Disclosure: IBD gave ValueWalk a free subscription for IBD Digital for this review.
Investor’s Business Daily offers a wide variety of premium products to help investors make wiser investment decisions, and the main flagship product is IBD Digital. There are quite a lot of individual features packed into IBD Digital, but I wanted to offer a broad overview of the product and a brief synopsis and review of the main features that are included.
Market Trend
When you sign into IBD Digital, the first main section you will see is Market Trend, and there are several offerings underneath this umbrella. I found it to be a nice snapshot of the U.S. market at any given time. You can see how the S&P 500, NYSE, Dow Jones Industrial Average and NASDAQ are doing at a glance to quickly see whether the markets are up or down for the day.
There’s also a short synopsis of what the markets are doing, and at the time I looked at IBD Digital, it defined the situation as “uptrend under pressure,” adding, “Indexes rapidly are surrendering gains and remain below the 50-day moving average. If you want more information, you can also click to see IBD’s up-to-the-minute market analysis. Additionally, there’s a news article just telling you what’s going on in the markets. It seems IBD keeps it up to date, although the article wasn’t really anything that you couldn’t read somewhere else for free.
The Big Picture
Another main section in IBD Digital is The Big Picture, and it’s basically just a section of news articles. There seems to be one for each trading day, and when I looked in the afternoon on Tuesday, the day’s article had not been posted yet. The Big Picture doesn’t seem to be anything special because it’s news you can get elsewhere easily enough.
However, I did find IBD’s Exclusive Stock Lists to be a very interesting section. The IBD 50 shines a spotlight on 50 stocks picked by the IBD team and explains why they could be good investments. There’s a chart which covers the stock price, its movement, volumes, earnings per share, and sales. Some of the data and posts in the Exclusive Stock Lists section do seem to overlap with those found on Leaderboard, which does make sense
It should be noted that the stocks listed in the IBD 50 are all selected as growth names, so if you prefer to invest for value, momentum or another factor, then the IBD 50 might not be as useful for you. Still, it was a good collection of well-known and lesser-known stocks, so it could bring your attention to a company you never even considered before or don’t know much about.
IBD Digital also provides access to analyst research on individual stocks from the IBD team. Just search the stock you want to look up, and you’ll see basic information about the company along with IBD’s rating of it. IBD also rates each company’s earnings per share, relative strength, and “SMR rating” and “ACC/DIS rating.”
At first, I wasn’t sure what these last two ratings are, but after scrolling down and digging to find them, I discovered that the SMR rating stands for “Sales, margin, ROE,” while the ACC/DIS rating stands for “Accumulation/ Distribution.” Both of these ratings are proprietary from IBD, and I found the ACC/DIS rating to be of particular interest because it’s based on what institutional investors are doing with the stock in question and whether they are buying or selling it.
Psychological Market Indicators
Another feature inside IBD Digital that I found particularly interesting was the section on psychological market indicators. For example, it flagged a signal for contrarian sentiment for CBOE Market volatility for the S&P 500. IBD Digital also highlighted a contrarian put/ call ratio, high-low ratio, and its “bulls vs bears” rating. Clicking on any of these brings up a nice chart showing the trading activity for the day and an explanation about each of the signals IBD has flagged.
The platform also provides its own ETF strategy through Market Pulse, which offers suggestions for investors regarding exchange-traded funds based on the direction the market is moving that day. IBD states that its ETF Market Strategy method has returned 150% cumulatively between Oct. 10, 2005 and Mar. 29, 2018.
Login problems with IBD Digital
One general thing I will say about IBD Digital is that in some ways, it isn’t very user-friendly. After I logged in, it kept telling me to subscribe to IBD Digital, so it didn’t look like I had access to it at all. However, Investor’s Business Daily did indeed give us a free subscription so we could try it out and write a review of it, so it was already unlocked. I just had to do some digging and clicking around after logging in to locate our access to IBD Digital without paying for it.
It’s unclear whether paying subscribers would have this same problem, but if you pay for the platform once and it doesn’t look like it was unlocked, just do some clicking around after you log in to figure out where to access IBD Digital. It isn’t exactly obvious, and one reason is probably because the sales page is the same whether or not you’re logged into the platform. Other platforms seem to distinguish better between logged-in and logged-out views.
Check it out right here
