Benzinga Pro Review
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Ease of Use
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Quality
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Value
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Speed
Summary
Benzinga Pro is a financial news platform aimed at active traders. This service offers a variety of tools and features including a real-time news feed and stock screener as well as audio alerts, stock details, signals, and more. Learn everything you need to know about this financial news platform by reading our complete Benzinga Pro review.
Pros
- Real-time news feed with actionable headlines
- Integrated charts and financial data
- Wide range of news, price, fundamental, and technical filters
- Supports audio alerts and news desk chat
- Very user-friendly platform with customizable workspaces
Cons
- Limited range of news sources
- Expensive
Benzinga Pro is a powerful financial news platform for active traders. The service offers a customizable real-time news feed with headlines written by Benzinga’s team of professional news analysts. It also includes actionable tools like a real-time stock scanner and audio alerts.
So, is Benzinga Pro worth it for you? In my Benzinga Pro review, I’ll take a closer look at all the features this news streaming platform has to offer.
Benzinga Pro Pricing Options
Benzinga Pro offers four pricing tiers: Free, Basic, Essential, and Options Mentorship.
The Free plan offers delayed quotes and access to a basic live news feed with no filters. The Basic plan costs $27 per month and unlocks the full news feed, but quotes are still delayed by 15 minutes.
The Essential plan costs $177 per month or $117 per month if you pay annually ($1,404 per year). It offers real-time quotes, advanced news feed filters, a news scanner, and audio alerts. You can also add on unusual options activity monitoring for $27.99 per month.
The Options Mentorship program costs $347 per month or $281 per month if you pay annually ($3,372 per year). It offers access to an options trading chat room led by trader Nic Chahine. This plan also includes the unusual options activity add-on at no additional cost.
Benzinga Pro offers a 14-day free trial of the Essential plan (no credit card required).
Benzinga Pro Features
News Feed
Benzinga Pro’s news feed is at the heart of this service. The feed mainly includes headlines from BZ Wire, a wire service from financial news provider Benzinga. In addition, you can opt to include press releases from a variety of sources as well as SEC announcements in the feed.
The news feed is simple and highly effective for headline-driven stock trading. New headlines are added to a running list in real-time. Clicking on any headline opens the full story, which is written by Benzinga’s analysts and is always short and to-the-point. Many stories use bullet points and color-coding so you can quickly get the most important information.
In addition, the news feed comes with several filter options. You can choose your sources and filter by “importance” from low to high. You can also filter by a wide variety of categories, which cover specific market sectors, topics like analyst ratings and earnings releases, and breaking news. In addition, the feed can be filtered by stock price, market cap, and trading volume, as well as by any of your custom watchlists.
Stock Details
One thing I really like about Benzinga Pro is that if you click on any ticker symbol in the news feed, a detailed panel about that ticker will open in your workspace. For many tickers, Benzinga Pro offers a brief, one-sentence explainer of why a stock is moving as well as information about upcoming earnings reports.
The panel also includes a candlestick chart with price intervals down to 2 minutes, as well as a list of all recent headlines related to that ticker. If you want more charting options, Benzinga Pro integrates customizable charts from TradingView. The details panel also collates financial data, a list of peer stocks, insider trading activity, and short interest information.
From the stock details panel, you can easily add a ticker to any of your watchlists or even take notes on the stock.
Stock Screener
Benzinga Pro includes a handy real-time stock screener that you can use to find trading opportunities. The screener doesn’t focus on news, but you can quickly pull up headlines around any ticker by opening its details panel.
The Benzinga Pro stock screener offers a wide range of technical and fundamental filters. You can sort stocks by price change, volume, VWAP, short interest, P/E ratio, EPS, and much more. I wouldn’t recommend Benzinga Pro’s screener on its own over a dedicated stock screener like FinViz, but traders who come to Benzinga Pro for the news feed probably won’t need to invest in an additional screening platform.
Audio Alerts
One of the standout features of the Benzinga Pro platform is audio squawk. With squawk turned on, the platform will read headlines out loud as they hit your news feed. This is a hugely important feature for day traders because it allows you to get breaking news without taking your eyes off your charting software.
News Team Chat
Another helpful feature of Benzinga Pro is the chat feature. If you see a headline and want to know more about it, you can chat with Benzinga Pro’s news team to get more information. You can also use the chat if you see a stock’s price moving sharply and want to know more about what’s behind the movement.
Signals and Movers
Benzinga Pro offers several more ways to find stocks to trade.
The signals panel notifies traders about sudden price changes, unusual options trading activity, block trades, opening gaps, and new highs and lows. You can filter signals by type, stock price, market cap, volume, and more, making it easy to tailor these signals to your trading strategy. Helpfully, you can also set up desktop notifications and audio alerts for signals so you can keep your eyes on the main news feed most of the time.
The movers panel enables you to quickly find the biggest gainers and losers in the stock market over any time period. You can choose preset periods from 5 minutes to 1 year, or choose your own timeframe. The scan can also be filtered by market cap, sector, and price, and results are updated in real-time.
Benzinga Pro Customization and Layout
Part of what makes Benzinga Pro such an incredible news platform is its intuitive and flexible layout. Within this web-based platform, you can have multiple workspaces open and organized into tabs. Within each workspace, you can open multiple panels and resize and rearrange them with ease. Key settings like audio alert volume and desktop notification preferences are available from the toolbar, without having to dive deep into a settings menu.
You can also build an unlimited number of custom watchlists and even link a portfolio from your brokerage account.
Benzinga Pro Platform Differentiators
Benzinga Pro is simply an excellent market news platform and my personal favorite news service. It’s very easy to use and offers actionable headlines written by an experienced news team. Features like integrated charts, the stock screener, and stock signals make Benzinga Pro more akin to a full trading platform than just a market news feed.
There are several features that really make Benzinga Pro stand out for active traders. The first is the audio squawk, which is key for traders who need to be working in a charting platform but still want to be able to trade breaking stock market news. Another is the ability to filter stocks and headlines by volume, price change, and VWAP. These filters allow traders to focus on high volatility stocks that are most likely to present trading opportunities.
The only thing Benzinga Pro is missing is a wider range of news sources in its feed. Platforms like MarketBeat cover headlines from sources like CNBC, Reuters, and Seeking Alpha, but Benzinga Pro does not. That said, this isn’t likely to be an issue for most traders, given the high quality of Benzinga Pro’s news feeds.
What Type of Trader is Benzinga Pro Best For?
Benzinga Pro is best suited for day traders, swing traders, and other active traders who want to trade around breaking financial news. The platform’s focus on fast, real-time headlines gives traders a chance to be among the first movers when a major story breaks.
For day traders, Benzinga Pro’s audio alerts make it easier to trade around news while focusing on quick technical analysis. For swing traders, Benzinga Pro’s news feed, stock screener, and signals can be extremely useful for finding short-term trading opportunities.