Atom Finance Review – Are These Free Investing Tools Effective?

What Is Atom Finance?

Atom Finance is an investing platform that offers a handful of unique investment research tools. The platform is designed for stock market investors who want to analyze their existing investment accounts and research new investing opportunities. The platform features real-time quotes, access to news and SEC filings, a portfolio analyzer, and other stock market analysis tools. Atom Finance claims to bring institutional quality investing resources to the casual retail trader.

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

Atom Finance Cost

Atom Finance is completely free to use. You can get access to all of the investing tools without paying a dime. 

The platform can be accessed online or through a mobile app that is available on the App Store and Google Play.

When we wrote our initial Atom Finance review, the company only offered a free service. Since then, they have released a premium version of the service that is offered at $6.99/month. A free 7-day trial is available.

For the sake of our Atom Finance review, we will be focusing primarily on the free service. Overall, the free version and paid version are similar, but the free version has some limitations. The paid version also offers a few additional features that some investors may find useful. We recommend starting with the free version to see if it is a good fit before upgrading to a premium plan.

While free stock market services may seem like a great value, you should still make sure they are worth your time. I’d prefer to pay for a service that helps me make money in the market than use a free service that does nothing for me.

With that said, Atom Finance claims to offer “institutional-quality” tools, so let’s take a closer look at some of the app’s features. You can sign up for an account below if you want to follow along with the review.

Atom Finance Features

Atom Finance offers a few basic research tools and investing tools for retail traders. While the tools are basic when compared to paid services, they are actually quite powerful for a free service. Let’s take a closer look.

Sandbox

The most unique aspect of Atom Finance is its financial models, which it places under a tab labeled “Sandbox.” With these models, you have the option to customize many of the assumptions that 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 analysts’ 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 modeling, 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

News feeds play a big role throughout Atom Finance. Within the platform, 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 – platforms 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 quite as wide a view of the market as 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, and you can always use Yahoo Finance if needed.

Atom Finance also has a feature it calls “X-ray,” which 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 actually a pretty cool feature for a free tool. It’s similar to the premium functionality of tools like EquityFeed and Benzinga Pro (although not quite as powerful).

Company Comparison

Atom Finance lets you directly compare two or more companies. We were excited to review this feature although 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 tool is definitely convenient, it’s nothing new. You can do similar analyses with more data on Yahoo Finance and FinViz.

Unfortunately, there are no built-in screeners or sector listings to help you decide which companies to compare. You have to enter tickers manually, so this tool is only useful if you already know which companies are worth comparing for your purposes. 

You also 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.

Portfolio Tracking

You can also use Atom Finance as a portfolio tracker. Strangely, though, there’s no way to enter transactions manually onto the platform. You have to connect a brokerage account in order to track investments. This also means that you cannot create a simulated portfolio and watch how it performs over time.

That said, the tool is designed more for analyzing your existing portfolio than it is for modeling simulated portfolios and/or new portfolios.

Once you’ve imported transactions, Atom Finance will graph your returns against the S&P 500 and calculate the average P/E and other fundamental metrics for your portfolio. 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.

This is actually pretty insightful if you are invested in a broad range of stocks. It is even more beneficial if you have been investing for awhile since you can analyze your returns over time.

If you have multiple brokerage accounts, you can aggregate the data or look at each account individually. 

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 the Hub 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 Premium Features

Atom Finance was launched as a completely free service, so the free plan still offers many worthwhile features. A premium subscription is available for $6.99/month and comes with a few additional benefits. These include:

• No limitations on stock and company data (i.e. analyst forecasts, institutional holdings, investor documents, etc.)
• Price change explanation
• Research summaries
• Price target updates
• Analyst commentary
• Paper trading (mock accounts)

Basically, limitations are removed and you get access to more relevant research and data. The premium features actually offer quite a few benefits, and may be worthwhile for investors with bigger accounts. If you have a small account, it will be difficult to justify the monthly subscription fee, but if you have a larger account with more holdings, the premium features provide some excellent insights.

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 more robust features than Atom Finance’s tracker, including the ability to input trades manually. That said, I was a fan of Atom Finance’s interface. It is very clean and easy to use.

Atom Finance also gives traders access to real-time data which is usually limited in free tools. Real-time quotes are particularly useful for more active traders. While most brokerages will offer real-time quotes to clients, it’s still 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 for free. That said, 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. 

The platform is also ideal for cost-conscious investors who want free investment research tools that can be used to analyze investment accounts and new investing opportunities. The main appeal of this service is that it is free. There’s no doubt that the tools add value, but the second you throw a subscription fee on the service, you need to start comparing it to alternatives.

It should also be noted that a lot of the investing tools offered in this service are also available through most brokers. Most brokers will give you access to real-time quotes, investment research, news, SEC filings, portfolio management tools, and other research tools. In this sense, a lot of the stock market tools offered by Atom Finance will be redundant.

That said, the service is 100% free right now so it’s definitely worth checking out.

Hopefully, when the Atom+ service is launched, the company will fill in some of the gaps of the current service and introduce new features. For now, it is a great free investing tool for analyzing your portfolio, reviewing filings and news, and getting access to real-time stock market data as you need it.

Pros

• Completely free to use
• 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