Yahoo Finance Plus Review – Pros And Cons Of This Service

About Yahoo Finance Plus

Yahoo Finance Plus (formerly Yahoo Finance Premium) is an investment research service built for retail investors. The platform builds on the popular free tools long offered by Yahoo Finance and includes fair value analysis, daily market analysis, additional financial data, and more.

Yahoo Finance Plus isn’t cheap, so is this service worth it? In our Yahoo Finance Plus review, we’ll take a closer look at all of the premium tools this platform offers to help you decide.

Yahoo Finance Plus Pricing Options

Yahoo Finance offers three pricing options. The Free plan offers basic access to Yahoo Finance, including real-time quotes, portfolio tracking, and basic charts.

The Lite plan costs $25 per month or $250 per year. The main things it adds are fair value analysis for stocks and advanced portfolio analysis tools. It also comes with enhanced alerts and 24/7 live chat support.

The Essential plan costs $35 per month or $350 per year. It adds historical financial data, research reports from Morningstar and Argus, a daily market digest, and automated chart pattern recognition.

You can try out Yahoo Finance Plus’s Lite or Essential plans for 14 days (credit card required). 

Yahoo Finance Plus Features

Investment Ideas

One of the standout features of Yahoo Finance Plus is its selection of daily trade ideas. Each day, Yahoo Finance Plus uses automated chart pattern analysis to identify breakout and breakdown patterns that could represent opportunities for trading. Some of the chart patterns that the software recognizes include double bottoms, triangles, flags, and strong trends.

Yahoo Finance Plus combines these patterns with fair value analysis from Argus research reports to pick out stocks for which technical and fundamental analysis point in the same direction.

Yahoo Finance Plus typically finds more than 100 ideas per day, so there’s a lot of information for traders to dig through. You can filter ideas by whether they’re bullish, bearish, or neutral or whether the timeframe of the idea is long-term or short-term. You can also limit displayed ideas to only tickers that are in one of your portfolios.

Automated Chart Analysis

Traders can also dig into the charts behind the patterns that Yahoo Finance Plus detects. These annotated charts display current support and resistance levels and indicate whether a stock’s trajectory is bullish or bearish over short-term, medium-term, and long-term timeframes. The charts also show bullish and bearish technical events like moving average crossovers, wedges, and common candlestick patterns. 

The charts in Yahoo Finance Plus don’t offer anything near the level of automated analysis that you’ll find in dedicated charting software like TrendSpider. However, for traders who are new to technical analysis and need help interpreting price action, they can be relatively handy.

Stock Analysis

Yahoo Finance Plus also offers access to premium financial data and analysis. First, users get access to fair value estimates for stocks. These fair value estimates are determined algorithmically, and offer differ from fair value estimates offered by Argus or Morningstar analysts. 

You also have access to Yahoo Finance Plus’s Company Outlook pages, which offer unique measurements of a company’s performance from the standard financial metrics that are available in the free version of Yahoo Finance. For example, Yahoo Finance Plus gives each company an “innovation score” on a scale from 0-100 and compares that score against the sector average. The platform also tracks hiring and insider sentiment and scores each company based on its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives.

Research Reports

Essential subscribers get access to stock research reports from investment firms Morningstar and Argus. These reports are written by professional stock analysts and are very detailed. You’ll find a price target, fair value estimate, analysis of a company’s economic moat, and discussion of business risks. Yahoo Finance Plus offers a brief summary that indicates whether the report is bullish or bearish for those who don’t want to read an entire report.

It’s worth noting that Morningstar Premium also offers access to these same research reports and only costs $249 per year. Morningstar Premium includes many of the same financial and portfolio analysis features as Yahoo Finance Plus, although it doesn’t offer many tools for technical analysis.

Portfolio Analysis

While the free version of Yahoo Finance allows you to import a portfolio from your brokerage, the premium service offers more advanced portfolio analytics. With Yahoo Finance Plus, you can see whether each of your holdings are over or under the platform’s fair value estimate and compare your portfolio performance against any index or individual ticker symbol.

You can also track your portfolio’s average P/E ratio, earnings growth rate, market cap, and dividend yield. Risk analysis measures your portfolio’s beta and volatility.

Stock Screeners

Yahoo Finance Plus unlocks several stock screeners that aren’t available in the free version of Yahoo Finance. The analyst rating screener enables you to filter stocks by analyst firm, distance from price target, ratings changes, or average rating across multiple firms. The smart money screener lets you filter stocks based on the percent of shares held by institutions or the percent of shares in funds for which the stock is in the top 10 holdings. Yahoo Finance Plus subscribers can also use fair value analysis or Morningstar ratings as part of any screen. 

Yahoo Finance Plus Customization and Layout 

Yahoo Finance Plus enables you to create an unlimited number of portfolios and watchlists, and you can save any custom screens. However, the research tools aren’t especially customizable. For example, you cannot save default layouts when using customizing annotated technical charts.

We also found that the layout of Yahoo Finance Plus can be somewhat confusing. There’s a tab within the main Yahoo Finance dashboard to access premium features, but not all of the premium features are available in this tab. It’s also not straightforward to access annotated technical charts, since they are separate from the main stock charts within Yahoo Finance.

Yahoo Finance Platform Differentiators

Yahoo Finance Plus takes the free tools available through Yahoo Finance to the next level. You get improved portfolio analysis tools, additional stock market analysis, and daily trade ideas based on technical price patterns.

However, it’s not clear what Yahoo Finance Plus is trying to achieve. The service seems to cater towards investors who want to incorporate both fundamental and technical analysis into their strategies, but it lacks in-depth tools for either type of analysis. Moreover, the technical analysis tools are primarily focused on timeframes of days to weeks, while the research reports and company outlook metrics are focused on timeframes of months to years.

Yahoo Finance Plus’s best feature for fundamental analysis is its research reports, which can be accessed with a Morningstar Premium account at a lower cost. For technical analysis, the service’s best feature is its enhanced charting tools. But these are still limited in how actionable they are. Traders who are interested in more advanced automated chart analysis may want to consider TrendSpider as an alternative.

What Type of Trader is Yahoo Finance Plus Best For?

Yahoo Finance Plus caters to medium-term traders and active investors who want to use both fundamental and technical analysis in their strategies. The service can help you find trade ideas and offers basic tools for analyzing whether your investment ideas are worthwhile. 

However, the different timeframes of Yahoo Finance’s fundamental and technical analysis features make it difficult to combine them effectively. Traders and investors may be better served by opting for best-of-breed services that offer a more in-depth set of tools for the specific trading strategy they plan to use.