Reviewing The New Investor’s Business Daily Leaderboard

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Disclosure: Investor’s Business Daily provided ValueWalk a free subscription to Leaderboard for this review.

Investor’s Business Daily offers a strong selection of premium products aimed at investors who like to research and pick their own stocks, and one of these products is Leaderboard. IBD just recently redesigned Leaderboard, so things look quite a bit different than they did when I wrote my last review of it about a month ago.

What is Leaderboard?

Even though the platform looks different, the premise behind Leaderboard is still the same. IBD does an excellent job of helping do-it-yourself investors spot stocks that could be heading for a breakout in the coming days or weeks. Upon logging in to the new Leaderboard, you’re greeted with a tour, which points out the Leaders List, the Quick Look, In-Depth Information, and links to IBD’s various tools, such as the annotated stock charts, your stock lists, or any alerts you’ve set up on various stocks.

The Leaders List highlights stocks that could be close to a buy point, are currently extended in price, or are emerging as potential leaders to come. The Leaders List also helps investors identify potential short positions and options plays, if you’re into the options market. The Quick Look offers just a basic price and volume overview for the stocks that are included on the Leaders List, and then you can click any stock to bring up a panel with more detailed analysis of it on the right.

Leaderboard also highlights its “Cut List,” which includes stocks that have recently been added to or removed from the Leaders List. Other areas of focus include The Market Trend and The Big Picture, Sector Leaders, the IBD 50, the Stock Spotlight, and My Stock Lists.

Overview of the new Leaderboard

Upon logging into Leaderboard, you’ll see a sort of dashboard with a basic summary. On the day I tried it out, Leaderboard declared that the market was in a “confirmed uptrend.” The dashboard also shows you the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and NASDAQ, and also volume numbers for the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ.

The front page also contains a highlighted stock, which in this case is Amazon. Leaderboard lists it as being near a buy point and identifies the buy range as between $1,568.62 and $1,647.05 per share. I like that Leaderboard identifies a range of prices for the buy point, and IBD also highlights any recognizable chart patterns that have appeared recently.

Looking through the Leaders List brought several other stocks that IBD considered to be in a buy zone, including some that are far lesser known than Amazon. For example, IBD suggested Veeva Systems, declaring that it joined the Leaders List as a “half position.” Leaderboard also used this terminology for “full” and “half” positions before the redesign, but the one complaint I have about Leaderboard is the lack of an explanation about them.

These terms are commonly used in swing trading, but investors who are beginners may be confused about them. In general, full and half positions are rather subjective because these sizes depend on various factors, such as portfolio size, weighting, etc. Leaderboard obviously assumes that investors are familiar with swing trading terminology. This is good in the sense that advanced investors won’t feel like their abilities are far above the potential offered by Leaderboard, but beginners could be put off a bit by this. Still, IBD offers a plethora of resources for investors who want to learn about swing trading, so there are opportunities to learn about common terms and how to customize them to your own portfolio.

A+ on the Leaderboard redesign

Overall, I think the new design of Leaderboard is fresh and crisp. In some ways, I think it’s much easier to use than the previous design. In fact, I noticed more features this time around, and I think it’s because they were easier to find and navigate.

For example, I spotted the Alerts in the dropdown menu, and I was able to quickly create my own alerts for various stocks. All you need to do is enter in the symbol, the price you’re looking for, and select which moving averages you’re watching. You can choose to have your notifications sent to your email or even your desktop, which is quite handy for those who like to be available to make a trade at a moment’s notice without having to watch the charts on all of the stocks they’re thinking about buying or selling.

I also feel that the new Leaderboard is easier to follow and less cluttered. Even though the same information on each stock is available, I felt a little bit less like I was in the information overload zone. When looking at your stock lists, you can choose from the dropdown whether you want to look at the stocks’ price and volume, fundamentals, or IBD’s proprietary “SmartSelect ratings.”

Another tidbit that I like about the redesign is the addition of a sort of background about each of the stocks on the Leaders List, which is helpful for companies that you haven’t heard of before. It’s just enough information to help you see whether it’s even a company you might be interested in at all.

Leaderboard is still an excellent resource for stock info

Some of the articles that are available in Leaderboard are also available through IBD Digital, but the layout is different. I actually like the refreshed look of Leaderboard’s layout, and it would be refreshing to see IBD Digital head in this same direction because if there’s any risk with using IBD’s products, it’s feeling overwhelmed with information. Having access to so much information in a single place offers investors an excellent value, but including too much on the same page can make it easy to miss things that you would have otherwise noticed.

Perhaps one of the things I like best about the new Leaderboard is the list of stocks that have been added or removed to the Leaders List in the last five days. This list makes it easier to see exactly when a stock was added or removed. The only downside here is not being able to click on any of the stocks to see the details of their addition to or removal from the list, but if you navigate to the full Leaders List, you can scroll through until you find the stock you’re trying to read more about.

Overall, I give IBD a near-perfect score for the redesign of Leaderboard. I think they made some excellent changes and made it much easier to use.

Check out LeaderBoard right here

IBD has some other interesting products

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