Yahoo! Finance Premium Review – Is This Subscription Service Worth It?

Yahoo! Finance Premium

Yahoo! Finance Premium is a new subscription service from Yahoo! that builds on the features and data available in the extraordinarily popular Yahoo! Finance platform. Yahoo! Finance Premium specifically targets retail investors who want to take their trading and investing to the next level. The platform offers advanced technical charting, portfolio management, live trading, and a large volume of expert stock analysis.

Yahoo! Finance Premium Pricing Options

Yahoo! Finance Premium costs $34.99 monthly or $349.99 annually. First-time users can try out the platform for free for 28 days.

Keep in mind that the standard version of Yahoo! Finance remains free. The Premium platform adds advanced technical analysis features to the charts already available in Yahoo! Finance, as well as advanced portfolio analytics and fair value analysis for stocks. Yahoo! Finance Premium also adds third-party stock research to your dashboard and removes ads from your Finance experience.

Features

Portfolio Analysis

Yahoo! Finance Premium includes basic portfolio analysis, which isn’t a groundbreaking tool but enhances the usability of the platform as a go-to center for trading. Traders can create an unlimited number of portfolios within Yahoo! Finance and update them with active holdings to track performance. 

The main analysis tool available to Premium subscribers is automated comparison of portfolio performance versus the S&P 500, Dow, or Nasdaq. Diving into more detail, Premium users can see at a glance whether their holdings are overvalued, undervalued, or fairly valued, and get an idea of the overall volatility of their portfolio. Users can also create custom data views, although these primarily aggregate information that are available to free Yahoo! Finance users.

Investment Ideas

One of the more interesting features of Yahoo! Finance Premium is the investment ideas. These aren’t just news reports or lists of stocks, like you might get with a service like The Motley Fool. Instead, the investment ideas are based on technical movements in stocks and analyst ratings. The platform automatically sends stocks that have shown technical pattern formation to your investment ideas feeds, along with estimates for the short-term or long-term price movement expected based on the recognized pattern. 

The design of the investment ideas interface is what makes it so useful. It’s simple to scroll through the entire feed and get a quick overview of suggestions, and clicking on any individual idea gives you a preview of what the signal that triggered the idea was. From there, you can jump to research reports or load a technical chart to view the pattern for yourself.

The downside to the investment ideas feed is that it’s enormous. On any given day, there are tens of thousands of investment ideas listed. You can search for specific stocks or use a set of basic filters for sector or rating, but it can be quite hard to make the investment ideas feed manageable.

If you’re looking for something more like The Motley Fool, with articles based around individual stocks or groups of stocks to watch, Yahoo! Finance Premium also has that. The platform calls it a blog, but don’t underestimate it. The articles that appear on the blog are very good at highlighting stocks to watch, as well as opportunities around specific stocks or industries.

Technical Charting

Premium members get access to far more advanced technical charts than those available to free Yahoo! Finance users. The technical charts are surprisingly good, with around 100 indicator overlays and the ability to compare multiple stocks or indices on a single chart. One of the unique features is that you can also overlay corporate events other than dividends and earnings reports, such as corporate deals, leadership changes, and financing and product announcements.

Still, Yahoo! Finance Premium is not a dedicated technical charting platform. There are no features in the technical charts that you can’t get elsewhere, including for free (e.g. with ThinkorSwim). But, the important thing is that they’re good enough that the majority of traders can get by with technical analysis without every having to leave the Yahoo! Finance platform.

Research Reports & Company Outlooks

Yahoo! Finance Premium includes access to reports from Argus Research, which is a valuable resource for advanced traders doing their due diligence. As for investment ideas, there are tens of thousands of research reports available. Thankfully, you can search them by ticker symbol to find only reports related to stocks of interest. You can also filter by report types or sector if you are exploring an entire industry’s outlook.

Company outlooks are another interesting feature that can be quite useful for in-depth research into a particular stock. These reports, available for every stock on its description pages, include metrics like Innovation Score, Insider Sentiment, Supply Chain, Sustainability, and more. It’s not clear how Yahoo! Finance calculates all of these metrics, so be careful when using them. But, they’re unique, easy to interpret from a high-level perspective, and can be used to determine whether a company is worth a deeper look.

Fair Value Analysis

Another useful metric available to Premium subscribers is fair value. Fair value for a stock is calculated according to the Peter Lynch valuation method, which looks at PEG, earnings growth rate, and earnings. Fair value is available for every stock, and this metric is available at a glance for all stocks within your portfolios and watchlists.

Customization and Layout

Yahoo! Finance has an excellent, easy to navigate layout. It’s one of the basic things that makes this one of the most popular financial platforms in the US. Premium keeps that layout, and simply adds a Premium tab to the dashboard so you can quickly and easily access paid features. It’s also worth noting that just as the rest of Yahoo! Finance is customized to your interests and holdings, so too is the Premium dashboard. You’ll automatically see reports, fair values, and company events related to stocks you’re holding or watching.

Yahoo! Finance Premium Platform Differentiators

Yahoo! Finance is already one of the most-loved financial platforms out there, and Premium builds on that without making any radical changes to the features users have come to love. In that respect, Yahoo! Finance Premium is intuitive and immediately useful.

However, it does beg the question as to whether this service is really worth $350 per year. The technical charting capabilities are available elsewhere, as are metrics like fair value and features like comparing portfolio performance against index performance. In reality, the main advantage of using Yahoo! Finance Premium is that it puts all of these features in a single place along with live trading through any major brokerage. For traders who combine fundamental and technical analysis for their strategy and who want the added speed of using a single, centralized platform, that may be worth the cost.

What Type of Trader is Yahoo! Finance Premium Best For?

Yahoo! Finance Premium is best suited for retail traders whose strategy blends fundamental and technical trading. The platform’s features offer a blend of the two styles, although none of the tools are so heavy-duty or fine-grained that Premium could be of much use for serious analysts. In addition, traders who don’t mind using multiple platforms could easily get all of the features of Yahoo! Finance Premium elsewhere for a lower total cost. So, this platform is really aimed at traders who want the simplicity and time savings of using a single, familiar and easy-to-use platform.

Pros

• Simple fair value analysis for all stocks and holdings
• Access to Argus Research stock outlook reports
• Company Outlook metrics are relatively unique
• Everything you need for fundamental analysis, technical analysis, and live trading in one platform
• Easy to use, clean, and familiar layout

Cons

• None of the features are groundbreaking and many are available for free elsewhere