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

About Yahoo Finance Plus

Yahoo Finance Plus (previously Yahoo Finance Premium) is a subscription service from Yahoo that builds on the features and data available in the extraordinarily popular Yahoo Finance platform. Yahoo Finance Plus 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.

Is Yahoo Finance Plus a premium service worth paying for? We took a deep dive into the platform. Keep reading out Yahoo Finance Plus review to find out.

📈 Features	Stock Research, Ratings, Scanners, and More
💰 Pricing	Starts at $20.83/month
⭐ Discounts	10% Off 6 Months
✅ Best For	Research-driven Investors
🔁 Alternative To	Stock Rover

Yahoo Finance Plus Pricing Options

Yahoo Finance Plus costs $35 monthly or $350 annually. First-time users can try out the platform for free for 14 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 Plus also adds third-party stock research to your dashboard and removes ads from your Finance experience.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the features and research tools.

Yahoo Finance Plus Premium Features

Most investors and traders are familiar with the free version of Yahoo Finance. The premium version, Yahoo Finance Plus, is relatively new.

Yahoo Finance Plus comes packed with exclusive tools to help investors and traders better navigate the stock market. Let’s take a closer look at some of the premium features.

Portfolio Analysis

Yahoo Finance Plus 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 primary analysis tool available to Premium subscribers is an automated performance comparison of your personal portfolio 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 web portfolio. Users can also create custom data views, although these views primarily aggregate information that is available to free Yahoo Finance users.

Investment Ideas

One of the more interesting features of Yahoo Finance Plus 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 (full Motley Fool review here). 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. 

You can get daily trade ideas or long-term investment ideas, depending on your interests.

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 daily trade ideas. Clicking on any individual idea gives you a preview of what the signal that triggered the idea was. From there, you can jump to company 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 when analyzing all the stocks.

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 Plus 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.

The blog articles include breaking news, personalized news for your portfolio, helpful tips, and opinion pieces.

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.

I still prefer TradingView charts to Yahoo Finance interactive full-screen charts, but these charts are surprisingly good for this platform. The enhanced charting is particularly beneficial for traders and investors who want to do all of their research and analysis within the Yahoo Finance platform.

Still, Yahoo Finance Plus 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 ever having to leave the Yahoo Finance platform.

Research Reports & Company Outlooks

Yahoo Finance Plus 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 sectors 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 more in-depth look.

Fair Value Analysis

Another useful metric available with a premium account 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.

Once again, these are automated metrics, and it is not uncommon for top-performing stocks to remain overvalued for a long time (and underperforming stocks to remain undervalued for a long time).

Customization and Layout

Yahoo Finance has an excellent, easy-to-navigate layout. It’s one of the primary 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.

The platform can be further customized with stock price alerts, custom watch lists, custom portfolios, etc.

Yahoo Finance Plus 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 Plus is intuitive and immediately useful.

However, it does beg the question as to whether this premium version of the Yahoo Finance service is 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 Plus is that it puts all of these features in a single place along with integrated 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 Plus Best For?

Yahoo Finance Plus 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. Also, traders who don’t mind using multiple platforms could easily get all of the features of Yahoo Finance Plus elsewhere for a lower total cost. So, this platform is 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