GuruFocus Review – Is This Stock Research Platform Worth Using?

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By Theo Madsen

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Gurufocus Review

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GuruFocus Review

  • Quality
  • Ease of Use
  • Value
4.5

Summary

GuruFocus is a stock research platform with a focus on supporting value investing strategies. This platform includes market and trading information for stocks that their highly successful trading gurus and fund managers own. It also tracks insider trades, provides in-depth data, includes a stock screener, and more. Learn more about this stock research platform by reading our complete GuruFocus review.

Pros

  • Track trades from the world’s top investors
  • In-depth stock ratings and valuation grades
  • Comprehensive financial data with export options
  • Excellent stock screener with hundreds of filters
  • Model portfolios and pre-made screens

Cons

  • Expensive premium plans
  • Amount of data can be overwhelming for new value investors

About GuruFocus

GuruFocus is a stock research platform designed to support value investing strategies. The service provides trading and market information about the stocks that highly successful investors and fund managers own. It also offers in-depth financial data, a comprehensive stock screener, and model portfolios to help you find undervalued stocks.

In our Gurufocus review, we’ll cover everything you need to know to decide if this value investing platform is right for you. 

Gurufocus Homepage

GuruFocus Pricing Options

GuruFocus offers much of its data about individual stocks and guru holdings for free. However, you’ll need a premium membership in order to view recent guru trades and to access research tools like the stock screener.

A GuruFocus Premium membership costs $69 per month or $499 per year. It unlocks most features of GuruFocus, but limits you to 3 custom screens and 3 years of financial data.

Gurufocus Pricing

GuruFocus Premium Plus costs $169 per month or $1,348 per year and offers unlimited custom screens as well as stock data as far back as 2006. GuruFocus Professional costs $299 per month or $2,398 per year and offers unlimited access to the platform’s API.

These GuruFocus plans include data for more than 34,000 US stocks. You can also purchase data for other financial market regions like China, India, the UK, Canada, and Europe.

GuruFocus offers a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

GuruFocus Features

Gurus

GuruFocus tracks the holdings and trades of some of the best investors in the world. These so-called gurus include investors like Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Cathie Wood, Bill Ackman, Bill Gates, and others. In total, GuruFocus tracks the holdings of around 140 gurus and keeps a scoreboard so you can see which investors have been the most successful.

Gurufocus Guru Page

GuruFocus aggregates holdings from all of the gurus it tracks to help you make investing decisions. You can see a list of real-time trades made by gurus as well as the top stocks held by gurus on the platform. You can also select any number of individual gurus to see which holdings they have in common or which stocks they have all bought recently.

You can also dive into each guru’s individual portfolio to see all of their holdings and their latest trades. GuruFocus distinguishes between new buys and adds and between reductions in a position or selling out of it, making it easier to gauge what a guru thinks about a particular stock. Guru portfolios are also broken down by stock industry and geographic distribution.

Insider Trades

GuruFocus also tracks insider trades. You can quickly see all CEO and CFO buying activity, as well as sort stocks by performance, sector, and market cap. Even better are the insider cluster buys and double buys lists. The cluster buys list includes stocks that have been bought repeatedly by one or more company insiders, while the double buys list includes stocks that are seeing both guru and insider trades. You can also filter the double buys list by the number of gurus who have recently bought a stock.

Gurufocus Double Buys List

Stock Research

Individual stock research pages on GuruFocus are incredibly detailed and offer a ton of data for value investing. Summary pages offer a GuruFocus score on a scale from 0-100, as well as a fair value estimate for each stock. There are also ratings for financial strength, profitability, growth, momentum, and value, each on a 1-10 scale. The amount of data in these summaries can be somewhat overwhelming, but GuruFocus uses color coding to help you quickly compare all of the available metrics against a company’s competitor and against its own history.

Gurufocus Stock Summary

Additional pages for each stock offer even more in-depth data. For example, you can view up to 30 years’ worth of financial data, including cash flow statements, enterprise value, and valuation ratios. You can also see whether gurus have been net buying or net selling shares of a company over time. GuruFocus also includes a discounted cash flow calculator so you can determine a stock’s fair value using your own financial projections. A financial news tab enables you to track the latest stories from sites like Zacks and Seeking Alpha.

Gurufocus Dcf Calculator

Stock Screener

The GuruFocus stock screener is one of the most valuable research tools that the platform offers. The screener itself is extremely comprehensive and includes hundreds of filters for company fundamentals, valuation ratios, performance metrics, guru and insider activity, and more. You can screen stocks based on GuruFocus’s stock scores and financial strength ratings and on how many gurus are buying a stock versus how many are selling it. You can even screen stocks based on individual gurus.

Gurufocus Stock Screener

GuruFocus includes 34 pre-made stock screens, all of which can be customized. Some of these are based on the strategies of individual gurus (for example, there’s a Buffett-Munger stock screen), while others are based on valuation or insider trading activity. The pre-made screens are very well-designed and can help you quickly generate investment ideas.

Most web-based screeners have a hard time competing with the free FinViz screener, but GuruFocus offers a great alternative to FinViz (especially if you use the proprietary metrics).

Model Portfolios

GuruFocus also includes 18 model portfolios, which are based on results from several of the pre-made stock screens. These portfolios aren’t necessarily designed to beat the stock market, and many of them haven’t – GuruFocus is transparent about comparing the portfolios’ performance against the S&P 500. So, they shouldn’t be treated as investment advice or as a stock picking service.

Notably, though, the Most Broadly Held portfolio – which tracks the 25 stocks held by the largest number of gurus – generated an annualized return of 15.26% over the past 10 years compared to 12.03% for the S&P 500.

Gurufocus Model Portfolio

Customization and Layout

GuruFocus offers plenty of latitude for customization. You can save your favorite gurus to a watchlist, as well as create your own portfolios to more easily track your stock holdings. GuruFocus also lets you save custom screens.

Gurufocus My Gurus

GuruFocus makes it easy to download financial data and screener results from the platform. It even offers add-ons for Excel and Google Sheets to help you import GuruFocus data into your existing workflows.

GuruFocus Platform Differentiators

GuruFocus takes the practice of following in the footsteps of highly successful investors to the next level. With this platform, you can not only see what stocks are in guru investors’ portfolios, but track their recent trades as soon as they’re filed. GuruFocus also makes it easy to find stocks that many professional investors are buying or selling, and it even leans on insider trading activity to help you spot hot stocks.

There’s more to GuruFocus than just guru insights, too. The platform’s fundamental stock research and ratings are extremely useful for value investors. GuruFocus gives you all the tools you need to develop your own value strategies and even enables you to download data to Excel for further analysis. In addition, the GuruFocus stock screener is one of the most comprehensive screeners we’ve tested.

If you want to consider similar services, you may check out our MarketSmith review, Zacks Premium Review, and Morningstar review. That said, if you are looking for stock ideas from renowned investors, GuruFocus is the way to go.

What Type of Trader is GuruFocus Best For?

GuruFocus is best for value investing. The majority of the gurus that the platform tracks are value-driven investors, and GuruFocus’s stock research focuses heavily on financial performance.  Many of the pre-made screens in GuruFocus are also designed to help you find undervalued companies.  

GuruFocus isn’t cheap, and the financial data included in the platform is quite comprehensive. So, this platform is best for value investors who already have a clear investing strategy and can use GuruFocus’s data to put that strategy into action. That said, beginner investors can also benefit from the platform by using the pre-made stock screeners and model portfolios in GuruFocus to generate investment ideas.

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Theo Madsen

Theo has been actively trading the forex markets since 2013. Over the past five years, he has gained experience trading currencies, stocks, options, and futures. Theo's trading experience led him to test out over one hundred different trading services and he shares his insights in reviews to help other traders.

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