Disclosure: Investor’s Business Daily has given ValueWalk a free subscription to MarketSmith for this review.
Investor’s Business Daily has a very strong selection of premium products aimed at the do-it-yourself investor, and one of these products we got to try recently is MarketSmith. Overall, it seems to be a very comprehensive product that provides a broad base of information on virtually any stock you wish to research. MarketSmith seems to be designed for investors who want more than just to read what analysts say about a particular stock. The product is aimed at those who want to crunch the numbers and read the stock charts on their own.
Features of MarketSmith
IBD has designed MarketSmith to be a one-stop-shop for research into stocks. The site markets the platform as a replacement for hours of research combing through multiple websites for information. MarketSmith is designed to bring a wide array of information on various stocks into one platform.
The platform provides stock charts and screeners that enable investors to dig through thousands of stocks and funds in minutes. MarketSmith also brings up key fundamental information for companies and even a smidgen of coaching from IBD to help investors learn how to use the platform.
Charting stocks through MarketSmith
The flagship feature of MarketSmith is clearly the stock charts, which show not only the price action and volumes, but also many other details. The platform points out historical growth patterns that appear within the stock’s performance history and notes technical patterns that are in the process of forming on the chart.
To look up a stock in MarketSmith, all you have to do is log into your account and then choose one of the four categories at the top of the page, which are: up on volume, down on volume, breaking out today, and near pivot. It’s important that you set your popup blocker to always allow popups from MarketSmith, or the charts won’t show up.
How to use the charts in MarketSmith
After clicking on one of the categories, the chart will pop up, and at first, it takes a little getting used to because the chart will open to one of the stocks on the list in the category you selected after logging in to MarketSmith. If you don’t want to look at that particular stock, all you have to do is look at the bottom of the chart for a full list of all the stocks that are in the category you selected.
For example, when I selected “up on volume,” the chart opened up to Las Vegas Sands Corp. Clicking anywhere on the stock chart brings up some technical details about its movement, and if you don’t want to look at that particular stock, you can see the rest of the list for that category at the bottom of the chart.
You can even click the top of the list at the bottom of the chart and drag it up to see more of the list over the stock chart. In fact, I recommend doing that before really digging into whatever stock the chart opens up at because trying to look at the chart while it’s crammed down into only three lines underneath the stock chart is rather annoying. It seems to make more sense to look at the whole list of stocks in whichever category you picked before deciding which stock on the list you want to look at first, but that’s just now how this works.
Don’t miss the right-hand panel on the stock charts
There’s also a panel on the right side that you can pull out to see information like institutional ownership and management ownership levels. It also shows you the number of funds that owned the stock in each of the last eight quarters, probably based on 13F filings.
The panel on the right also includes a tab with details about the company’s industry and sector, a tab for news articles about it and data on options trades. It also contains one of the most interesting features I found in the MarketSmith charts, which is craftily hidden away under the “Checklist” tab” on the panel you can pull out from the right.
Basically, if you strive to follow the investing strategy of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, or other well-known investors or strategies, you can easily check here to see if the stock you’re looking at passes all of the things each one looks at when assessing a stock. For example, if you choose Warren Buffett, you’ll see a checklist of 16 different benchmark criteria, and Las Vegas Sands meets 14 of the 16 criteria. If you switch to Benjamin Graham, the stock meets only nine of the 13 listed criteria, and so on.
You can even create your own stock screens, although figuring out how to do that will take some doing. The first time I clicked on “My First Screen,” a list of 32 stocks came up, but it wasn’t clear to me what the parameters for that were. I’m looking forward to learning how to do that as I experiment more with MarketSmith in the coming weeks.
Check out MarketSmith right here
IBD has some other interesting products
