YCharts Review – Is This Stock Research Platform Worth It?

YCharts is an investment research platform designed to meet the needs of sophisticated individual investors, investment advisors, and fund managers. It offers classic research tools like stock and fund screeners, but the real value of this platform lies in its advanced fundamental metrics and unique data analysis tools. YCharts supports custom financial models and timeseries analysis, plus integration with Excel.

YCharts is pricey, so it’s important to understand how this service is different from other stock research tools. Our YCharts review will take a closer look at this platform’s unique features and help you decide if it’s worth the cost.

YCharts Pricing Options

YCharts offers three subscriptions: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise.

The Standard plan costs $3,600 per year. It offers stock and fund screening and analysis tools, but has limited features for financial modeling or timeseries analysis.

The Professional plan costs $6,000 per year. It adds all of YChart’s financial modeling tools, including Excel integration, plus timeseries analysis. 

Pricing for the Enterprise plan is by quote only. This plan is designed for asset management firms and offers higher export limits, single sign-on, and premium support.

You can try out YCharts for free for 7 days with no credit card required.

YCharts Features

Dashboards

One of the first features you’ll run into in YCharts is dashboards. Instead of giving you a premade dashboard that can’t be customized, YCharts lets you create fully custom dashboards to monitor the market, a specific industry, a watchlist, or whatever you want.

You can add and rearrange modules like watchlists, charts, news feeds, or scatter plots. The dashboards are terrific for getting a quick overview of all the stocks in a specific industry or a specific foreign market. You can have as many dashboards as you want and quickly swap between them in tabs.

Stock Research

YCharts offers extremely in-depth stock research pages that include proprietary indicators to help you make investment decisions. For example, a Y-rating rates each stock as attractive, neutral, or avoid. The rating is broken down into individual scores for a stock’s value and fundamentals, each on a 1-10 scale. YCharts also considers a stock’s valuation relative to historical multiples.

You’ll find detailed fundamentals for each stock as well as a complete history of earnings and earnings estimate revisions. You can see analyst ratings, key valuation metrics, and a news feed. Comparison tables enable you to quickly compare a company’s financials against competitors.

Fundamental Charts, Scatter Plots, and Timeseries Analysis

YCharts offers extremely powerful fundamental charts and scatterplots to help you dig into individual companies and benchmark them against peers.

With the fundamental charts, you can plot hundreds of financial and valuation ratios for any number of companies on a single chart. YCharts gives you the option to plot all metrics on a single chart or separate them into panels, making it easy to visualize changes over time. You can also annotate the charts, which is great for keeping track of events that may have caused companies’ valuations to diverge.

Scatter plots offer another way to compare companies. You can choose any of the metrics YCharts supports for the chart axes and add any number of stocks, ETFs, or indices. Even better, YCharts has built timeseries analysis right into the scatter plots. This offers a neat way to see how stocks’ valuations or financials have changed relative to another financial metric over time.

If you want to dig deeper into how companies’ financial metrics have changed over time, you can use YCharts’ timeseries analysis module. This shows much of the same data that you can plot in fundamental charts in a table format.

Stock and Fund Screener

YCharts includes screeners for stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds. The screeners are very powerful thanks to the sheer number of financial and valuation indicators available within YCharts. The filters are also very customizable. For example, you can filter using a range, percentage, or rank, or create your own equations.

Screener results are shown in a table, and you have complete control over what data columns are included in the table. You can save an unlimited number of screens and save any screen results to a watchlist with one click.

Notably, YCharts lets you create custom scoring models based on any combination of metrics. You get to choose the weight assigned to each metric. Then you can use your custom scoring model to rank all of the stocks in your screen results. This is a really interesting way to make your screen results more actionable for your investment strategy.

Alerts

YCharts offers simple but actionable alerts. You can create alerts based on any single metric, or based on events like earnings, new financial statement releases, and Y-rating changes. Alerts are delivered by email and you can choose whether alerts should be sent as soon as they occur or in a batch at the end of each day.

Portfolios

YCharts includes excellent portfolio tracking tools. You can create an unlimited number of portfolios and monitor their performance and allocations over time. YCharts also lets you account for rebalancing, management fees, and contributions or withdrawals over time. Interestingly, you can include any portfolio in YCharts’ fundamental charts and scatter plots in the same way you would include a stock or ETF.

Excel Integration

YCharts has an add-on for Excel that can be very useful for investors who use Excel to build financial models. The add-on connects your spreadsheet to YCharts to provide real-time data updates, ensuring your models are always populated with current data.

YCharts Platform Differentiators

YCharts stands in a crowded field of stock research platforms by offering more advanced data analysis tools than most of its competitors. The platform’s fundamental charts, scatter plots, and timeseries analysis tools are very powerful for comparing stocks against one another and deciding how to invest. The ability to create custom scoring models makes it easier to prioritize screener results based on your investment strategy. The platform’s Excel add-on is extremely valuable for building up-to-date financial models.

Notably, YCharts is very light on technical analysis and doesn’t offer analyst research reports like Stock Rover does. It’s more suitable for advanced fundamental investors who want to find the best stocks within specific industries and need powerful analytics tools to help.

What Type of Investor is YCharts Best For?

YCharts is broadly suitable for self-driven fundamental investors with experience interpreting and analyzing financial data. You’ll get the most out of the platform if you’re able to use the many data analysis tools – including fundamental charts, scatter plots, timeseries analysis, custom scoring models, and the Excel add-in – within the context of a proven fundamental investing strategy. Beginner and intermediate investors may find the amount of data in YCharts overwhelming and may be better suited with a simpler stock research tool.

Importantly, most YCharts tools can be used to analyze ETFs and mutual funds in addition to individual stocks. This makes the platform suitable for fund investors.

While individual investors can certainly get a lot out of YCharts, the primary audience for this platform appears to be investment advisors, fund managers, and family offices. These professional investors are best-positioned to use the portfolio features within YCharts and are more likely to have in-house financial models that can benefit from the Excel add-on. It also takes a relatively large portfolio ($100,000 or more for most investors) to justify YCharts’ annual price tag.