Atom Finance Review – Are These Free Investing Tools Effective?

What Is Atom Finance?

Atom Finance is an investing platform that helps stock market investors analyze their existing brokerage accounts and research new investment opportunities. The platform features real-time quotes, access to financial news and SEC filings, a portfolio analyzer, and a handful of other stock market analysis tools. The platform’s goal is bring institutional quality investing resources to the casual investor.

Is Atom Finance worth your time? Keep reading our Atom Finance review to find out.

Atom Finance Cost

Atom Finance costs $6.99 per month. You can try out the app free for 7 days.

The platform is available as a web platform or mobile app. You can download the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play.

Atom Finance Features

Atom Finance offers a few basic research tools and investing tools for retail traders. Let’s take a closer look.

Sandbox

The most unique feature that Atom Finance is a suite of financial models, which it places under a tab labeled “Sandbox.” With these models, you can customize many of the assumptions that stock analysts use when calculating a target price for a stock. For example, you can modify the number of shares outstanding, the share price, and the total debt and revenue that you think a company will capture in the future. Based on that, Atom Finance will automatically recalculate fundamentals like enterprise value-to-EBITDA and price-to-earnings ratio.

From there, you can model a fair value for the share price of a stock. You can use the price-to-earnings ratio and calculate a forward multiple to get the fair price, or use total enterprise value to EBITDA or revenue. Helpfully, Atom Finance also lets you choose to see detailed consensus estimates for all of these values, so you can see how your analysis stacks up against what experts are thinking.

If you want to get really deep into building your own financial models, you can also edit detailed fundamentals – for example, revenue, year-over-year growth percentage, and even tax rate, among around a dozen other metrics. Any model you create can be named and saved for future reference, which allows you to adjust expectations as new data comes in.

News Feed

You can follow any number of stocks or market sectors and Atom Finance will automatically curate a news feed for you.

Surprisingly, Atom Finance doesn’t have many stories from the biggest names in the stock news world – outlets like Benzinga, MarketWatch, and Bloomberg. Instead, many of the stories are from Reuters or from Atom Finance’s own press team. This is unfortunate since you don’t get as wide a view of the market as what many comparable stock news platforms offer. It’s also not uncommon to have more than an hour pass between stories, even if you follow market leaders like Amazon and Apple.

While the news feed isn’t the star of the service, it’s still adequate. You can always use Yahoo Finance if you need more financial news.

Atom Finance has a feature it calls “X-ray,” which is essentially a financial research search engine. It lets you search for mentions of companies and/or keywords across news articles, earnings call transcripts, and SEC filings. This can be helpful if you want to dig a little deeper into a company or its competition.

This is a pretty cool feature considering Atom Finance’s budget-friendly price. It’s similar to the premium functionality of tools like EquityFeed and Benzinga Pro (although it’s not quite as powerful).

Company Comparison

Atom Finance lets you directly compare two or more companies. We were initially excited to review this feature, but it ended up being a little disappointing. The results are output into a table rather than displayed in a graphical form. You can look at a variety of fundamental metrics such as price-to-earnings ratio, revenue growth, and EBITDA, but the list of factors to compare is far from exhaustive.

While this comparison tool is definitely convenient, it’s nothing new. You can do similar analyses with more data on Yahoo Finance and FinViz.

Unfortunately, you can’t compare companies based on the models you’ve created in the Sandbox. That’s a huge blow since it prevents you from really taking advantage of the custom modeling component of this platform.

Stock Screener

Atom Finance recently introduced a stock screener, which was missing when we first reviewed this platform. The screener is nothing mind-blowing, but it works reasonably well. You can screen stocks using any of the fundamental and valuation metrics available in Atom Finance, which is a pretty wide selection. Screens can only be based on standard valuation metrics, not valuation data you create using the Sandbox.

Screener results are displayed in a table and it’s easy to check multiple stocks to add them to a watchlist (which Atom Finance calls “Hubs”) or a comparison table.

Portfolio Tracking

You can also use Atom Finance as a portfolio tracker. You can connect one or more brokerage accounts or enter transactions manually. Atom Finance also lets you create a simulated portfolio and watch how it performs over time.

Once you’ve set up a portfolio, Atom Finance will graph your returns against the S&P 500 and calculate portfolio statistics like the average P/E ratio of your holdings. It will also display your portfolio diversity based on which sectors the stocks you hold fall into. Of course, you can also track your positions and trades over several different timeframes. If you have multiple brokerage accounts, you can aggregate the data or look at each account individually. 

One nice thing about Atom Finance for ETF and mutual fund investors is that the platform looks at the underlying holdings inside your funds. This is similar to Morningstar’s Portfolio X-ray tool and it’s essential if you want to remain diversified while investing in a mix of stocks and funds.

Trader Chat

Atom Finance recently added a chat feature that lets you discuss stocks with other Atom Finance users. The community is still relatively small, so the chatroom isn’t very active. Still, this could be turn into a very nice feature as Atom Finance grows.

Customization And Layout

Atom Finance is highly customizable in that you have complete control over which stocks and market sectors you want to follow. The platform will automatically tailor your news feeds and dashboard to these stocks and sectors.

One thing missing from Atom Finance, though, is a discover feature that allows you to find related stocks based on recent performance. The only way to “discover” new stocks is to look for competitors to the stocks you currently follow. 

Compatible Brokerages

Atom Finance can import trade data from a wide variety of US brokerages, including Schwab, E*TRADE, Fidelity, Interactive Brokers, Robinhood, and more. Adding your brokerage account to the platform enables you to track your return and analyze your holdings.

Atom Finance Platform Differentiators

Atom Finance does a little bit of everything, but it leaves a lot of major gaps for traders to fall through. The Sandbox modeling is arguably its best and most unique feature, but the platform doesn’t really capitalize on it. You can’t access your saved models throughout the platform, for example when comparing multiple companies’ fundamentals or analyzing the stocks in your portfolio. That dramatically limits the usefulness of creating custom models, although they’re still very valuable for analyzing a single investment.

The news and portfolio tracking features of Atom Finance are nothing special. In fact, there are much better free or inexpensive stock news aggregators. There are also plenty of free portfolio trackers that offer similar features to Atom Finance’s tracker.

That said, we liked Atom Finance’s interface. It is very clean and easy to use. In addition, Atom Finance gives traders access to real-time data, which is particularly useful for more active traders. While most brokerages offer real-time quotes to clients, it’s nice that this platform includes them.

What Type of Trader Is Atom Finance Best For?

Atom Finance is best for fundamental investors who can take advantage of the platform’s custom modeling features. This is a very unique feature for long-term investors to have access to, and it’s very impressive that the platform offers this modeling at such a low cost. However, investors should be cautious when creating their own models. The modeling tool is easily accessible, but it should only be used by investors who feel comfortable diving deep into earnings reports and call transcripts to come up with projections for the future. 

Beyond that, it’s hard to say exactly who Atom Finance is for. We would recommend using a combination of free financial news services and portfolio tracking tools over paying for an Atom Finance subscription. You can get free stock screening through FinViz. Most brokers will give you access to real-time quotes, investment research, news, SEC filings, portfolio management tools, and other research tools. So, a lot of the stock market tools offered by Atom Finance will be redundant.

Alternatives to Atom Finance

As we said above, you can piece together many of the capabilities of Atom Finance using free software. For stock news, we recommend Yahoo Finance or CNBC. For stock screening, check out FinViz or Ziggma. For portfolio tracking, there’s Personal Capital or Kubera.

If you’re willing to pay for an all-in-one investment research platform, we’d recommend Stock Rover over Atom Finance. Stock Rover is a fundamental stock research platform that offers the ability to build custom valuation models similar to Atom Finance. It also gives you in-depth stock research reports, a powerful portfolio tracker, and a more insightful stock screener.

Stock Rover starts at $7.99 per month, so it’s pretty competitive with Atom Finance on price.

Pros

• Multiple investment research tools
• Real time stock market data
• Broker integration for investment accounts
• Custom modeling of stock fair value
• Curated news feeds
• Basic portfolio tracking and analysis
• Compare fundamentals across companies

Cons

• Modeling data isn’t available across the platform
• News feeds don’t pull stories from several major outlets
• Many features are redundant to the ones offered by brokers