FAST Graphs Review – How Does it Compare?

FAST Graphs – short for ‘Fundamental Analysis Software Tool’ – is a charting package built around fundamentals. This platform enables you to look at up to 20 years’ worth of financial data for more than 18,000 North American companies. It offers an impressive degree of versatility in its visualization tools, plus has portfolios and screeners to make your analyses more actionable.

In our FAST Graphs review, we’ll cover everything you need to know to decide if this fundamental analysis software can help you find value in the market.

FAST Graphs Pricing Options

FAST Graphs offers two pricing tiers: Basic and Premium. The Basic package costs $15.95 per month or $191.40 per year and only includes access to FAST Graphs. This plan doesn’t include more customizable FUN graphs or the stock screener, and you are limited to three custom portfolios.

The Premium Package costs $48 per month or $480 per year. It gives you full access to FAST Graph’s tools, including unlimited portfolios.

FAST Graph has a free trial that includes limited access to 11 companies so you can try out the software. However, the trial does not include portfolios or stock screening.

FAST Graphs Features

FAST Graphs

FAST graphs are the primary tool that FAST Graphs offers. These are pre-made charts that display correlations between price and key fundamental metrics. For example, you can quickly pull up charts showing price vs. earnings and P/E ratio, price vs. free cash flow, and price vs. EBITDA. While FAST Graphs may not be a dedicated research platform/tool, like TipRanks or Wallmine, its data still extends back as far as 20 years for all of the 18,000 companies that FAST Graphs includes.

The fundamental charts are similar to Ycharts or Stock Rover and can be helpful for analyzing trends over time.

FAST Graphs also offers a way to look at forward estimates for the next four years. You can see analysts’ estimates for earnings and EBITDA, as well as how forecasts have changed over the past two quarters. The software also has a customization option so that you can enter your own estimates for future earnings and see how that changes a stock’s potential return.

Another feature that’s helpful is FAST Graph’s Analyst Scorecard. This looks at earnings for the past 10 years and analysts’ estimates for those earnings from one year prior. Depending on the company, you may find that analysts have routinely over- or underestimated future earnings.

FUN Graphs

FUN Graphs – short for ‘Financial Underlying Numbers’ – give you more control over manipulating and visualizing fundamental data. These charts are only available to Premium subscribers and offer 20 years’ worth of data plus quarterly data for the past 8 years.

There are four styles of FUN graphs: per share graphs, ratios graphs, percentage graphs, and in millions graphs. The per share graphs allow you to toggle displays on and off for any income or balance sheet metrics calculated on a per share basis (for example, debt per share). The ratios graphs include value ratios such as P/E, price-to-sales, and price-to-book.

The percentage graphs include metrics like profit margin, dividend yield, and return on equity. The in millions graphs include a variety of income and balance sheet metrics displayed as totals rather than as per share numbers.

Portfolios

FAST Graphs uses portfolios as a way to help you keep track of stocks that you’re tracking or to monitor the performance of your actual trading portfolio over time. You can enter your trades in FAST Graphs, and your trade dates will appear whenever you analyze stocks you have owned using FAST graphs.

Premium subscribers also get access to 15 pre-loaded portfolios, which offer a place to start if you need stock ideas. For example, one pre-loaded portfolio covers high-yield dividend stocks, another includes the entire Fortune 500, and another includes over 1,500 ADRs available for analysis in FAST Graphs.

Screening

The screener tool in FAST Graphs, available only to Premium subscribers, offers a way to search through the entire database of 18,000 stocks. The screener comes with 99 different filters, including many based on future analyst estimates. From the screener results, you can easily open up FAST graphs for any stock or export the entire list of screen results to a custom portfolio.

FAST Graphs Platform Differentiators

FAST Graphs is one of the most comprehensive charting and visualization platforms available for fundamental analysis. While a number of other software packages support charting fundamental metrics, few have the variety of views that FAST Graphs offers. The FUN graphs particularly stand out in this respect, as they offer multiple ways of slicing up and visualizing balance sheet data.

The other important dataset that FAST Graphs offers is future estimates from analysts. This data is often difficult to come by if you’re using a free software for fundamental analysis. The fact that FAST Graphs allows you to customize the estimates for your own analysis is also nice.

What Type Of Trader Is FAST Graphs Best For?

FAST Graphs is best for fundamental investors who want to take a deep dive into companies’ balance sheets and valuations. The software offers a huge amount of detail and 20-year datasets, and it’s this comprehensiveness that makes FAST Graphs’ price tag worthwhile.

Traders who are using a combination of technical and fundamental analysis, or are only interested in high-level fundamental metrics like P/E, may be better served by a more broad-based visualization tool like FinViz or TradingView.

Pros

• 20-year dataset for 18,000 companies
• Pre-made FAST graphs for valuation analysis
• FUN graphs for slicing and analyzing balance sheet data
• Supports portfolios
• In-depth fundamental stock screener

Cons

• Expensive
• No data export to Excel