Zacks Premium Review – How Good is This Stock Research Service?

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By Theo Madsen

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Zacks Premium Review

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Zacks Premium Review

  • Quality
  • Ease of Use
  • Value
4.7

Summary

Zacks Premium is a service from the independent research firm, Zacks Investment Research. Zacks Premium offers a variety of tools and features designed to help users find actionable investment opportunities. It includes research for more than 10,000 stocks and features such as a #1 rank list, earnings estimate revisions, stock screeners, fund screeners, and more. Learn more about this stock research service by reading our complete Zacks Premium review.

Pros

  • #1 Rank List highlights top stock recommendations
  • In-depth stock research and analyst reports
  • Earnings estimate revisions monitoring
  • Flexible stock screener with premade screens
  • 30-day free trial

Cons

  • Effort required to research #1 Rank List stocks
  • Very few technical analysis or market timing tools

About Zacks Premium

Zacks Investment Research is an independent research firm that’s been in business since 1978. The firm offers in-depth market research for more than 10,000 stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds. Research includes analyst reports, rankings, and detailed financial data.

Zacks offers a lot of data for free, but you’ll need a Zacks Premium subscription in order to unlock the platform’s full suite of research tools and stock recommendations. In our Zacks Premium review, we’ll cover everything you need to know about this research and stock picking service.

Zacks Premium Homepage

Zacks Premium Pricing Options

Zacks Premium costs $249 per year. You can try out the service free for 30 days. Other Zacks services include Zacks Ultimate and Zacks Investor Collection, which focus more heavily on stock picking than research.

Zacks Premium Features

#1 Rank List

One of the key features that you get with Zacks Premium is access to the Zacks #1 Rank List. The Zacks rank system ranks all stocks on a scale from 1-5, where 1-rated stocks are strong buys, and 5-rated stocks are strong sells. So, the #1 Rank List is essentially a list of stock recommendations from Zacks’ analysts. Since Zacks Research launched in 1988, the #1 Rank List has an average annualized return of 25.08% compared to 11.24% for the S&P 500.

Zacks Premium #1 Rank List

The #1 Rank List is further broken down into value, growth, momentum, and income categories. Stocks on the list are typically intended to be long-term investments, and there may be hundreds of stocks on the list at any time.

The #1 Rank List is very different from a stock picking service like The Motley Fool Stock Advisor, which offers two monthly stock picks. With Zacks Premium, it’s up to you to research the stocks on the list and decide what investment ideas are worth pursuing.

For investors interested in shorting stocks as part of their investment strategy, the #5 Rank List provides a list of potential short ideas.

Stock Research

Zacks offers extremely in-depth fundamental research for more than 10,000 US stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds. For any stock, you’ll find the Zacks rank from 1-5, as well as A-F grades for value, growth, and momentum categories. Zacks also includes equity research reports for each stock, written by Zacks analysts. The reports are very detailed and offer bulleted lists of reasons to buy and reasons to sell a stock.

Zacks Premium Stock Research

If you want to dive even deeper into researching a company, Zacks offers detailed financial statements, news headlines, and a snapshot that quickly compares a company’s performance against its peers. You can also plot fundamental metrics such as cash flow, net income, earnings per share, and more on interactive charts. Zacks also offers in-depth growth estimates that highlight projected earnings for the current year and next year.

Zacks Premium Snapshot

It should be noted that the majority of the research is geared towards fundamental analysis. Technical traders may prefer a service like MarketSmith or MarketClub (which can be complementary to a Zacks subscription).

Earnings Estimate Revisions

One unique area of research that Zacks offers is investigation into earnings estimates. The firm pays close attention to when analysts revise what EPS they expect a company to announce at its next earnings report. When revisions trend bullish or bearish, Zacks calls this to traders’ attention so you can act ahead of earnings. According to Zacks, earnings are one of the most important factors influencing stock prices.

You can find earnings estimate revisions for any stock in the snapshot report that Zacks provides. Alternatively, the platform has an earnings ESP (expected surprise potential) filter that lets you search for stocks for which Zacks anticipates reported earnings will differ from the analyst consensus. The Zacks earnings ESP filter lets you sort stocks by the expected difference in actual and consensus earnings, Zacks rank, or the amount of difference between actual and expected earnings at the end of the prior quarter.

Zacks Premium Earnings Esp

Stock and Fund Screeners

Zacks offers a stock screener, ETF screener, and mutual fund screener.

The stock screener allows you to search for stocks based on a very wide range of fundamental and financial metrics, as well as based on Zacks’ rank and value, growth, and momentum grades. You can also filter based on EPS revisions or expected earnings surprises. The platform also includes more than 45 premium screens that help you find growth stocks with strong momentum, #1 Rank List stocks hitting new highs, value stocks at 52-week highs, and more.

Zacks Premium Stock Screener

The ETF and mutual fund screeners enable you to search for funds based on performance, portfolio composition, fees, and average fundamentals. They’re fairly flexible, but they don’t offer the same breadth of filters that you’ll find in fund screeners from a service like Morningstar.

Customization and Layout

Zacks enables you to create an unlimited number of portfolios, which are useful for keeping an eye on stocks you currently hold or are interested in. You can quickly see the Zacks rankings and grades for each stock in your portfolio, as well as a portfolio-specific market news feed.

Zacks Premium Portfolio

You can also save custom stock and fund screens to your account to reuse later.

Zacks Premium Platform Differentiators

Zacks Premium offers high-quality and in-depth stock research from a team of experienced analysts. The platform offers everything you need to analyze companies’ fundamentals, with interactive financial charts, analyst reports, and competitor analysis. Importantly, the Zacks #1 Rank List, value, growth, momentum grades, and stock screens make it easy to find stocks worth researching in more detail.

Zacks’ focus on earnings estimates is also unique. While many of the tools Zacks offers are geared towards medium- and long-term investors, the earnings ESP filter can help you spot potential trades to make around companies’ earnings announcements.

Notably, Zacks also offers ETF and mutual fund research. The fund research features don’t replace a service like Morningstar, but they add to the value that Zacks Premium provides.

What Type of Trader is Zacks Premium Best For?

Zacks Premium is best for active investors who want professional analysts to point them in the direction of strong companies, but who don’t mind following up with their own research. It’s fundamentally different from a stock picking service like The Motley Fool Stock Advisor in that you need to be willing to research stocks in the #1 Rank List on your own and decide what to invest in.

While this takes more work, it also provides a lot more information and flexibility. Investors can fully understand the bull and bear cases for a company, explore competitors, and monitor earnings revisions and analyst reports to decide when to buy and sell.

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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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