MarketSmith Review
- Ease of Use
- Quality
- Value
4.2
Summary
MarketSmith is a stock market analysis platform from Investor’s Business Daily. This service is designed to help active investors and traders identify worthy trading opportunities. MarketSmith’s wide variety of tools and features include annotated stock charts, customizable stock screens, lists of stock ideas, investment research, alerts, and more. Find out if this stock market analysis platform is right for your needs by reading our full MarketSmith review.
Pros
- Annotated stock charts with pattern recognition
- Pattern recognition on daily, weekly, and monthly timeframes
- RS rating to identify stocks with strong momentum
- Fundamental analysis tools and checklists
- Customizable stock screener and weekly stock ideas list
Cons
- Stock charts are not very customizable
- Very expensive
About MarketSmith
MarketSmith from Investor’s Business Daily is a stock market analysis platform designed to help active investors identify trading opportunities. The platform offers annotated charts, in-depth stock analysis, and stock ideas to help you profit from the market. MarketSmith is relatively easy to use and offers actionable information that traders can put to use right away.
In our MarketSmith review, we’ll take a closer look at what this technical analysis platform can do and help you decide if it’s right for you.
MarketSmith Pricing Options
MarketSmith costs $149.95 per month or $1,499 per year. You can try out the platform for 3 weeks for $19.95.
MarketSmith Features
Annotated Stock Charts
The key feature that MarketSmith offers is pattern recognition on stock candlestick charts. MarketSmith can automatically recognize common chart patterns like cup and handles, consolidation, flat and ascending bases, and double bottoms. These patterns are displayed on annotated stock charts so you can easily see when and how they formed.
MarketSmith charts also include annotated trendlines and pivot points. For any stock, you can see at a glance how far the current price is above or below the next pivot point. Pivot points are color-coded, so you can also see when to buy or sell.
Each MarketSmith chart also includes a Relative Strength (RS) rating. The RS rating is an algorithm-based rating from 0-100 that indicates how bullish a stock is. In combination with the platform’s annotated chart patterns, the RS rating is useful for identifying a buy point.
MarketSmith charts are available on daily, weekly, and monthly timeframes. There are also intraday charts available, but these are not annotated or analyzed with the platform’s pattern recognition software.
Notably, MarketSmith isn’t a dedicated technical charting platform. The charts cannot be customized with other technical indicators like RSI or MACD.
Stock Screens
MarketSmith offers a customizable stock screener to help you find stocks that are worth investing in. Interestingly, the screener doesn’t use MarketSmith’s chart patterns, but rather relies mostly on fundamental data. You can filter stocks by share structure, EPS growth, sales growth, and key fundamental ratios, including P/E. For technical analysis, the screener offers filters based on price change, trading volume, RS rating, and stock price relative to moving averages.
You can save an unlimited number of custom screens.
Stock Ideas
MarketSmith offers a list of curated stock ideas that it calls the Growth 250 list. This list is loosely based on the CAN SLIM investor strategy developed by William O’Neill. It focuses on growth stocks that are nearing a buy point and is updated weekly on Friday afternoons.
The Growth 250 list is broken down into several sub-lists, including recent breakouts, stocks that are breaking out today, and stocks that are experiencing strong price movements after reaching a pivot point. The Growth 250 list doesn’t have a set number of stocks on it each week, but rather tends to expand in a bull market and contract in a bear market.
MarketSmith also has a list of stocks that are breaking down for investors who want to take short positions.
Stock Analysis
MarketSmith offers useful investment research on individual stocks alongside its annotated charts. For any stock, you can see a breakdown of its institutional ownership and how the stock ranks against its peers for key valuation metrics.
In addition, MarketSmith offers checklists to help you identify the best growth stocks. There are multiple checklists based on strategies from several well-known investors, including Warren Buffet, William O’Neill, and Peter Lynch. Each checklist shows whether a company passes or fails a fundamental performance requirement of those investors’ strategies.
Alerts
MarketSmith enables you to set up alerts for any stock you want to monitor. While you can set basic price alerts, MarketSmith also offers more complex stock alerts based on volume breakouts, moving average breakouts, and pivot points. These are very helpful since you can customize your alerts to be notified when a stock you like reaches a buy point.
Customization and Layout
MarketSmith enables you to create an unlimited number of watchlists and portfolios, which you can organize into groups and hierarchies. The portfolio management module can feel a little clunky at times, but it’s easy to get used to.
MarketSmith puts all of its tools in a single window, which is good and bad. On the one hand, you can review fundamental data while having an annotated stock chart open. On the other hand, we found ourselves constantly resizing panels to get a better look at the module we were actively using.
MarketSmith Platform Differentiators
MarketSmith from Investor’s Business Daily is an easy-to-use stock research platform. It combines fundamental and technical analysis, helping growth investors figure out not only what stocks to buy but also when to buy and sell. The included stock screener, Growth 250 list, and price alerts combine to make MarketSmith extremely actionable.
MarketSmith’s chart annotations can’t compete with an automated technical analysis platform like TrendSpider. They offer a limited range of annotations, and the charts don’t support most popular technical indicators. However, the annotated charts are very easy for newer traders and investors to understand. It’s also noteworthy that MarketSmith offers weekly and monthly charts, whereas most other automated chart analysis tools primarily cater to day traders.
What Type of Trader is MarketSmith Best For?
MarketSmith is best-suited for active growth investors and swing traders who want assistance finding winning stocks. The platform is easy enough to use for beginners to try it out, but also offers enough depth for more sophisticated investors.
MarketSmith isn’t cheap, so it’s worth considering whether this platform is significantly better than alternatives like Zacks Premium or The Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor. These platforms cost $249 and $199 per year, respectively, so they are much less expensive than MarketSmith.
Zacks Premium stands out as an especially noteworthy alternative since it offers a similar focus on growth and value stocks while also accounting for technical momentum. MarketSmith makes the most sense for highly active investors who want to identify optimal buy points rather than simply invest in promising stocks.
