Ortex Review – Stock Market Research Platform

About Ortex

Ortex is a market research platform that offers data about global stocks, commodities, forex, and cryptocurrencies. The platform organizes a ton of information, including market news, analyst ratings, insider activity, stock fundamental data, and options chains.

The platform can be highly useful for globally-oriented traders, but it may be a bit too much for traders who are mainly interested in US stocks. In our Ortex review, we’ll explore everything this research platform has to offer and help you decide if it’s right for you.

Ortex Pricing Options

Ortex offers three account tiers: Free, Basic, and Advanced.

The Free tier gives you very limited access to Ortex’s platform. You can view charts and news headlines, but little else. Most data in Ortex is blurred out, so it’s difficult to get much out of the platform without a paid subscription.

The Basic tier costs $29 per month or $276 per year. It adds event and analyst data, notifications for stocks with extreme short interest, and portfolio monitoring tools.

The Advanced tier costs $79 per month or $588 per year. It offers stock trading signals, options analysis tools, proprietary stock ratings, a stock screener, and Level II market data. 

There is no trial available for the paid subscriptions. Since most data can’t be viewed with the Free tier, you’ll need to sign up for a one-month subscription to really test out the platform. 

Ortex Features

Market Feeds

Ortex is essentially a series of feeds and displays that are organized around different markets and data types. The Market Overview panel gives you a quick rundown of how the markets are performing in North America and Europe. The best feature here is Ortex’s morning note, which highlights the key events and price movements that traders need to know about before the market opens. There are also lists of top gainers and losers, which can be filtered by market cap.

Ortex also offers a My Universe panel. This is similar to the Market Overview, but is tailored to stocks in your portfolio.

There are also feeds for forex, commodities, cryptocurrencies, ETFs, and indices. These feeds show price changes for major assets, top gainers and losers, news headlines, and trading signals for each of these asset classes.

Stock Analysis

Ortex offers an enormous amount of data about individual stocks. An overview page offers charts from TradingView and news headlines that can be filtered by importance. You can dive into a company’s balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement and even pull up basic bar charts to visualize key data. The charts aren’t very customizable compared to what platforms like Stock Rover or TIKR offer, however.

Ortex also has panels that show analyst rating changes over time, EPS estimates over time, institutional ownership by firm, and insider trading activity. Another panel showing short interest in a stock is especially neat because you can plot moving averages of a stock’s days-to-cover (DTC) ratio against price, volume, borrowing cost, and options put/call ratio.

Trading Signals

Ortex offers trading signals for stocks, cryptocurrencies, forex, indices, and ETFs.

There are a few different types of signals that Ortex tracks. Short squeeze signals identify stocks with high DTC ratios. EPS divergence signals identify stocks for which analyst estimates differ widely from the current share price. Technical signals use RSI, MACD, and stochastics to find stocks that could make a strong price movement in the near future. 

Ortex backtests all of its signals to calculate confidence levels and estimated returns. However, the platform does not provide information about the historical performance of its signals. You can filter signals by the signal type, expected return, holding period, significance, or market cap of the underlying stock.

Short Analysis

Ortex is especially useful for finding stocks to short or potential short squeeze setups. A Short Extremes panel offers a list of stocks that have high short interest, high DTC ratios, and bullish recommendations from analysts. You can filter this list by Ortex’s proprietary short scores or by short interest, DTC ratio, or potential upside.

The platform also offers a chart of short interest by market sector over time and a list of stocks that have seen the largest changes in share lending in the past week. Short lists are available for individual countries in Europe and Asia, which is pretty unique.

Stock Screener

Ortex also offers a broad-based stock screener that traders can use to build their own custom watchlists. The screener offers a mix of fundamental and technical parameters, but what makes it especially useful is that you can also filter based on short interest, analyst ratings, insider activity, and institutional ownership.

It would be nice to have more technical filters in the screener, but it’s worth noting that Ortex screen results can be exported to Excel. So, you can create a list of potential short squeeze candidates or stocks with promising insider activity and then export that list for further screening in a more technical-oriented platform like Scanz or FinViz.

Customization and Layout

Ortex has a lot of different panels, and many panels include sub-windows and tabs. It takes a little while to figure out where everything is on the platform.

Unfortunately, you can’t hide windows within any of Ortex’s feeds or even resize panels. You have the option to create custom dashboards, but you can only add two panels to each new dashboard. Greater flexibility to build custom views or only see the data that matters to you would be a big improvement for Ortex.

Ortex Platform Differentiators

Ortex offers data for more than 50,000 global stocks, but it’s more than just a stock research platform. Ortex also includes data about forex, commodities, and cryptocurrencies. That helps it stand out from platforms like TIKR and Stock Rover that also offer global stock research.

Ortex is similar in design to services like Finbox and Koyfin that offer complex data dashboards and tons of different ways to explore market data. However, Ortex offers some unique tools for finding potential short squeezes and staying on top of analyst and insider activity. The trading signals can also be very useful for traders who use them as a starting point for conducting their own technical analysis.

One issue with Ortex is that it offers too much data. It’s unrealistic that a single trader will want all of the panels and views available on the platform, but there’s no way to hide data that a trader doesn’t need or to prioritize data views that are more helpful. More customization options would go a long way toward making Ortex more streamlined and actionable.

What Type of Trader is Ortex Best For?

Ortex is mainly designed for stock traders and active investors. The platform offers many data views on multiple timelines to cater to both groups. While there is intraday data, day traders may find that Orex takes too broad a view for it to be useful for them. Forex, commodity, and cryptocurrency traders may find the platform’s news feeds and trading signals helpful, but these assets aren’t the main focus of Ortex. 

Ortex is especially well-suited for traders who want to look beyond US stocks to global markets. The platform offers a lot of data about European and Asian stocks that many US-centric platforms don’t include. 

One thing to keep in mind is that to get the most out of Ortex, you’ll need an Advanced subscription. A lot of the platform’s features are inaccessible with a Basic subscription. This means that Ortex can be somewhat expensive, so is more suitable for traders with relatively large portfolios.