Overstock is acutely aware of the importance of maintaining a good reputation in such a competitive space, however, so they enforce strict quality control to make sure no consumer receives counterfeit or defective products.

Overstock’s Prices

Overstock’s business model relies on the competitive edge it gets from its low price points and discounts.

They’re so proud of their low prices that they even put real-time price checkers on their product pages to show how much you’d save if you bought from them instead of their competitors.

A number of factors contribute to Overstock’s ability to offer products at such low prices:

1. They purchase and sell liquidated inventory from other retailers
2. Advanced logistics capabilities tailored for furniture and home furnishings
3. The Club O Loyalty Program that increases customer retention
4. Long-term mutually beneficial relationships with vendors and manufacturers

The firm lists these factors as part of how it stays competitive as part of its latest 10-K report to the SEC.

They aren’t exactly forthcoming on any of the specifics, but it makes sense that they’d keep them under wraps.

Overstock Customer Experience

Overstock.com and its mobile app are very easy to navigate.

Finding the products you’re looking for is quick and easy, and they have the same smooth purchasing process as prominent rivals like Amazon.com.

Reviews for Overstock.com are pretty much what you’d expect: A ton of good reviews that are drowned out by the hordes of pissed off customers who had a bad experience.

The good reviews are very complimentary about how easy it was to buy and have products shipped to them, how the products arrived on time and in good condition, and occasionally that Overstock was quick to replace an item that was broken or damaged in transit.

Some of the negative reviews are your typical sour grapes, but there’s a fairly disturbing trend that arises when you read through enough of them.

A lot of buyers report struggling with Overstock customer service personnel for returns, account credits, and (apparent) pricing and financing mistakes.

One reviewer reports receiving a rug from Overstock that was infested with moths which went on to destroy almost all of their clothes.

Another reports a big purchase being canceled without warning or notification.

Someone calling themselves Deepwoods said they paid for two chairs, received one, and was never made whole. 

So it seems like you’ll have a great experience if you buy from Overstock.com…

…as long as nothing goes wrong.

If something does go wrong, well, it seems like you’re in for a fight.

Taking Stock of Overstock’s Stock

Overstock’s stock OSTK is currently trading at $29.14, with its 52-week range being between $24.69 and $111.28.

The company posted overall sales earnings of $2.76 billion in 2021, a 10.53% increase from the previous year.

Its earnings have been on a slow but fairly steady upward trend over the last five years—other than 2019’s painful 19.88% decrease from 2018.

The firm’s 2021 gross income of $606.04 million represented a 10% increase from 2020, and its net income of $155.38 million was an increase of 75.18% over the previous year.

Overstock employed 1,350 full-time employees as of December 21, 2021, and reported difficulties in finding the kind of talent it felt it needs moving forward, particularly when it comes to finding software engineers and technical staff.

The firm reported hiring 177 new non-customer service or warehouse staff in 2021 in addition to 55 new customer service and warehouse personnel.

The environment in which Overstock operates is very competitive and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. E-commerce is a crowded field, and there are relatively low barriers to entry for new firms trying to get into the market.

For example, we wrote a review on another popular e-commerce website, StockX, which deals in shoes, electronics, collectibles, and more.

The site Wayfair is of particular concern for Overstock due to similarities between their product offerings and business models, and will likely remain a source of consternation in the future.

That said, the threats Overstock faces appear to be threatening its growth, not its survival.

The company’s financial situation remains stable enough to assure continued business and modest profits for at least the next few years.

Conclusion

Overstock.com is an e-commerce site that focuses on home furnishings, décor, and a number of other product types, most of which are supplied at a reduced price by its almost 3,000 partners.

The firm leverages these relationships, its logistics network, and other factors to make their price points as cheap as possible for all their products.

Overstock works hard to give every customer a great experience, though it seems like they need to invest more in their customer service if they actually want to achieve that goal.

Have you had any experience with Overstock before reading this Overstock.com review? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Overstock.com Review appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

With all the volatility in the stock market these days, you may be wondering what other options are out there for you to invest your hard-earned money in.

Real estate is the third-largest asset class in the United States (after stocks and bonds).

Previously, it has been difficult for investors to gain access to real estate without physically owning property.

But platforms such as CrowdStreet are letting investors get into the real estate game without ever touching a shovel!

This CrowdStreet review will introduce you to the platform, tell you what securities CrowdStreet offers, and walk you through their past performance.

What Is CrowdStreet?

CrowdStreet was founded in 2012 by Tore Steen and Darren Powderly.

After the financial crisis that began in 2008, the co-founders thought that people were relying too much on the stock market (and getting burned for doing so).

They wanted to create access to asset classes outside of public equities, which often don’t get enough attention.

However, commercial real estate came with a pretty significant barrier to entry at the time: most people don’t have billions of dollars sitting around to use to fund the construction of a new office building.

But with the emergence of crowdfunding as an investment method, Steen and Powderly saw an opportunity to help investors get into a previously closed-off asset class using partial investments.

There are thousands of investors on CrowdStreet that have invested in at least one project.

These investors have invested over $3.49 billion to fund more than 661 projects.

Now, onto the CrowdStreet review!

What Can I Invest In On CrowdStreet?

There are plenty of different securities you can invest in on CrowdStreet, all of which involve investing in commercial real estate.

You can invest in an individual project, such as the construction of a senior living facility.

You can also invest in a fund that finances multiple commercial real estate projects.

You can also invest in real estate investment trusts (REITs), multifamily buildings, apartments, hotels, and retail spaces.

The projects open for investment on CrowdStreet are passive investments.

This means that you don’t take an active part in the construction / rehabilitation of the properties you’re investing in.

You simply choose which projects you want to help crowdfund, invest your money, and (hopefully) collect your gains!

Like the CrowdStreet website says, “you’re a passive investor, not the landlord.”

CrowdStreet does not currently have a mobile app.

For now, you can only invest on and interact with the platform from your computer.

Why Invest In Commercial Real Estate?

If you’ve read our article on The First Stock Everyone Should Buy, you know that investing in different securities that are uncorrelated (or negatively correlated) can help you mitigate some of your investment risk.

That way, when one security performs poorly, another uncorrelated security may perform well (or not as poorly), and you won’t experience as big of a loss.

Real estate is relatively uncorrelated with the stock market, meaning that it can be used to help mitigate the risks of investing in stocks.

CrowdStreet Fees

The cost of investing on CrowdStreet depends on which projects and funds you invest in.

CrowdStreet does not charge its investors any fees. Instead, it charges sponsors fees to open up their projects to investors on the platform.

The sponsors, however, may charge CrowdStreet investors fees to invest in their projects.

So while it is possible to use CrowdStreet for free, you may end up paying fees for individual projects.

Only accredited investors can invest on CrowdStreet.

Accredited investors are those individuals who have a net income of $200,000 or more ($300,000 or more for married couples), or a net worth of $1 million or more.

Business entities can be accredited investors as well, provided they have enough assets.

Accreditation is required to invest in securities that are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC requires accreditation for these types of investments in order to protect investors who are not as financially sophisticated from suffering big losses on risky investments.

There are some investment minimums you’ll need to keep in mind when investing on CrowdStreet.

For example, you need to invest at least $25,000 in any given project.

Some projects and funds have a minimum investment of $100,000.

It’s important to know that the money you invest on CrowdStreet will likely not be liquid for several years.

Commercial real estate projects tend to be large undertakings that take years to complete, and the money you invest in these projects will be inaccessible for the duration of the projects.

Please note that this investment style differs from investing in stocks through a brokerage account.

When you invest through a regular, taxable brokerage account, you can (usually) sell off your stocks at any time.

Crowdfunding real estate projects is a longer-term commitment.

As noted above, the average hold period for CrowdStreet projects is 2.9 years.

CrowdStreet Performance

In this section of the CrowdStreet review, we’ll go over how CrowdStreet has performed in the time it’s been in business.

As you can see, the CrowdStreet platform boasts some pretty promising performance metrics.

The internal rate of return (IRR) of 17.5% means that CrowdStreet investors earn a 17.5% annualized return on the projects they invest in.

The equity multiple of 1.5 means that CrowdStreet investors recover about one and a half times the cash that they invest in projects.

This chart shows where CrowdStreet’s calculations for its historical performance came from.

You’ll see that the IRRs do indeed cluster around the 17% range.

You’ll also notice that about 11 of CrowdStreet’s projects have produced a negative IRR, meaning that investors received a negative return on the projects and did not recover all of their invested capital.

In fact, six of these 11 projects produced an IRR of -100% and an equity multiple of 0%, meaning that investors lost all of their invested cash.

While this is only a minority of the deals that CrowdStreet has done, it’s important to remember that returns are never guaranteed when you take on risk with your money.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, the best investment for you is the one that best fits your risk profile and makes you comfortable with what you’re doing with your money.

We hope you’ve found this CrowdStreet review helpful and that you know that there are other asset classes available to you besides stocks and bonds, if you’d like to give them a shot.

The post CrowdStreet Review appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

China’s economy has grown from near irrelevance to the second largest in the world in less than half a century. Perhaps more incredible than its meteoric rise is the fact that it’s done so without any kind of significant economic contraction. Nearly fifty years of consistently positive GDP growth is practically sorcery in the eyes of the west, as our more democratized and less managed economies seldom manage to go a single decade without at least some kind of bust, let alone five.

The assumed impossibility of eternally uninterrupted economic growth has raised more and more eyebrows and elicited more and more dire predictions about China’s economy as time has passed. Surely the ruling Chinese Communist Party can’t stave off the fundamental economic forces indefinitely. Surely the other shoe is going to drop soon, and all will be right with the world.

It has to. Right?

We’re supposed to be living in a post-Soviet world. A world where the question of managed versus free economies is long-settled fact. But if the CCP is able to keep China’s economy—an economy encompassing the interests of over a billion people—from experiencing so much as a recession, that settled fact starts to look more like an open question with each passing quarter.

The current situation facing China’s real estate market is the latest and perhaps most convincing sign that China has finally reached a tipping point. A generation’s worth of breakneck growth, urbanization, and unintended consequences may be coming to a head.

(Un)Real Estate

China’s housing market is currently the biggest asset class in the world, with a notional value of nearly $60 trillion, more than the entire capitalization of the stock market. About one third of China’s economic activity involves the real estate sector (compared to 15 to 18% of the American economy), a staggering figure that becomes even more so when combined with the fact that housing accounts for about 70% of Chinese household wealth.

The reasons for the outsized role that housing and real estate play in China’s economy are complex and numerous, though they all trace their roots back to the CCP.

The current real estate crisis began shortly after China relaxed its rules on private home sales back in 1998. This change in policy roughly coincided with the explosive economic growth that’s characterized much of the past decades, much of which relied on the importation of cheap labor from the Chinese countryside into rapidly growing metro areas. Over 480 million Chinese moved from the country to the city in pursuit of better economic opportunities, and real estate developers were only too happy to provide the accommodations that the newly urbanized Chinese both needed and could suddenly afford.

Real estate developers and construction firms weren’t the only ones to profit from the unprecedented mass urbanization. Regional governments—many of which relied heavily on land sales for revenue—encouraged as much development as possible, and the seemingly endless demand for housing gave yield-starved Chinese investors a place to park their capital. Developers soon found themselves unable to keep up with the pace of demand and began to take on massive amounts of debt, much of it in dollar-denominated offshore bonds, and even started selling properties in developments that hadn’t even begun construction.

China’s government took notice of all this rampant speculation and took what it saw as reasonable steps to mitigate the threat of the collapse of the real estate market. It imposed new financing restrictions for developers based on their liabilities, debt, and cash holdings, as well as imposed new rules for banks to limit the amount of mortgage lending. Some developers, including the giant China Evergrande Group, were pushed into default by these new restrictions and were forced to put ongoing projects on hold while they sorted out their balance sheets.

Quirks in China’s real estate system meant that the newly paused or canceled projects were more than just the developers’ problems. Chinese homebuyers who had gotten mortgages and purchased unbuilt properties suddenly found themselves on the hook for properties that may never be completed, and many were understandably upset. More and more people began to protest the situation by refusing to pay their mortgages until upwards of $295 billion worth of loans were affected before the CCP started interfering with data collection on the subject. So far China’s government has been unsuccessful in trying to get the situation under control, though they are stepping up support for distressed developers and providing some special loans to help ensure certain projects are completed.  

How Will China’s Housing Collapse Affect the World?

The current crisis has severe implications for the wider China economy, some of which are already being felt. S&P Global Ratings has claimed that around 20% of the Chinese developers it rates are at risk of going under, and that falling land sales have impacted local governmental revenues to the point that 30% of local governments may have to cut spending by the end of the year. Nonperforming real estate loans held by state-owned banks increased by a full 1% in 2021, a figure that is sure to grow as more recent data is made available. There is every reason to believe that the real estate market will suffer in the short to medium-term.

Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff estimates that a drop of 20% in real estate-related investments could cut 5 to 10% out of China’s GDP, and that the subsequent drops in real estate and construction employment could create significant instability in China’s job market. Or, more broadly: “On the medium term, China faces a multitude of challenges, ranging from extremely adverse demographics to slowing productivity…Until now, the housing boom has been sustained by a broad economic boom that now faces steep headwinds.”

The intentionally opaque workings of China’s government make it difficult to predict exactly how the current crisis will play out. It is, however, possible to extrapolate the kind of impact the crisis may have on the global economy if China’s real estate market continues to deteriorate. The first and most obvious consequence of a serious slowdown in China’s economy will be felt by companies with significant exposure to China. Firms like Wynn Resorts, Apple, Tesla, and Disney would all suffer from the ensuing loss of revenue from China’s market, as would firms like Qorvo, Boeing, Caterpillar, and any other firms that rely on supplies from or sales to China.

In terms of Chinese companies, the ratings agency Fitch identified three main sectors that would be most vulnerable to a slowdown in the real estate market: Asset management companies, engineering and construction firms, and steel producers. Fitch also believes that small and regional banks would be most vulnerable to continuing difficulties—particularly if the trend of homebuyers refusing to make mortgage payments on properties that may not ever be built continues—though this may have little impact on the global economy beyond the consequences of a slowdown in China’s economy at large.

Conclusion

As dire as things may seem, however, it is important to remember that China’s government is acutely aware of the risks its economy faces from the current crisis. Pundits, analysts, and observers alike have been warning about an imminent collapse in China for years now, yet the closest we’ve seen was a self-imposed downturn that resulted from the government’s draconian attempts to eradicate COVID-19 within their borders. There is little reason to assume that China’s government’s control over their economy has slipped to any significant degree. Anathema as it may seem to western sensibilities, China’s government still possesses the tools, the will, and the monopoly on violence it needs to prevent the real estate market from destroying their economy as a whole.

The best response, for now, is to maintain the course. It may be a good idea to close positions concerning firms with significant exposure to China’s economy, but treat all other investments the same way you would when facing any other kind of economic headwinds. If the economies of Europe and the United States made it through the 2008 housing crisis, chances are China’s economy will weather this storm as well.

The post China’s Housing Crisis: What Investors Need to Know appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Intro to Alpha Picks Review

Seeking Alpha’s newest product “Alpha Picks” claims to clue you in on the best stock picks before they skyrocket. Let’s review Alpha Picks and see how they stack up against the competition.

Predicting where the stock market is going is…hard. You can stare at charts all day. You can draw trendlines, calculate moving averages, perform technical analysis, consult shamans, sacrifice goats, watch to see if Warren Buffet sees his shadow, etc, etc. 

Many folks prefer to park their money in a 401(k) or hand it over to money managers who may or may not know what they’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with that, not everyone has the time, expertise, or testicular fortitude to take their portfolio into their own hands, but even the most steely-eyed quants need a little third-party advice based on rigorous analytics sometimes. 

On that note, may we introduce you to our friend Alpha Picks? 

Quantitative Easy

Alpha Picks, the newest service from the mad geniuses at Seeking Alpha, is designed specifically for investors looking to turn the market’s noise into actionable insights. 

If you’re familiar with Seeking Alpha you already know just how much cognitive firepower they bring to the table. If you aren’t familiar with Seeking Alpha you should be ashamed of yourself here’s a quick overview.

How Seeking Alpha Seeks Alpha

Seeking Alpha is a website, community, and crowdsourced research platform made by and for investors. The site hosts the world’s largest investing community—boasting a staggering 20 million visitors every month—and offers an unprecedented array of analyses, market-specific news, and investing tools that rival those found on Wall Street trading terminals. 

In addition to all of the above, Seeking Alpha is also home to possibly the largest collection of crowdsourced investment theses written, reviewed, and debated over by professional investors. Some 7,000 well-vetted contributors post over 10,000 investing ideas every month, each of which is reviewed by Seeking Alpha editors to make sure every post meets their quality standards. 

As if that weren’t enough, Seeking Alpha also hosts news, discussions, and data-driven analyses on small-cap stocks, commodities, ETFs, cryptocurrencies, and just about any other security on the market. And if you want to go even deeper, Seeking Alpha’s PREMIUM subscription gives you access to a frankly insane amount of investing ideas, data visualizations, and author, quant, and dividend ratings—plus the ability to track the performance of individual authors. 

In other words: It’s quant heaven. 

Now that you have a sense of where their information is coming from, let’s get back to the reason we’re all here: Alpha Picks.

What Makes Alpha Picks Different

Finding great stocks to buy on Seeking Alpha can be a bit like panning for gold. It can take a while to sift through all the good stuff to get to the truly great, and there’s so much valuable information that the market might have moved on by the time you’re done reading through the research, scanning the charts, and checking out all the discussions. 

If you’re thinking that it’d be great if Seeking Alpha had a service that did all the gold panning for you and just handed you the biggest, shiniest nuggets, guess what: they’re two steps ahead of you. 

Alpha Picks is a subscription service that Seeking Alpha designed for that exact purpose. It takes all the information from the Seeking Alpha Quant model and filters it all down to the two stocks with the biggest potential for positive share price growth every month. 

A lot of stock picking services hide their methodology for any number of reasons—to build mystique, because they’re afraid someone will steal their proprietary recipe, because they identify with the Wizard of Oz from The Wizard of Oz, etc—but not Alpha picks. Their methodology and stock criteria are fully transparent, and their results speak for themselves. 

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s a quick overview of how Alpha Picks stack up against two of the more prominent stock picking services out there: The Motley Fool and Zacks. 

Alpha Picks Review: Stock Criteria

Alpha Picks

To qualify for Alpha Picks, a stock must:

• Hold a Strong Buy Quant rating for a minimum of 75 days
• Have a market cap of $500 million or more
• Be traded as a common stock on standard exchanges
• Have and maintain a stock price of over $10 per share
• Have not been previously recommended within at least one year of the time of selection

The Motley Fool

To qualify for a recommendation by the Motley Fool, a stock must…

• No idea

The Motley Fool doesn’t make their stock picking methodology available on their website. Or maybe they do if you pay for their premium services, but who knows?

Zacks

Zacks has a list, the Zacks Rank, which rates stocks between 1 (strong buy) to 5 (strong sell). It apparently uses a set of formulas to leverage earnings estimate revisions to predict stock price growth and assigns letter grades (A-F) for any given stocks’ value, growth, and momentum. 

The good stuff, the Zacks Rank #1 list, is hidden behind a paywall, but presumably it works much the same as the regular Zacks Rank. 

To qualify for the Zacks Rank #1 list, a stock must:

• Pass some quantitative test 
• Get good marks on their proprietary equity research reports 
• Make it through their earnings estimate revisions formulas with a good rating

So essentially Zacks is very similar to the Motley Fool when it comes to concealing their methodology.

Alpha Picks Review: Portfolio Process

Alpha Picks

Alpha Picks is tailored for investors who like to buy and hold stocks for longer periods of time, and their process reflects that ethos. 

• One stock is picked on the first trading day and the closest trading day after the 15^th of every month 
• Stocks that have dropped into Sell or Strong Sell territory will be sold at the beginning of each month
• Stocks that are rated Neutral for over 180 days will also be sold
• (Simulated) cash generated from dividends and asset sales will be reinvested immediately
• Stocks that have doubled in price since purchasing gets a Sell or Strong Sell recommendation, though only the initial investment will be sold 
• A stock will be sold if another Sell or Strong Sell is triggered while the stock has less than twice the value of the initial investment

Pretty straightforward, right? 

The Motley Fool

Once again, the methodology for the Motley Fool’s portfolio process is hidden (possibly behind a paywall). The closest we have is the six-step investing philosophy on their website:

1. Buy 25+ companies over time
2. Hold stocks for over five years
3. Add new savings regularly
4. Hold through market volatility
5. Let your winners run
6. Target long-term returns

Zacks

It’s not entirely clear whether Zacks follows the same portfolio-based model as Alpha Picks and the Motley Fool, though again there may be more clarity hidden behind their paywall. That said, it’s probably safe to assume that their portfolio process, if any, is based on their Zacks #1 Rank list. 

Alpha Picks Review: Performance

Alpha Picks

Although they are packaging Alpha Picks as a new product, Seeking Alpha’s Quant Rating has been picking rocketship stocks for years. With Alpha Picks, you are getting the cream of the crop of their highest rated Quant Stocks. So if you take a look back at the their Top Rated Quant Stocks since 2010, you get this mind-blowing chart:

You don’t have to be a mathematician to appreciate numbers like that. 

Alpha Picks’ portfolio has seen a return of over 470% since 2010 compared to a 290% return from the S&P 500 as a whole, meaning Alpha Picks has outperformed the S&P 500 by 180% over the past 12 years. 

The Motley Fool 

The Motley Fool measures their returns since their inception in 2002 as opposed to 2010 for Alpha Picks, but the timeframes don’t need to be exactly the same to get a sense for their overall performance. 

According to their site, the stocks picked by the Motley Fool have outperformed the market by 3-to-1 over the last 20 years. Their ads and other content on their site make it a bit harder to tell what’s what—one ad says “STOCK ADVISOR VS S&P 500 +400% vs + 128%” which, what?—so let’s go with the 3-to-1 figure. 

Zacks

Zacks’ website says that stocks that Zacks ranks as a #1 Strong Buy have outperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 13.9% each year since they started picking stocks 34 years ago. 

It’s tough to provide an apples-to-apples comparison here, but suffice to say all three services do a good job of beating the market. 

Pricing

Alpha Picks

A subscription to Alpha Picks will net you two top-quality stock recommendations a month for a discounted rate of $99 per year. Its actual (not discounted) price is $199 per year, so you should make sure to take advantage of the discounted rate while you can. 

The Motley Fool

The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor service is $199 per year, but that’s far from the only service they offer. Their Epic Bundle, which gives you access to Stock Advisor, Rule Breakers, Everlasting Stocks, and Real Estate Winners is $499 per year, and their other services range from $100 for a single stock recommendation to an option called One, which provides full access to all of their services for $13,999 per year. 

Zacks

Zacks’ services range from $249 per year for Zacks Premium, to $495 per year for Zacks Investor Collection and $2,995 per year for Zacks Ultimate, which gives you access to pretty much everything Zacks has to offer. 

Conclusion

There are a lot of quality stock picking services out there, and Alpha Picks is hitting the ground running neck-and-neck with the best of the best. Alpha Picks gives you all the research and quantitative excellence that you’ve come to expect from Seeking Alpha, a promising portfolio with transparent and rigorous methodology, and a price point that’ll pay for itself in no time at all. 

The post Alpha Picks Review by Seeking Alpha (plus vs Motley Fool and Zacks) appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

We learn a lot of stuff in school. Math. Science. History. Why it’s a bad idea to throw parties at your house when your parents are out of town. 

But there’s one subject that’s as important and many times absent from curricula: Personal finance.   

Let’s face it, everything’s getting more expensive and wage growth just isn’t keeping up. Most of us are having to do more with less, and we can’t all win the lottery or marry a wealthy widow.

Keeping a proper budget has never been more important, and the lack of formal personal finance and budgeting classes means the burden of teaching students how to manage their money has fallen on individual parents, teachers, and professors.

The bad news is that keeping students engaged and learning is harder than ever in the age of TikTok and nanosecond attention spans, and that goes double for dry subjects like personal finance and budgeting. 

The good news is that there are some very, very smart people out there who understand the importance of budgeting, how difficult it is to get students to care, and the best methods for getting students to engage with and learn about personal finance. 

What is the best method, you ask? One word: Gamification. 

Here are some of the best personal finance and budgeting games for kids, high schoolers, and college students. 

The Best Budget Games for Students

Okay, we all know there’s practically no chance you’re going to get elementary school-aged kids to sit down and put together a budget no matter how much candy or colorful flashing lights you throw at them. But middle school kids? Middle school kids can be tricked. 

Enter the bean game. Available for the best price ever—free—all you need for this game is a few kids, a printer, and a couple handfuls of jellybeans. 

The game is simple. Each kid receives a salary of 20 jellybeans, a game board, and a reminder that eating their beans will make them poor. 

Each board contains a set of spending categories like housing, food, transportation, insurance, and recreation. 

The kids will have to divide their beans between the categories, some of which will have to go to necessities like housing and food. The rest can be divvied up (or eaten) as the kids choose. 

It’s a simple game, but it does have all the ingredients you need to start a conversation about finite resources, wants versus needs, and, hopefully, about how the money they spend on iPhone games is money their parents could have otherwise spent on college. 

No Beans for Teens: PersonalFinanceLab, the Best Budget Game for High School Students

High school can be tough, but it’s important that high schoolers know that real life will be exponentially tougher…if they don’t know how to properly manage their money, that is. 

Thankfully there’s a budgeting game that’s tailor-made for teachers and students alike: PersonalFinanceLab. 

PersonalFinanceLab gives you everything you need to teach kids about managing a household budget. 

Its streamlined interface lets you get up and running in minutes, and its deep mechanics and fully customizable parameters let you create personalized scenarios for students in all income levels and career tracks. 

Want to motivate students by showing them how hard it would be to get by with the money they’d make working at McDonald’s? PersonalFinanceLab has you covered. 

Want to show your students why it’s a bad idea to carry a balance on their credit card without lecturing them? PersonalFinanceLab lets you adjust interest rates, simulates balance increases, and includes embedded lessons that break down the concepts in an approachable way. 

Rent. Income tax. Part time versus full-time work. PersonalFinanceLab lets you customize all of it to fit the cost of living and prevailing wages in your community. 

And best of all? PersonalFinanceLab is only $10 per student, and only $6 per student in classes of 10 or more. That won’t be a stretch for even the tightest school budgets. 

Stock-Trak: The Best Budgeting Game for College Students

Their brains may not be fully developed, but college students are (usually) mature enough to wrap their heads around the complexities of managing their finances in the real world…and yet surprisingly few of them receive the instruction they need to do just that. 

In an ideal world there would be a program that could walk college students through budgeting and investing in and out of the classroom. A program that professors could customize to fit their students’ specific needs, and that would supplement the built-in lessons with integrated quizzes and gamified scenarios. 

It’s too bad no such program exists. Oh wait a second. 

Stock-Trak is a software platform that does all of the above and more.

Not only does Stock-Trak bring over 30 years of expertise to the table, it comes jam-packed with an ever-growing list of lessons, interactive scenarios, and an innovative gamification system that can keep even chronic sufferers of senioritis engaged with the material. 

Stock-Trak is more than just an educational program, it’s a whole ecosystem of customizable curriculum and powerful tools that make delivering important information and keeping track of your students’ progress so easy you’ll almost forget you’re working at all. 

And here’s the best part: Over 1,000 universities already use Stock-Trak to teach their students about budgeting and investing.

Stock-Trak helps over 1,000,000 students learn how to manage their money every year, so you know you’ll be spending your budget wisely if you sign up. Stock-Trak even offers demos, too, so you don’t have to spend a dime unless you think it can help prepare your students for the real world. 

BudgetChallenge.com

PersonalFinaceLab and Stock-Trak try to make budgeting and personal finance seem interesting and engaging. BudgetChallenge.com, while retaining much of the same essential functions, doesn’t have the same quality of user experience and gamification.

BudgetChallenge comes with the benefit of being free to qualified schools. It comes in the form of 10-week modules that give students hands-on experience with budgeting via in-depth simulations (IE lots of spreadsheets) that cover things like cash flow budgeting, emergency funds, and credit management. 

BudgetChallenge is perfect for teachers who like a more traditional approach to education. The front page of its website contains such charmingly off-putting remarks like “Aren’t you tired of reading about how young adults are making a mess of their financial lives?” and pictures of trophies – a halfhearted attempt at gamification.

Conclusion

Budgeting is a crucial skill that most students don’t learn until it’s too late, but you can change that. 

The services listed here are the best of the best; they’re intuitive, customizable, and reasonably priced, and even the most tight-fisted admins will have to acknowledge the amount of bang you’ll get for your school’s buck. 

It doesn’t take much to change a student’s financial trajectory, and you’re just the person they need to make that happen. 

The post Best Budget Games for Students appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

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At WallStreetSurvivor, you can manage your trade settings and practice investing solely in Cryptos. This is the perfect way for crypto-curious investors to start without risking their savings. 

If you’re not ready to focus solely on cryptos, you can change your trading settings as you go! 

That makes you can: 

• Day trade 
• Short Sell 
• Trade on Margin
• AND invest in cryptos!

All Wall Street Survivor accounts (that verify their email address) can:

• Create your own contests and invite your friends
• Take our FREE Courses
• Join other contests

Invite your friends and family to join you in some friendly competition! Customize your trading settings–you can even set up a contest to exclusively trade cryptos. Be the reason you and your friends feel confident to invest in the real world! 

Looking to educate yourself first? We have you covered! 

This is an excellent opportunity to make all your mistakes before using real money. And if you need some help getting started, we have courses and articles introducing you to the investing world.

Here is a short list of some of our most popular courses and articles:

• Cryptocurrency – What You Need to Know
• Value Investing for Beginners
• Robinhood Crypto Wallet: What You Need to Know
• eToro vs Coinbase
• Best Investing Courses 2022: Courses for Every Investor

We are constantly evaluating all types of financial tools, from stock picking newsletters to brokerage apps, stock screeners, and more!

Wall Street Survivor’s YouTube channel has plenty of videos on topics ranging from basic stock market knowledge to product reviews to cryptocurrency insights.

Head over to the channel, and don’t forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell!

Follow us on social media to learn more about the best services in the financial world and stay informed on market trends.

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After you’ve learned and practiced for free on Wall Street Survivor — we won’t leave you to fend for yourself! For information about buying cryptos in today’s market, check out our articles and services:

• Best Crypto Exchanges in 2022
• Is Seeking Alpha Worth It?
• Morning Brew Review
• Motley Fool Review

The post Getting Started With Cryptos appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Introduction to Dividend Stocks

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

You can buy low and sell high, of course, or you can short the market by selling high and buying low, or you can buy a bunch of dividend stocks, kick back, and let the payments pile up. 

Dividend Stocks Are Stocks That Pay More than Just Returns  

Profitable companies have to decide what to do with their profits at the end of their respective fiscal years. 

Some choose to invest their profits back into their business in the form of capital improvements, infrastructure or IT upgrades, or headcount increases, but some take a slightly different tack and decide to pay out those profits to their shareholders. We call those payments “dividends.” 

Investing in Dividend Stocks

Dividend stocks don’t always keep up with the market overall in terms of share prices, and growth stocks typically reinvest their profits in the business rather than pay them out in dividends, but that doesn’t mean dividend investing is a bad idea. 

Think of it like this: If a company like IBM is able to pay a dividend year after year regardless of the prevailing market or economic conditions, owning shares in IBM almost guarantees a return on your investment even during bear markets and periods of economic stagnation. 

And while dividend stocks may not always come with the same potential for share price appreciation as the rest of the market, their dividend payments provide both a steady source of return and a boost to the overall return on your investment. 

Who Let the Dogs (of the Dow) Out? 

The most straightforward and least time-consuming way to get into dividend investing is an approach called the Dogs of the Dow strategy. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, as you may know, is a major stock index that tracks 30 of the largest public companies in America, many of which dole out dividends like clockwork. 

The Strategy is fairly simple: All you have to do is identify the 10 or so stocks on the Dow with the highest dividend yields (Equal to the annual dividend / the current stock price) and invest in them. 

Why is it called the Dogs of the Dow Strategy, you ask? Great question, and the answer is also fairly simple: Math. 

A company’s dividend yield goes up when they increase their dividends, but it also goes up when their share price drops—provided the dividend stays the same. 

The Dogs of the Dow Strategy looks for companies whose dividend yields are high and/or have risen recently, IE companies whose share prices have dropped recently. 

Stocks that have seen big drops in price don’t look very attractive (like dogs) to most investors, which is where the strategy gets its name. 

The strategy is effective for a few reasons. 

• Blue Chip (Dow Jones) stocks are reliable earners and almost always regain their value
• You get a steady stream of dividends from reliable companies  
• You get both the dividends and the potential upside from increasing share prices

Now that that’s out of the way, here are some of the best dividend stocks you can buy in 2022.

International Business Machines (IBM)

IBM is still a damn fine company with a stable business model and a history of consistent quarterly dividends, even if the days of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” are behind us. 

IBM’s shares are trading at $130.95 at the time of writing, and each share entitles the holder to a quarterly dividend of $1.65, equivalent to about a 5% annual dividend yield. 

Granted, a 5% annual return isn’t that great compared to the market’s average 10% annual growth, let alone to the upside potential of some individual stocks, but there’s something to be said for consistent returns that aren’t affected by market fluctuations. 

Last but not least, it’s worth noting that IBM is a stable, established company that’s pretty well insulated against market forces—meaning you won’t have to worry if your dividend payments are going to show up next quarter or for the foreseeable future. 

Caterpillar Inc.

Caterpillar is another stable, mature company with a long history of growth and consistent dividend payments. 

How consistent are we talking? How does never missing a dividend payment since 1933 sound to you? 

Their dividend isn’t that much—just $1.20 quarterly, a roughly 2.5% annual dividend yield—but that’s on top of the stellar 69% growth their share price has seen in the last five years. 

Caterpillar is a solid investment in pretty much every respect, and their 28 consecutive annual dividend increases strongly implies their dividend payments will only get bigger in the future. 

Essex Property Trust

What do you get when you combine a real estate investment trust that invests in multi-family housing on the west coast with the housing crisis on the west coast? Money, mostly. 

Essex Property Trust didn’t make it on this list because it’s a household name, it made it because it’s a mature player in a no-brainer business that’s posted consistent profits and increased their dividend 29 years in a row. 

 
Its quarterly dividend payment of $2.20 per share may only amount to an annual dividend yield of about 3%, but that single stat doesn’t tell the whole story. 

Not only has the company seen sustained growth since it went public in 1994, it’s also increased its overall dividend nearly 200% over the past 20 years. 

Essex Property Trust won’t be changing the world as we know it or making any major waves in its industry anytime soon, but you can bet your butt that it’ll keep posting solid numbers and paying out dividends like clockwork. 

Microsoft

Speaking of reliable but not necessarily exciting companies, have you met my friend Microsoft?

Okay, a $0.62 quarterly dividend with an annual dividend yield of 0.85% isn’t great, but Microsoft has some good things going for them. 

For one: Microsoft is a global player with decades of proven performance. That’s nothing to sniff at. 

Microsoft’s share price has also rocketed up nearly 300% over the last five years—not too shabby for a corporation that’s almost 50 years old—so you can expect its shares to keep appreciating (unless something terrible happens) on top of the dividend payments.

And speaking of dividends, think back to IBM for a second. Its dividends have increased as its business has matured and its capital has found fewer productive outlets, right? 

Well think of it like this: Microsoft’s posted 12 consecutive years of dividend increases, and it isn’t signaling any major moves into costly new lines of business, so isn’t it reasonable to think they might keep on boosting their dividends as time goes on (like IBM. In case you didn’t follow that).

Lowes 

Lowes is another established company with a long history of paying dividends and a steadily growing business (seeing a pattern here?).

Their current dividend, $1.05 per share per quarter, only represents a 2% annual yield, but there’s plenty of upside potential with the stock itself. 

Though it’s down from its high earlier this year, Lowes’ stock price has grown by 160% in the last five years, and the current housing market implies that the DIY and home improvement trend will continue for some time. 

Conclusion

Dividend investing isn’t for everyone. It involves a lot of holding onto stocks for a long time—not too appealing for people with itchy trigger fingers—and is best suited to patient investors looking to follow a longer-term plan. 

It is usually a good idea to have at least some dividend-paying stocks in your portfolio for cash flow, reinvestment, and inoculation against market forces, however, so definitely don’t rule dividend stocks out when you’re looking for new investment opportunities. 

The post Best Dividend Stocks of 2022 appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Intro

With constant new ways to trade cryptocurrencies, we all have at some point wondered: what are the best crypto exchanges?

Cryptocurrencies have exploded in popularity and numbers since Bitcoin first launched back in the distant past (2009).

It seems like more and more cryptocurrencies hit the market every day, and new crypto exchanges have been popping up at nearly the same rate.

Trading crypto is easier than you might think—especially after you’ve learned and practiced for free right here on Wall Street Survivor — but how do you choose which crypto exchange you want to trust with your money?

Check out this quick list of recommendations for the best crypto exchanges out there in 2022. 

Best Crypto Exchange for Beginners

Coinbase

Coinbase is one of the larger and most established crypto exchanges out there. 

Their site lists over 10,000 cryptocurrencies you can trade on the exchange, which can obviously be overwhelming to new investors, but their extensive list of tips, tutorials, articles, and newsletters will help guide you every step of the way. 

Seriously, the people at Coinbase know how confusing all this crypto talk can be, so they’ve really gone above and beyond with their educational materials. 

You can find in-depth articles on everything from the underlying technologies that make cryptocurrencies work, how to spot investment opportunities, and even how to figure out how your crypto holdings will affect your taxes. 

And as if that wasn’t enough, Coinbase even has a program that rewards you with free crypto for completing learning modules via their Coinbase Earn program.

It’s not every day you get paid to learn, but Coinbase is just that committed to making sure you know what you’re doing before you start investing…almost like they want their customers to succeed, or something.  

Coinbase also comes with a streamlined interface that makes finding, buying, and selling different coins easy as pie, and their transaction and conversion fees are very reasonable compared to some of their competitors. 

The one thing Coinbase is missing is a good way to practice investing without using real money, but thankfully you can do that right here for free on Wall Street Survivor. 

Best Crypto Exchange for Passive Investors

Abra

Looking to buy and hold onto some crypto without making too many trades? Look no further. 

Abra is a reasonably large exchange—about $1.5 billion in assets under management, over $7 billion in transaction volumes—that’s available in over 150 countries.

Its roster of over 80 popular cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Etherium, Dogecoin, etc) isn’t as impressive as some of the other exchanges out there, but a passive investor probably doesn’t want or need to speculate or trade on smaller coins. 

Abra doesn’t charge transaction fees, just a spread fee built into exchange rates, so you can trade to your hearts content, though that probably won’t be as important to passive investors as it would be to day traders.  

The real draw for passive investors isn’t Abra’s product offerings or transaction fees, it’s the fact that Abra will pay you up to 10% interest on any crypto you keep on their platform. 

Passive investors could do a whole lot worse than making up to 10% interest (compounded daily and paid out every week, no less) just by holding onto their crypto on top of the upside potential from the coins themselves. 

Abra also offers low-interest crypto loans to its members that start at 0% APR, which isn’t super helpful for passive investors but is still cool enough to warrant a mention here. 

Best Crypto Exchange for Day Traders

Crypto.com

Surprise, surprise; Matt Damon might actually know what he’s talking about!

Crypto.com isn’t just one of the biggest, most polished exchanges on the scene, it’s also one of the highest-rated and most-recommended platforms available. 

You’ve probably run across crypto.com in your quest to find the best crypto exchange, and it seems there’s a reason for that. 

Crypto.com accepts over 20 fiat currencies and lets you trade in over 250 cryptocurrencies, tracks prices in real time, and gives you access to an incredibly liquid market populated by over 50 million other users. 

The crypto.com desktop platform has everything you need to find, trade, and keep track of your favorite coins, and the mobile app is just as packed with features and useful information.

Day traders will love the fact that you can pull up charts, track trading volume, and see which coins made the biggest moves in any given day, and day traders on the go will love the fact that all that functionality is available on the crypto.com app, too. 

On top of all that, the crypto.com platform also crawls the net to find mentions of specific coins on twitter, reddit, and other social media, which is perfect for the plugged-in trader who wants to take the temperature of the market without setting up a bunch of alerts and doing hours of searching themselves. 

Crypto.com also has you covered if you’re looking for a place to trade NFTs, and their one-stop DeFi wallet app (and browser extension) gives you a great place to store, swap, and send your NFTs and crypto. 

Best Crypto Exchange for Security-Conscious Traders 

Gemini 

Gemini is one of the older exchanges that’s still operating today, and its longevity isn’t an accident.  

In addition to its semi-famous roots—it was founded by the Winklevoss twins, AKA the guys Mark Zuckerberg screwed over in the Social Network—Gemini is probably most notable for the fact that it’s been working closely with regulators to bring greater security and legitimacy to cryptocurrency since it was founded back in 2014.  

Working with regulators might not sound very cool or punk rock or whatever, but it’s hard to argue with the rigorous security measures Gemini has put in place as a result.

Gemini’s security measures start from the second you try to sign up, and are actually rigorous enough to put some users off.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Gemini requires the same, if not more, security measures you’d expect if you were trying to open a bank account or get a mortgage. 

They want your full name, your address, your phone number, at least one form of valid ID, your same-sex celebrity crush, all your fingerprints, toe prints, tongue print, eye print, DNA—okay, everything after “valid ID” is a lie, but still. 

Two-factor authentication is required to access your account (not recommended, required), new devices are subject to verification if you try to sign on, and they even use machine learning algorithms to catch suspicious activity on your account if you get hacked. 

And speaking of hacking, you know how a lot of exchanges are basically big digital bank vaults waiting for hackers to bust in and rob? Yeah, not Gemini. 

Instead of leaving their assets on servers connected to the internet, Gemini puts all their (and your) valuables into “cold storage,” which basically means “they turn off the Wi-Fi in the server room,” but sounds a lot cooler. 

It’s safe to say that Gemini has the security of your account and your assets at the top of their minds, so you can breathe easy if you’re worried about scams or hackers. 

The main downside to trading on Gemini is that it’s not as big or popular as some of its competitors, which means there aren’t as many people to trade with or as much liquidity in the market. 

This may or may not be a big deal to you, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind before you sign up. 

Best Peer-to-Peer Crypto Exchange (for Bitcoin)

Bisq

Do you like feeling like an outlaw? Do you like operating off the grid? Do you like exchanging currency for Bitcoin, selling that Bitcoin for a different currency, and using that currency to buy more Bitcoin? You are going to love Bisq.

This decentralized, open-source software runs off a peer-to-peer network of anonymous users located around the world and hidden from prying eyes by a combination of local-only storage and the same obfuscation technology used by the Tor browser. 

There’s no identity verification, no strict rules, and no central authority running the show. 

Trades are made by simply making or taking offers, transactions are completed and secured by holding deposits in 2-of-2 multisig wallets, and it’s all done between individual users with no moderation or oversight. 

In other words: It’s pretty much the opposite of Gemini. 

Bisq is great if you want to feel like a hacker while you trade Bitcoin, but all that freedom and anonymity comes at a cost—namely at the expense of literally every other cryptocurrency. 

As cool an idea as Bisq may be, being limited to Bitcoin may be a dealbreaker for some people. 

That being said, you’d be hard-pressed to find an open-source, decentralized platform that’s as robust or as well-designed as Bisq.

Conclusion

There are a ton of different crypto exchanges vying for your business, but not all of them are worth your time. Make sure you pick an exchange that has the right mix of features, products, fees, and security before you invest your money…and it never hurts to prepare by practicing your crypto investing right here on Wall Street Survivor.

The post Best Crypto Exchanges in 2022 appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

Intro

It’s never been easier to take investing into your own hands. 

There are dozens of investing apps and trading platforms out there, and picking the right one is almost as hard as picking the right assets for your portfolio. 

E*TRADE and Robinhood may be two of the most recognizable names in the space, but which one is better for you?  

Keep reading for a quick breakdown of what each platform has to offer in terms of asset classes, markets, analytical tools, research, fees, and other important factors before you decide which to trust with your hard-earned capital. 

The Platforms – Overview 

Robinhood

Though Robinhood has a desktop site, it’s a mobile-first platform through-and-through. 

Robinhood’s interface is sleek, simple, and easy-to-navigate, perfect for checking stock prices and making quick trades on the go. 

That simplicity comes at a cost, however. 

Robinhood has emphasized ease-of-use over functionality, and that shows when you try to chart your investments, access detailed research, or anything beyond searching for assets and making quick trades. 

Although they’ve improved their access to market news, they never intended to have in-depth analytics and research. So if that is an important feature to you, you’ll likely need to go elsewhere.

E*TRADE

E*TRADE has desktop and mobile versions of both its regular E*TRADE and Power E*TRADE platforms. 

The normal E*TRADE platform is packed full of valuable resources for veteran investors, and Power E*TRADE goes a few dozen steps further with interactive charts and a whole range of analytical tools that give you all the power you need to invest like a pro. 

Both E*TRADE platforms are a little less streamlined than Robinhood’s, but if you love analysis and research, a few more menu items to sort through is a small price to pay for all the added functionality. 

Markets and Asset Classes 

Both E*TRADE and Robinhood let you trade stocks, ETFs, and options contracts on the major American exchanges, though only E*TRADE lets you trade mutual funds, commodity futures and options, fractional shares, penny stocks, and stocks on international exchanges. 

Robinhood does have one big advantage over E*TRADE, though: cryptocurrencies. 

E*TRADE lets you trade Bitcoin futures on its platform, but that’s the extent of its participation in the crypto markets. 

Robinhood, on the other hand, has a full-fledged crypto wallet built into its app and lets you trade Bitcoin, Etherium, and tons of other cryptocurrencies on its platform with zero fees or commissions, making it the obvious choice for investors looking to trade crypto and not a whole lot else. 

Education 

E*TRADE comes out as the clear winner in this category as well. 

You can find plenty of articles and links to relevant podcasts etc on Robinhood’s platform, as well as a decent number of resources designed to teach investing concepts and terminology to newbies, but you’re out of luck if you want anything more substantial than simple definitions. 

E*TRADE, on the other hand, has a whole library worth of information for newbie investors and veterans alike, plus tons of content for people interested in long-term investing.  

On top of tutorials, articles, and helpful videos, E*TRADE also offers what they call Virtual Learning Environments; all-day online classes with specific learning objectives that can benefit investors of all skill levels. 

Research 

E*TRADE has invested a lot more resources than Robinhood in this category. 

Robinhood will give you some stock research and ratings from Morningstar if you pay $5/month for Robinhood Gold.

E*TRADE gives you research and ratings from Morningstar for free, and it gives you access to research from other top firms like Thomson Reuters, MarketEdge, Moodys, Trefis, and more…for free. 

On top of all that, E*TRADE even has a tool for screening stocks and securities to meet criteria of environmental, social, and governance criteria, perfect for the socially and environmentally conscious investor. 

Analysis Tools 

Robinhood has some basic charting functionality, and it can do some simple account analysis like identifying balances, percent gain, dividend history, and so on, but its tools are basic compared to E*TRADE’s. 

And as impressive as E*TRADE’s portfolio analysis tools are, the real star of the show is in Power E*TRADE’s charting and analytical functions. 

Power E*TRADE’s interface makes it easy to create and edit charts on just about any security over any time period, and its built-in technical analysis functions help you predict where the market will go with technical studies and automatic support and resistance lines for identifying patterns. 

As if that weren’t enough, Power E*TRADE lets you perform snapshot analyses to help determine whether an option trade will pay off, and its powerful scanning function lets you use real-time data to identify potential trades with just a couple clicks. 

Costs and Fees

Opening and maintaining an account (even an inactive one) is free at both Robinhood and E*TRADE, and neither platform charges for stock or ETF trades, though their fee structure differs in most other areas. 

Robinhood doesn’t charge for options trades, for instance, while E*TRADE charges $0.65/contract if you’ve made less than 30 trades per quarter or $0.50/contract if you have made more than 30 trades. 

The platforms also charge different fees for margin: Robinhood charges a flat 9% on margin, Robinhood Gold includes $1,000 of margin for $5/month and 5% interest on margin over $1,000, and E*TRADE’s margin rates range from 11.7% for less than $10,000 to 9.7% for $250,000 to $499,999.99.

Verdict

Robinhood and E*TRADE are both great platforms with lots of strengths, they just serve entirely different purposes and are meant for different types of investors.

If you’re a new investor looking for a simple-to-use search and trade interface on mobile, or you’re looking to have your cryptocurrency and stocks all in one place, Robinhood is your best bet. 

If you’re looking to learn, read intensive research, perform technical or portfolio analysis, or trade in anything more exotic than regular stocks and crypto, E*TRADE is the platform for you.

The post Robinhood vs E*Trade appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.

With the ongoing craziness of the 2020s many Americans have become discouraged from investing, due to increasing losses in many sectors across the market.

Cannabis Stocks

It can be particularly nerve-wracking to put more of your hard-earned paycheck into an account that has seen enormous volatility throughout the last couple of years.

Nevertheless, investors with a long-term point of view could see this market uncertainty as an opportunity to buy up high potential stocks for a significant discount.

So, aside from high flying tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Telsa, what other high growth options exist?

One interesting option for investors is the cannabis industry.

Despite seeing significant share price declines this year, due to fiscal and legislative pressures, the US cannabis industry is expected to see legal sales topping 52 billion dollars in 2026 alone.

The sector as a whole is primed for growth, especially if federal legalization is brought forward during the current administration.

Trends

So, if cannabis stocks are so great why are their share prices dropping?

The primary reason for this downtrend lies in uncertainty surrounding the timing of federal legalizations on several accounts.

Most importantly when and how the industry will become legitimized by the federal government, and in the short-term when will banks be allowed to offer credit to current legal state run operations?

It is widely expected that either or both of these hurdles being eliminated could help cannabis stocks reach new heights.

According to Viridian Capital Advisors and others, the first chance for legislative change could come in late 2022 after the midterm elections.

Furthermore, they state that one of the biggest challenges for the industry is its inaccessibility for investors.

Many US cannabis stocks have to be traded as OTCs or over the counter equities, meaning it can be both harder to invest in them and also a riskier investment than NASDAQ graded stocks.

This is one of the biggest reasons US investors turned quickly to Canadian companies such as Tilray that were available to almost all mainstream investors. 

With all of these risks assumed, why would investors take the chance on the cannabis industry?

For one thing, almost all experts agree that legalization is a certainty in the future.

Well more than 50% of Americans believe that cannabis use should be legalized and its use is already legal in some form in 35 states.

Every year more states are expected to include recreational marijuana usage to their dockets, and eventually it’s expected that the federal government will do the same.

Once the cannabis industry is legalized and able to access investor and institutional capital, experts expect widespread opportunities and growth on both a domestic and international level.

For investors looking to take advantage of such phenomenal long-term expectations, 2022 may be the perfect year to invest.

With overall market downtrends and uncertainty, almost all sectors have dropped well below their 2021 valuations.

This widespread market pressure could allow investors to enter the cannabis industry for a significant discount, particularly if the industry makes legislative headway in late 2022. 

How to Invest in Cannabis Stocks

If you decide investing in the cannabis industry is the right option for you, what are the best and safest ways to go about it?

For the most part, buying individual US cannabis stocks can be tricky depending on your broker.

For investors that handle their own investing, make sure to check your broker for what options are available in the OTC market.

For other investors that prefer to invest in ETFs and/or through a traditional broker, there are a growing number of index funds and ETFs that widely cover and track the cannabis industry and could provide a way to invest without giving up the safety of diversification.

Furthermore, international cannabis stocks such as Tilray do trade on common exchanges such as the NASDAQ and are widely available to investors on almost every platform out there.

These stocks could provide a safe and proven entrance into the industry, without having to worry about the short-term risks surrounding US legalization. 

Overall, the cannabis industry has been an exciting sector to watch over the last few years and it’s expected to continue to see short-term volatility as the road to legalization continues.

For long-term investors looking to expand their portfolios at a potential discount, the marijuana business could offer significant upside.

Additionally, with increased accessibility to institutional capital, the cannabis sector could soar to new heights with a rush to acquire competitors and to expand with a large increase in funding.

Whether or not you decide to invest in the marijuana industry is up to you, but either way the sector is expected to continue to make headlines on its long and tumultuous road to both state and federal legalization across the United States.

The post The Future of Cannabis Stocks and How to Invest appeared first on Wall Street Survivor.