Moby Review – How Does This Research Platform Compare?

About Moby

Moby is a mobile-friendly market research platform designed to help new investors get up to speed on the market. The platform covers stocks and cryptocurrencies and offers easy-to-read research reports to help you generate investment ideas. Moby also has a selection of model portfolios, making it simple to get your investment portfolio off the ground.

So, is Moby right for you? Our Moby review will take a closer look at everything this platform has to offer.

Moby Pricing Options

Moby costs $29.95 per month or $199.95 per year. You can try out the service free for 7 days.

Moby Features

Market News and Research Reports

The main thing Moby offers for investors are market summaries and research reports in the form of easily digestible articles.

The market summaries are essentially weekly briefings designed to prepare you for the week ahead. They break down the week day-by-day and focus on the biggest events happening in the market – including earnings reports, Fed announcements, and other economic releases. The reports also highlight major market trends, such as if a specific asset class is performing unusually well or poorly. 

Moby’s research reports – which the platform refers to as investing strategies – are more useful for generating investment ideas and critically evaluating individual stocks. Each report focuses on one company and presents a thesis as to why that company is worth investors’ attention or not. The reports are easy to read by design, and they don’t get deep into financials or technical analysis. Each report takes around 5-10 minutes to read.

The nice thing about these reports – and what differentiates them from free market research articles from sites like The Motley Fool – is that each report wraps up with a price target. It would be nice if this price target was displayed prominently at the top of each report since that’s the most actionable piece of information that the reports provide.

A new research report is published about once per week. Moby also offers reports on individual cryptocurrencies along with educational articles about topics like decentralized finance and Web 3.0.’

Investment Ideas

Moby offers additional articles that spotlight several stocks the platform’s analysts are watching at any given time. Recent examples of these articles include top momentum stocks, three stocks to buy if you’re worried about inflation, and the top three financial stocks to buy in 2022.

What’s nice about these articles is that they give some background about the sector or trend under discussion before diving into the specific stock picks.

Model Portfolios

Moby offers model portfolios for dividend stocks, growth stocks, and international stocks. All of the portfolios are only a few months old, so it’s hard to gauge their performance. The portfolios are designed to be active and may see relatively high turnover from month to month. So far, each portfolio only contains 5-8 stocks, and Moby has changed out at least one stock in each portfolio each month. 

Investment Course

Moby offers a five-part investment education course that’s designed for anyone who is completely new to the market. The course covers basics like what the different types of investable assets are (e.g., stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies, and gold), how taxes on investment gains work, and how to build a portfolio and manage investment risk.

The entire course consists of 24 videos for a total of around 3 hours of content. The videos are useful, but they can be very fast-paced and hard to follow if you’re completely new to investing.

Customization and Layout

Moby’s platform is available on the web and through mobile apps for iOS and Android. The articles appear designed to be read on the go, and Moby tracks your progress as you read more reports and market briefings.

Moby doesn’t offer watchlists or any portfolio tracking tools to help you monitor your investments.

Moby Platform Differentiators

Moby makes stock research accessible for investors who are fairly new to the market. The platform’s market briefings and research reports don’t require you to have a deep understanding of fundamental analysis, and they’re short enough that you can read a report anytime you have a few spare minutes.

It’s worth noting that the reports available on Moby bear a lot of resemblance to free stock research articles available from sites like The Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance, and Seeking Alpha. While Moby stands out for attaching price targets to its reports, it’s not clear that the platform provides enough added value to justify its subscription cost. On the other hand, articles from The Motley Fool and especially Seeking Alpha may be too complex for first-time investors (see how Moby compares to Motley Fool here).

Moby’s model portfolios could become a major differentiator for this platform in the future. But for now, they’re too new to judge fairly, and the platform doesn’t have a pre-existing track record to prove it can find winning stocks.

What Type of Trader is Moby Best For?

Moby is best for beginner investors who want an accessible way to learn about the market and find potential investments. The platform does an excellent job of making its stock analysis friendly to investors who aren’t comfortable with fundamental or technical analysis. In addition, Moby’s investment course can be a good resource for beginners who want to learn how to invest on their own.

On the other hand, Moby is not suitable for experienced investors or for intermediate investors who feel comfortable doing their own stock analysis. The platform doesn’t provide any tools for self-directed analysis, and its stock reports are somewhat superficial since they avoid diving into financials.

Pros

• Beginner-friendly stock research reports
• Assigns price targets to every stock the platform analyzes
• Investment ideas and model portfolios
• Investment education video series
• Available for web and mobile

Cons

• Limited research for the price of a subscription
• Model portfolios are too new to prove they can be profitable