TipRanks Review – Is This Investment Research Platform Legit?

TipRanks is an investment research platform that helps you evaluate stocks based on the advice of Wall Street analysts and insiders. You can follow top-performing analysts and investors to mimic their portfolios. You can also compare stocks within a sector to find the one that analysts think is best.

Overall, TipRanks is a great platform for generating investment ideas. In our TipRanks review, we’ll cover everything this research service can do and help you decide if it’s right for you.

TipRanks Pricing Options

TipRanks offers two subscription plans: Premium and Ultimate.

Premium costs $359 per year and unlocks most TipRanks features. You can compare analyst price targets, access proprietary Smart Scores, and use all of the filters in the TipRanks stock screener.

Ultimate costs $599 per year and adds stock risk analysis, research firm rankings, and analysis of companies’ website traffic.

Both plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

TipRanks also offers a limited free account. It mainly lets you view consensus Wall Street price targets for individual stocks. You cannot filter top-performing analysts, view Smart Scores, or see ratings from individual analysts.

TipRanks Features

Stock Analysis

The detailed stock analysis pages in TipRanks are one of the key elements of this platform. You can search any stock and get a thorough breakdown of what financial experts think about it.

To start, you can see what Wall Street analysts think about a company. TipRanks displays the low, median, and high 12-month price targets based on analysts’ publicized targets. You can filter to just top-performing analysts, which makes TipRanks more useful than other sites that summarize analyst price targets.

You can also check out each analyst’s rating in more detail. This includes the analyst and their ranking, their price target, and when the target was issued.

TipRanks also offers a breakdown of each company’s financials, including their balance sheets, cash flow statements, and income statements. The platform uses a combination of tables and graphs to make this information more easily digestible.

In addition, TipRanks looks at insider activity around each stock. You can see all insider transactions and their size. An indicator dial shows whether insider activity is more bullish or more bearish than for the sector as a whole.

TipRanks also analyzes the portfolios of its users to see whether public sentiment around a stock is bullish or bearish. TipRanks evaluates hedge funds to see whether major investors are buying or selling a stock. The platform also analyzes articles on sites like Seeking Alpha, Investor Place, and The Motley Fool to give you an idea of how positive or negative expert sentiment is around a company.

TipRanks combines all of this analysis into a single proprietary Smart Score, which ranks each stock on a 1-10 scale. An overview page also helps you get a quick idea of how different groups of experts are approaching a stock.

Expert Rankings

TipRanks ranks Wall Street analysts, corporate insiders, financial bloggers, hedge fund managers, and individual users based on their performance at picking stocks.

For top analysts, you can see each analyst’s success rate, average return, and current distribution of buy/sell/hold ratings. You can filter by sector, success rate, return, and timeframe to find analysts that match your style.

You can also follow analysts, bloggers, insiders, and other TipRanks users. When you follow someone, you’ll receive alerts when they issue a new stock rating.

Stock Ideas and Comparisons

TipRanks uses all of the data on the platform to assemble top lists of stocks. You can view stocks that are top-rated by analysts or insiders, for example, or check out a list of stocks with the highest Smart Scores.

The Smart Score list is especially noteworthy because it’s generated a return of 216.5% since 2016 compared to 99.5% for the S&P 500 over the same time period. So, you could potentially use this list like a stock picking service and get pretty good results.

TipRanks also makes it easy to compare stocks across popular sectors. You can pull up a table of airline stocks, for example, and see analyst price targets, insider and blogger sentiment, and Smart Scores for each of them.

Stock Screener

The TipRanks stock screener allows you to filter all stocks on the platform by analyst rating, price target upside, blogger and insider sentiment, Smart Scores, and more.

The screener is great for generating a list of recommended stocks, but it doesn’t include many traditional financial or valuation metrics. So, it works best if you can use the results from the TipRanks screener as the basis for a more strategy-specific screen in another platform like FinViz or Stock Rover.

Market News

TipRanks also includes its own market news feed, where you’ll find articles written by an in-house news team. Articles mainly focus on new recommendations from analysts and help you find the best analysts to follow on TipRanks for different investing approaches. There’s a section of the news center devoted to earnings analysis, which is a nice way to get a summary of what analysts took away from new earnings releases.

TipRanks Platform Differentiators

Many investment research platforms consider what analysts and insiders think about a stock, but TipRanks takes that to the next level. It does an excellent job of breaking down consensus price targets into the individual ratings that went into them. Even better, you can see how analysts have performed in the past, so you know how much trust to put in their price targets and recommendations.

Notably, the TipRanks approach seems to work well. The Smart Scores portfolio has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than two-to-one over the past seven years.

What Type of Trader is TipRanks Best For?

TipRanks is a great option for medium to long-term investors who want to find high-quality companies to invest in. The service is heavily focused on Wall Street analysts’ 12-month price targets, so investors should have roughly a 12-month horizon in mind when using TipRanks.

It’s nice to be able to follow experts that match your investing style and use the stock screener to develop your own investment ideas. However, you can also benefit from TipRanks simply by mimicking the Smart Scores portfolio, which has vastly outperformed the S&P 500 since 2016.

TipRanks is mainly focused on showing you what financial experts think about a stock, so it has limited capabilities for doing a deep fundamental or technical analysis of your own.  Investors may want to use TipRanks as a starting point to find high-quality stocks, then conduct their own deeper analysis using a service like StockRover.