There are a lot of stock picking services out there.
The list of investment platforms, portfolio management services, charting, scanning, screening, researching, and analyzing programs is long and grows longer by the day.
Offline. Online. Browser-based. Desktop-based. Mobile app-only – you can find an almost alarming number of programs that promise the moon, offer all the most innovative and user-friendly features, claim that they have the best interface, the best research tools, the best recommendations, the best charting features and the most advanced technical stock analysis features on top of a whole suite of good old-fashioned fundamental analysis functions built right in…
…and they all do pretty much the exact same things.
In such a saturated market, there’s really only one big question we should be asking of every single investing-related platform, software, and application:
So what?
What does this service/software/platform bring to the table that we haven’t seen a hundred times already?
What about their value proposition is so compelling that we should jump out of our seats, payment cards in hand, and sign up for their undoubtedly pricey premium services?
More to the point, what exactly does TipRanks do better than its peers? What does it have that’s compelling enough to make us drop whatever service we’re already using and sign up as their newest members?
Pro Tip:
TipRanks gives you access to the investment strategies of stock experts, top Wall Street analysts, and even corporate insiders. You can follow your favorite experts, see if they’re beating the S&P 500, and copy their trades for yourself. You can sign up for TipRanks Premium for less than $1 per day, PLUS a 30-day money-back guarantee.
What Is TipRanks?
TipRanks was founded in 2012 by Uri Gruenbaum and Gilad Gat, with the help of a finance professor at Cornell University named Roni Michaely.
The Tel Aviv-based financial technology company launched its first major service in 2013, something it called the Financial Accountability Engine.
The Engine is a pseudo-A.I. designed to utilize machine learning and natural language processing to scan and analyze analyst ratings, corporate filings submitted to the SEC, financial news websites, and whatever other information it can get its digital hands on.
It crunches all the numbers and parses all the information it can to monitor and rank the performance of investors, financial bloggers, corporate insiders, financial advisors, hedge fund managers, and a whole range of other experts – making it easier for TipRanks users to find out which experts are worth listening to and which ones are full of it.
TipRanks Features
TipRanks has a bunch of other services and features on offer, but the investor ratings seem to be the main differentiating factor that they bring to the table.
As far as we can tell, their ability to monitor, analyze, and rank the performance of tens of thousands of financial professionals is unmatched for finding hot stocks, and they seem very confident about the value of having that financial information at your fingertips.
So let’s start with that, shall we?
TipRanks Expert Rankings
When you click on the Top Experts link you’ll be brought to the page pictured above.
This is where TipRanks shows off the number of experts it tracks, what their positions are, and the star rating they’ve been assigned by the system.
Expert Ranking Factors
The fact that Elon Musk is listed alongside Warren Buffett is…curious, but it makes more sense when you consider the factors that TipRanks uses to rank its experts:
- Success Rate: TipRanks monitors all the experts on its list (all 96,000 of them) and marks down each recommendation and/or transaction they make. Each transaction is monitored over a one-year period or until the expert changes their recommendation, at which point it is marked down as a win or a loss. And yes, you guessed it: wins are better for your rating than losses. Fascinating stuff.
- Average Return: This is exactly what it sounds like. TipRanks monitors each rating or transaction an expert makes, then measures their return over a default period of one year (or if they change their recommendation). This data is then averaged across all their transactions and used to calculate a good portion of their star rating.
- Statistical Significance: This one’s a little less obvious. The TipRanks website says: “The more recommendations or transactions an expert makes, the more statistically significant their performance results. For this reason, experts with a higher number of recommendations are more likely to be ranked higher if their success rate and average return rate are high. Or they may be ranked lower if their success rate and average return are low/negative.”
Let’s take Musk as an example to see how this all plays out in practice.
His rating seems to be primarily based on his occasional sales and buybacks of Tesla stock, which has netted him quite a lot of upside – not surprising, considering the fact that he got in on the company before the share price started doing its gravity defying act.
Those profits, the fact that he’s mostly traded the stock at advantageous times, plus his high-profile status among certain types all add up to five stars; though it isn’t clear why Musk is labeled #2 but doesn’t appear anywhere on the top 50 list.
If you click on any individual investor, analyst, etc you’ll be taken to their personal page.
There you’ll find things like their success rate, their average returns, what your portfolio would earn if you’d followed every trade of theirs (for one year per transaction, which confuses things a little), the number of buy/hold/sell stock ratings they’ve made, their stock coverage, and so on.
As you can see from the screenshot below, every one of these pages has a ton of data that you can use to assess whether or not the expert in question is worth listening to.
So it’s pretty clear that TipRanks’ expert ranking system is robust and practically unmatched in the market.
That feature alone may be worth the price of admission, but what else do they have going for them?
Pro Tip:
TipRanks gives you access to the investment strategies of stock experts, top Wall Street analysts, and even corporate insiders. You can follow your favorite experts, see if they’re beating the S&P 500, and copy their trades for yourself. You can sign up for TipRanks Premium for less than $1 per day, PLUS a 30-day money-back guarantee.
TR Ideas
The TR Ideas section of TipRanks’ site is essentially an aggregated, high-level view of what the best-performing experts that TipRanks monitors have been recommending, buying, or selling. It’s broken up into several sections:
- Stocks
- ETFs
- Crypto
- Options
- Currency
- Pro Newsletters
Each section contains a bunch of subsections, each with their own little gimmicks and/or TipRanks special sauce.
For example, the Stocks section includes these subsections:
- Top Analyst Stocks
- Top Smart Score Stocks
- Top Insiders Stocks
- Top Stock Websites
- Top Gainers/Losers/Active Stocks
- Dividend Stocks
- ChatGPT Stocks
Each of the subsections has its own specific high-level area of focus.
For example, the Top Analyst Stocks subsection measures the sentiment of the best-performing analysts and shows you how they feel about certain industries and specific stocks, giving you both a high-level and a more granular perspective on their current sentiment.
Research Tools
TipRanks doesn’t just show you what the most influential and highest-performing analysts and investors are trading and/or recommending; it also comes with a fairly impressive set of tools for finding your own trades.
There’s a stock screener with a pretty wide set of filters (pictured below), an ETF screener that does pretty much the same thing, just with ETFs, a penny stock screener that – you guessed it – does the same thing with penny stocks, and even a technical analysis screener that lets you look for hot stocks based on technical factors.
There are tools that let you compare up to 10 stocks or ETFs at the same time with criteria like technical indicators, analyst consensus and stock price targets, dividend information, earnings data, performance, and other factors.
There’s a tool to research stocks that have been trending (rated by 3 or more analysts in the last few days), and you can even find stock portfolio tracker tools for tracking daily insider transactions and daily analyst ratings.
Most of TipRanks’ research tools are functional and fairly robust, but not all that special in the grand scheme of things.
You can find better screeners, more impressive research, better charting tools, and a whole host of other interesting features on other sites – but that’s not necessarily what TipRanks is going for.
A lot of the value that TipRanks brings to the table comes from their expert ranking system, and that’s as true of their research tools as it is of their actual ranking system.
Their platform isn’t going to give you as much of a technical analysis and/or quant-centric toolset; their platform is going to help you get a sense of how the market and its most talented participants are feeling, acting, and trading on a day-to-day basis.
It’s a different focus than you may be used to, but it’s one that may pay off greatly for some investors.
How Much Does TipRanks Cost?
Now, let’s dive into the price of TipRanks.
TipRanks has two paid tiers: Premium and Ultimate.
As you can see, both tiers have a lot going for them.
There’s tons of additional content, additional functionality for the research and analysis tools, more investment ideas, the ability to maintain more smart portfolios (which, let’s be honest, you can do on every other stock research service as well), and, of course, more access to the expert data that TipRanks collects.
The Premium package will likely be worth it to investors who are very interested in following along with and learning from some of the highest-performing traders and analysts.
A lot of people learn best by example, so it’s not hard to see why a lot of folks would be interested in the TipRanks model of investing advice.
The Ultimate tier has some compelling bonuses, but it’s always a good idea to do a free trial or even a month or two of the Premium tier before signing up for Ultimate.
The Ultimate tier is $600 a year, after all, so it’s a good idea to make sure you’re actually going to get enough use out of it before you pull the trigger.
The ultimate litmus test, of course, is whether or not you can make more money off of the information TipRanks gives you than your TipRanks subscription costs.
This is kind of hard to determine without spending at least some time on the platform, but it’s also the only way to truly know if the service is worth it to you.
Pro Tip:
TipRanks gives you access to the investment strategies of stock experts, top Wall Street analysts, and even corporate insiders. You can follow your favorite experts, see if they’re beating the S&P 500, and copy their trades for yourself. You can sign up for TipRanks Premium for less than $1 per day, PLUS a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Mobile Experience
The TipRanks app is free, relatively lightweight, and not nearly as good of an experience as the browser version.
Sure, it looks fairly sleek, and yes, the interface is relatively responsive and straightforward; but a smartphone’s screen just doesn’t have the real estate that TipRanks needs to display all of its important information.
The app is a lot like most other mobile versions of popular sites and services: TipRanks has clearly spent a long time trying to pack as much information onto the screen as it can while selectively cutting or hiding information to better fit a smartphone.
It’s a perfectly functional experience, but you don’t want functional when you’re trying to pore over financial data and compare statistics – you want to be able to actually pore over the data without wondering what’s been omitted for the sake of visual brevity.
To put it another way: the TipRanks app is fine. Just, you know, use the app to browse around and read stuff, then hop on your PC to make sure you get the information you need to make educated decisions.
Conclusion
TipRanks takes an interesting approach to investing.
It doesn’t have the most advanced screeners, research tools, stock charts, or technical stock analysis features. It doesn’t have the widest selection of assets on offer, nor does it have the volumes of professional research reports you’d find on some other sites.
What it does have is possibly the most expansive and in-depth expert performance-tracking functionality on the market.
So when we ask: What exactly does TipRanks do better than its peers? That’s the answer. Same goes for “so what?” and “what about TipRanks is so compelling it’s worth signing up for?”
TipRanks’ value proposition is either very compelling or not compelling at all, depending on your investing philosophy and your need for tools to research stocks.
Want to trade on sentiment, track the performance of important investors, mimic and/or learn from talented traders, and get a fairly decent set of research and portfolio management tools at the same time?
Chances are you’ll find TipRanks pretty darn compelling. Just make sure you get your money’s worth.
We hope you’ve found our TipRanks review useful. If you’d like to compare TipRanks to another investment platform that lets you copy other trader’s strategies, check out our eToro review!