FinViz Review
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Ease of Use
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Quality
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Value
Summary
FinViz is a market research tool designed to help users find valuable trading opportunities. This platform includes a stock screener with more than 65 parameters as well as heatmaps and bubble plots for assisting users in visualizing stock data. Additionally, FinViz offers a news feed, an industry comparison tool, an insider trades feed, and more. Find out if this platform is worth using by reading our full FinViz review.
Pros
- Most tools are available for free with delayed data
- Market dashboard with actionable signals
- Comprehensive stock screener with 65+ filters
- View screener results as miniature charts or on a bubble plot
- Free stock news and insider trading feeds
Cons
- Cannot use portfolios to restrict stock screens
- Heatmap box sizes cannot be customized
About Finviz
Finviz is a market research tool with an impressively comprehensive stock screener. The platform is distinguished by its use of visualizations, including miniature charts and heatmaps. Many of FinViz’s features are free to use, but real-time data and advanced features like strategy backtesting require a paid subscription.
In our FinViz review, we’ll cover everything you need to know about this platform to decide if it’s right for you.
Finviz Pricing Options
You can use many of FinViz’s features, including the stock scanner, news feed, and heatmaps, for free without even registering an account. Registering enables you to save up to 50 portfolios and 50 custom stock screens. However, all data on free accounts is delayed by 15 minutes.
Real-time data requires a subscription to FinViz Elite, which costs $24.96 per month. FinViz Elite also includes access to the platform’s strategy backtesting tool and email alerts.
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Finviz Features
Market Dashboard
FinViz’s market dashboard provides a quick, handy rundown of how the stock market is doing. At a glance, you can see 10-minute charts of the major exchanges, the advance/decline ratio, and the percentage of stocks hitting new highs and lows.
The dashboard also offers lists of stocks grouped by signals, which can be new highs and lows, high volatility or volume, insider buying, or action around technical support and resistance levels. These lists alone are a great way to generate trade ideas without even running a stock scan. Even better, if you hover over any ticker symbol with your mouse, a miniature candlestick chart showing daily bars for the last 3 months will appear on the screen.
Heatmaps and Bubble Plots
FinViz uses heatmaps and bubble plots to help you visualize stock data.
Heatmaps are organized by sector, and each stock’s box is sized by its market cap. The heatmap can be colored based on several different factors, including recent performance, relative volume, dividend yield, P/E ratio, or analyst recommendation.
Bubble plots offer more flexibility. You can customize the settings for the X and Y axes, bubble size, and bubble color. Options for the axes and bubble color include sector, market cap, dividend yield, EPS growth, volume, performance, short ratio, institutional ownership, and more. Options for bubble size include market cap and relative volume. You can also limit what stocks are included in your bubble plot by market sector, market cap, or average volume.
Stock Screener
One of the best features of FinViz is its stock screener, which offers more than 65 parameters for filtering stocks. The available filters cover a lot of ground, including broad categories like market cap and industry, key fundamental ratios, recent performance, and price relative to moving averages.
Screener results are displayed in a table, as miniature charts, as a heatmap, or as a bubble plot. In the table view, you can hover over any ticker to bring up a chart. Tables and charts can be sorted by a variety of filters, including market cap, sector, fundamental ratios, or performance metrics.
News Feed
FinViz offers a real-time news feed with headlines from sources like Bloomberg, MarketWatch, Fox Business, and the Wall Street Journal. You can hover over the headlines to see the first sentence of each article.
The platform also offers a feed of blog-based news. This includes headlines from Seeking Alpha as well as from many lesser-known financial blogs.
Industry Comparison
FinViz also offers a unique tool to compare market sectors and sub-sectors in aggregate. You can compare the performance or valuation of, for example, the biotech, drug manufacturing, and health insurance sub-sectors within the healthcare industry. FinViz makes this data available in both table and bar chart formats.
Insider Trades
FinViz has a feed of insider trades for all US stocks. You can sort the list by buy and sell transactions and by trades conducted by insiders who own more than 10% of a company’s stock, but it’s not searchable.
Strategy Backtesting
FinViz Elite users can access the platform’s strategy backtesting tool, which allows you to see how a custom trading strategy would have performed over up to 24 years of historical trading. You can designate entry and exit parameters based on more than 100 indicators and filters, as well as limit trading to specific ticker symbols.
Your strategy performance is plotted and compared against the S&P 500. You can also see stats on your max drawdown and your return by month.
Finviz Customization and Layout
FinViz doesn’t offer many customization options, and in some ways, the platform is less modern than you might expect. However, it’s straightforward to navigate, and charts load quickly because it’s not a data-heavy web app.
The platform supports saved portfolios and saved screens, as well as saved layouts for bubble plots. One minor drawback is that you cannot use your portfolios as a list of ticker symbols to filter on when using the stock screener.
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Platform Differentiators
FinViz is an easy-to-use platform that offers a comprehensive stock screener and excellent visualization tools to help you sort through your screener results. Having the ability to view stock screener results as miniature candlestick charts is a major improvement over most other screeners. Bubble plots are equally as effective at helping you find the best stocks to trade in a list of screener results.
FinViz’s market dashboard is also a very useful tool for any trader to keep an eye on throughout the day. It provides not only a basic overview of the market, but also lists of stocks worthy of your attention.
Perhaps the thing that most sets FinViz apart from competing platforms is the fact that you can access most tools for free. Delayed data might be problematic for some active traders, but FinViz’s screening tools can work well for most swing traders and active investors without real-time data.
What Type of Trader is FinViz Best For?
FinViz is suitable for a wide variety of traders and active investors. The platform’s stock screener is comprehensive enough to work for both fundamental investors and technical traders. Investors may benefit more from being able to view and differentiate stocks on a bubble plot, while traders can benefit from being able to view screener results as miniature candlestick charts. FinViz’s dashboard and market news feed also cater to active traders.