10 Best Stock & Investment Research Tools for 2024 (Buyer’s Guide)


State of Market Intelligence
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The nature of investment research has radically evolved in recent years.

Once a practice reserved for firms, analysts, and fund managers with the right expertise, modern technology has made investment research accessible to anyone with an interest. From the largest firms on Wall Street to Fortune 500 companies, stock and investment research tools are powering smart decisions based on AI-driven insights.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence in investment research, traditional research methods are no longer sufficient.

The emergence of Big Data—large, hard-to-manage volumes of data that businesses must deal with day to day—has made it impossible to uncover the insights that matter without the support of automation and artificial intelligence. The speed at which the investment world operates today now requires investors to have access to real-time updates and relevant insights about the companies and industries that matter to them.

Further, sophisticated analysis tools and smart data visualizations are essential to building and communicating investment strategies to stakeholders.

In short: whether you’re developing an investment strategy or delivering one to clients, you need to be equipped with the right investment tool to succeed.

All the tools and platforms covered in this guide are designed to support your investment research needs by providing data and news on various asset classes—stocks, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), stock options and more.

This guide will cover our top picks for the best investment research tools currently on the market, including who they’re built for, their top features, and pricing options — all the information you need to decide which tool is best for you.

What features and functionality matter most in a stock and investment research tool?

The best stock and investment research tools power more agile, informed investment strategies. They level up your ability to capitalize on opportunities ahead of your competitors, delivering insights from the investment world’s top sources of data and supported by the newest technologies, such as AI-powered search and automated monitoring.

Before we dive into specific tools on the market, let’s take a deeper look at 5 features and functionalities to look for in a quality stock and investment research tool in 2024:

Access to Premium Content

Even the most savvy research analysts have limitations to what they are able to access through traditional search channels — sources like company websites, search engines, public reports, and stock analysis websites only tell part of the story. Organizations carefully curate what they share to craft public opinion, keeping much of the most important information private. 

In addition, broker research — an invaluable source of industry insight — is often hidden behind paywalls, requiring companies to maintain multiple separate subscriptions.

The industry’s best stock research websites and tools provide access to exclusive content sources in one streamlined, centralized platform.

Semantic Search

Perhaps the most powerful application of AI in stock and investment research tools is semantic search — the ability to deliver not only search results that match your exact keywords, but also those that match your intent.

AlphaSense is one of the only investment research tools that provides this capability through our proprietary Smart Synonyms technology, which delivers results for your exact search terms and synonyms of your search terms, all while screening out incorrect results for words with multiple meanings.

For example: a search for “ESG investing” on the AlphaSense platform would include results for similar relevant terms, like “socially responsible investing” and “impact investing.”

Rather than have to perform multiple searches with different terms to capture all the information you need, tools with smart search capabilities understand your intent and deliver it to you in a single search.

Real-Time Alerts and Monitoring

The investment world, like the market, moves faster now than any other time in the past. The technology-driven speed of business and the sheer volume of data available today have made it critical for investors to be informed on market trends, company updates, and other real-time data and news.

The catch: this task is virtually impossible to do manually.

Stock and investment research platforms automate the process in ways that save you vast amounts of time and combat the fear of missing out on an important insight.

Real-time alerts provide automated, immediate updates for the stocks, companies, products, industries, or themes you care about most. The best investment tools give users complete control over the frequency and method of delivery of their alerts.

Watchlists and customized dashboards centralize alerts and information about a set of stocks, companies, or industries in one place. They allow users to see a single snapshot of the current most important insights for their investment research.

Sentiment Analysis

Broker research, annual reports, and call transcripts are often dozens of pages long. It takes hours to read through them manually, let alone garner the overall tone behind the discussion it includes.

Enter: sentiment analysis.

Powered by natural language processing (NLP) technology, sentiment analysis not only delivers the right results for your search, but tells you how the market feels about the company, product, trend, or event you’re researching. Investment research tools do this in varying ways.

AlphaSense, for example, uses color-coded analysis to make sentiment clear to the user. The platform also calculates an algorithmic sentiment score that indicates the positive and negative tone of a document and/or the overall set of search results, as well as how it’s changed over time.

Easy Data Export Capabilities

The information you access with any stock and investment tool is most valuable when you can export it and integrate it into your existing workstream. Further, data extraction makes it possible to transpose information and use it for financial modeling.

Top platforms (like AlphaSense) offer this capability, allowing you to easily export findings to places like Excel so you can analyze with your own formulas or build charts and other visuals. With AI surfacing insights in mere seconds, your reports, decks, and memos can practically write themselves.

10 Stock Research Tools to Support Your 2024 Investing Strategies

AlphaSense

Best for: Executing a holistic stock and investment research strategy

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AlphaSense is designed for comprehensive qualitative and quantitative investment research. It’s used by the world’s most respected corporations and financial institutions — including 85% of the S&P 500 and 75% of top asset management firms — and is built for organizations looking to implement a full-scale strategy. It was also recently named one of Forbes’ top 50 AI companies.

What are its features and capabilities?

Leading Content Sources

AlphaSense provides access to 10,000+ premium sources of information, including trade journals, news, SEC filings, and company filings.

Moreover, AlphaSense offers access to two highly valuable proprietary and premium content offerings: 

  • Expert Transcript Library – 35,000+ transcripts of one-on-one calls with industry experts, customers, professionals, competitors, and former and current executives, available as an add-on to the AlphaSense package.
  • Wall Street Insights® A collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.

Pioneering AI and Automation Technology

Unlike other consumer-grade generative AI (genAI) tools trained on publicly available data, AlphaSense takes an entirely different approach. Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights and leans on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time. 

Our suite of genAI tools and automation features currently includes:

  • Smart Summariesthis feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights—reducing time spent on research during earnings season, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees
  • Smart Synonyms™ technology is an AI-based feature exclusive to AlphaSense, which recognizes the user intent behind every search and delivers results for both the exact search terms and related keywords.This technology recognizes when results are not relevant to the search intent and automatically filters them out, removing unnecessary noise and eliminating hours wasted on combing through potentially fruitless sources
  • Enterprise Intelligencea first-of-its-kind offering that delivers AlphaSense’s AI-powered search and summarization capabilities to customers’ internal organizational knowledge
  • AlphaSense Assistanta generative AI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources
  • Sentiment Analysis – a feature built with natural language processing (NLP) that identifies changes in a text’s tone and subjective meaning and assigns a numerical sentiment score to help you assess if the document has positive, negative, or neutral sentiments
  • Automated Monitoring – customizable real-time alerts that deliver automated updates on any emerging trends, news, topics, markets, and companies you most care about
  • Instant Company Insights – provide updates on companies currently on your radar in the form of tearsheets and search analytics, giving you an in-depth reach across document types, industries, and regions

Uniquely Tailored Experiences

AlphaSense allows users to design their own experience with customizable features throughout the platform — saved search, document notes, custom watchlists and alerts, and curated dashboards all contribute to a unique user interface that delivers the right insights on the right topics, all in real time.

Optimized Convenience Features

The AlphaSense user experience is enhanced with convenience features like easy data export and mobile app access.

How much does it cost?

AlphaSense offers a free two-week trial for all potential users. Subscriptions can be seat-based (for small- and medium-sized companies) or custom (enterprise subscription packages).

Price quotes are available upon request to the AlphaSense team.

YCharts

Best for: Building compelling visuals

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YCharts was built to democratize stock and investment research for asset managers, financial advisors, and individual investors. This tool is exceptionally useful for those who are visual researchers and/or whose roles require development of data visualizations for stock reporting.

What are its features and capabilities?

The YCharts solution is comprised of three distinct tools: 

Model Portfolios enable users to build and analyze their investment models in a few key ways:

  • Portfolio metrics visualization: Use data visuals to educate clients and stakeholders on risk, performance, overlaps, and other key concepts.
  • Strategy comparison: Create branded, custom reports that compare your modeling strategy to a prospect’s current portfolio.
  • Custom benchmarking: Centralize benchmark modeling around your priority metrics to drive performance improvement and gain a holistic view of your strategy.
  • Stock Screeners help users find stocks based on custom criteria. Features like qualitative and quantitative filters and stock scoring models drive smarter portfolio construction. In addition, users can tap into 4000+ financial metrics to build custom formulas and analyze nearly 30,000 equities on the platform.
  • Fundamental Charts bring a user’s strategy to life and compare stocks using compelling charting tools. The platform makes it easy to share strategy reasoning with colleagues and clients, embed analyses as images in other places (like blogs or emails), and trademark original research with a company logo.

How much does it cost?

YCharts offers a free 7-day trial for all potential users and three leveled subscription plans: 

  • Enterprise: Best for firms, advising teams, and investment committees
  • Professional: Best for individual advisors, portfolio managers, and advanced individual investors
  • Standard: Best for students, individual investors, financial consultants, and educators

Company-specific pricing for each plan is available upon request to the YCharts team.

S&P Capital IQ Pro

Best for: Sector-specific research

S&P Capital IQ Pro is built for corporate and financial researchers, analysts, and business leaders. The platform curates data from the highest-quality financial sources, in addition to providing in-depth expert analyses and proprietary research reports on ETFs, funds, and bonds for thousands of global companies.

What are its features and capabilities?

S&P’s tool has one of the largest libraries of data on the market, and is specifically geared toward delivering sector-specific insights that inform strategy. 

Its features allow users to seamlessly integrate their research processes into their larger strategy — for example, data from the platform can be easily pulled to Excel or other Microsoft Office applications to build financial models or charts.

The platform itself provides visual ways to see and analyze information. The Maps visualization tool provides a bird’s eye view of market activity, for example, and presentation-ready graphics can be extracted for sharing insights.

S&P’s platform also offers a wide range of customization options, most notably custom dashboards so that users can monitor specific companies, industries, and topics to pinpoint the insights they need.

How much does it cost?

Pricing options are only available by request from the S&P Global Team.

Morningstar Premium

Best for: Both firms or individual investors

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MorningStar is one of the biggest names in investment research — no surprise given their vast library of financial services product solutions. Unlike some other platforms on this list, Morningstar focuses on fundamental analysis over charts and technical analysis. The two most relevant Morningstar Premium services for investment research are Morningstar Direct and Morningstar Investor.

The former is built for professional investors or firms and powers advanced portfolio analytics and performance monitoring. The latter is for individual investors and offers expert advice for self-directed strategies.

What are its features and capabilities?

Both products offer access to sophisticated, quality-sourced data — the main difference is in their focus. Morningstar Direct features are designed for portfolio performance analysis and optimization. They include:

  • Research and ratings from Morningstar experts
  • An analytics lab for investment analysis and research
  • Pre-built Morningstar datasets to simplify workflows
  • Custom investment scorecards and risk scenario analysis
  • Sustainability-focused ratings and analysis

Morningstar Investor is all about removing complexity for the individual investor and getting straight to the point when it comes to smart investing. Features include:

  • Independent analysis from 150+ analysts to help you make decisions
  • Simplified ratings for assets across the investment landscape
  • Stock screening tools and pre-filtered investment lists
  • Morningstar® Portfolio X-Ray® — a proprietary portfolio assessment tool

How much does it cost?

Morningstar offers one-week free trials for both products. A Morningstar Investor subscription is $250 annually. Morningstar Direct pricing is available by contacting their team directly.

Gurufocus

Best for: Value investing

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GuruFocus was created for institutional investors as a source for finding high-potential stocks that have already been researched by the world’s top investors. Today, it’s one of the industry’s  top value investing websites, providing stock financials, valuation data, and proprietary stock screening and backtesting tools that help investors make informed decisions.

It’s best for value investors who want to find and follow already-identified high potential stocks, then stick with them for a while.

What are its features and capabilities?

GuruFocus users get access to dozens of pre-built stock screeners (examples: Canadian Fast Growers, Industry Overview, Undervalued Predictable and many more) and stock comparisons (examples: Chinese Stocks, Bank Stocks, AI Stocks) that make risk assessment and investment decisions simpler. Users can also create their own custom screeners.

Model Portfolios are available and updated continuously to reflect real-time current data (example: High Quality Low CAPEX Companies in the US) and give investors ideas and a baseline for building their own models.

Finally, the GuruFocus API can be used to seamlessly build value investing models into other programs.

How much does it cost?

GuruFocus offers a free 7-day trial for potential users. Beyond that, there are three available subscription models:

Premium: $499/year – This level includes most features but with some limitations. For example, trading strategies can only be tested using historical data from the last five years and API queries are limited to 2000. For the individual investor looking to use GuruFocus for daily research, this level should provide everything you need.

Premium Plus: $1348/year -Premium Plus membership offers all GuruFocus key features without the above mentioned limitations (or much higher ceilings). For financial advisors and asset managers at boutique firms, this level is likely most appropriate.

Professional: $2398/year – For larger firms implementing an ongoing research strategy to drive stock investment decisions, this option is likely your best bet. API usage jumps to 50,000 queries under the Professional Membership, you’ll get access to delisted stocks, and GuruFocus will assign you a designated account manager to help you maximize ROI.

Finbox

Best for: Individual investors

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Finbox is similar to GuruFocus, only built more specifically for the individual investor. Serving as a stock market portfolio research and management platform, it offers accurate real-time stocks and market data without many of the premium features and larger research capabilities that come with other tools on this list.

If you’re new to investing and/or are looking to execute a smart but more laid-back investment strategy, Finbox is a great tool to check out. If you are looking for more sophisticated reporting and access to data outside of stock valuations and market activity, Finbox won’t be enough for you.

What are its features and capabilities?

Finbox provides a stock screener based on 1000+ metrics so that investors can find stocks that align with their investment style and criteria. Watchlists allow users to keep track of the stocks they care about.

Once users find the right stocks, Finbox’s pre-built valuation models (like DCFs, Dividend Discount, & Comparable Company Analysis) enable them to analyze with ease.

Their data library includes financial data for 100K+ stocks on 130+ exchanges worldwide, more than 900 million individual data points, and licensed data sourced directly from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

How much does it cost?

Finbox offers a free version of the tool that includes features like whitelisted metrics and screener filters as well as the ability to view and edit financial models, create charts, and explore potential portfolios.

For $25/month ($300/year), you’ll gain additional features like premium metrics and screener filters and the ability to export data.

For $66/month ($792/year) you’ll unlock data for all six global regions (vs U.S. and Europe only).

Koyfin

Best for: User-friendly analysis tools

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Koyfin is a solution built for investors at every experience level—professional, individual, and student. Known for its user-friendly features and in-depth qualitative data, the Koyfin platform is a great budget alternative to Bloomberg Terminal. While the qualitative research access is relatively basic, the platform makes investing more accessible without sacrificing the sophistication and accuracy needed by firms managing real client portfolios.

What are its features and capabilities?

Koyfin offers in-depth coverage of stocks, currencies, fixed-income assets, ETFs, bonds, mutual funds, and news, giving its users a complete overview of the markets and their movements. Its most prominent features include:

  • Advanced graphing features which enable users to create custom graphs to spot trends and investment opportunities
  • Financial analysis tools that provide an in-depth analysis of company metrics, including financial statements, historical overviews, valuations, and viability analyses
  • Stock screener and charting tools to help users find and match with companies that fit their trading styles
  • Customizable market dashboard templates that give users a complete overview of the markets over a given period
  • Custom watchlists to live-track market trends, companies, stocks, and other assets
  • Portfolio tools that help users track all their investments from one place

How much does it cost?

Free – This option is for beginner investors and includes the most important Koyfin features in limited fashion — two watchlists, two dashboards, and two chart templates as well as advanced charting and market dashboards.

Plus: $39/month – This is likely the starting level of experienced investors looking to actively manage their portfolios and perform frequent research. Watchlists, dashboards, and templates are unlimited with a plus membership. Users can also export data, access filings and transcripts, and take advantage of advanced sharing capabilities.

Pro: $79/month – Koyfin’s highest-level membership includes everything in the Plus plan as well as custom financial analysis templates, document search capabilities, market closing email summaries, and priority support from the Koyfin team.

Stockopedia

Best for: Optimizing your portfolio

Stockopedia was founded for individual investors to help them avoid emotional investing in favor of a rules-based approach — still its core mission in 2022. Its features are exceptionally helpful for taking a continuous improvement approach to driving portfolio growth over time.

What are its features and capabilities?

Individually and collectively, Stockopedia offers one of the best sets of features for granular (but uncomplicated) portfolio analysis that pinpoints differentiators to improve performance:

  • Stock reports are one-pages that give users the most important insights in a glance for faster (but hyper-informed) decisions.
  • StockRanks is Stockopedia’s proprietary rating system based on factor investing — targeting quantifiable stock attributes to drive higher returns.
  • Screeners allow users to find stocks that match your investing style
  • Portfolio and watchlist management centralize tracking of portfolio performance.
  • Toolbox and technical analysis are a set of tools to help users conduct detailed analyses of stocks in their portfolios.

How much does it cost?

Stockopedia’s unique pricing model is built on access to regional data. For U.S. data alone, a subscription costs $50/month or $425/year (29% cost savings when paid annually). This subscription covers 10,000+ stocks on Nasdaq, NYSE, and OTC.

From there, you can choose to add on different regions, which vary in cost. Here’s an overview (keep in mind these prices are in addition to the cost for U.S. data access):

  • U.K. (+2000 stocks) — $100/year
  • Europe (+9000 stocks) — $425/year
  • Developed Asia (+7500 stocks) — $425/year
  • Australasia (+2500 stocks) — $175/year
  • India (+3500 stocks) — $25/year
  • Canada (+7500 stocks) — $175/year

Stockopedia also offers a 14-day free trial for users to try out the platform.

Business Quant

Best for: Beginners starting their investing journey

Business Quant was founded to educate individual investors focused on U.S-based stocks and help them make smarter investment decisions. It’s best for investors who want to skip the research hours and get straight to investing — and if you’re a beginner, you’ll appreciate their straightforward messaging and user-friendly interface to make the process approachable.

What are its features and capabilities?

KPI-driven data is delivered on the Business Quant platform as:

  • Granular KPI Data – thousands of KPI data points on hundreds of listed stocks
  • Industry KPI Data – coverage of 30+ sectors to identify industry trends, leaders vs. laggards, performance comparisons, and KPI-based company rankings
  • Financial and Economic Datahistorical financial data on thousands of stocks, SEC filings, stock ratings, 200+ metrics and ratios, export capabilities, and an intuitive user interface to facilitate analysis

Business Quant also provides original analysis for unique insights not found elsewhere — their data is curated and analyzed by their own internal team of analysts. 

How much does it cost?

Business quant offers three straightforward pricing levels:

  • Basic: Free and includes access to basic platform data
  • Pro: For $19/month, includes granular KPI data, stock research tools, and industry data
  • Enterprise: For $99/month, includes Pro plan plus custom-built features to help you reach investing goals

The Motley Fool

Best For: Enthusiastic individual investors looking to learn the ropes

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The Motley Fool aims “to make the world smarter, happier, and richer.” They do it not only with their investment research tools but with an active and relatable podcast, blog, discussion board, and other resources for enthusiastic investors (new and experienced alike) looking to level up their investing skills and gain new knowledge.

What are its features and capabilities?

The Motley Fool’s features are built to provide ongoing portfolio guidance. They include stock picks and stock recommendations (monthly or weekly, depending on subscription level), portfolio allocation guidance, insight into high-growth future market leaders, and individual stock research reports. 

The hallmark of Motley Fool’s product library is the ability to either pick and choose the ones most relevant to you or subscribe to them in an “Epic Bundle” for more comprehensive and streamlined services.

How much does it cost?

The Motley Fool has an extensive list of products that vary in cost. Their most popular product offerings include The Motley Fool Stock Advisor (their proprietary stock picking service) at $199/year, the Epic Bundle (for more advanced investors) at $499/year, and Rule Breakers (an investment advisory service focusing on growth stocks with high volatility).

See all of The Motley Fool’s products, services, and prices here.

Choosing the Right Tool

There are a few key questions you can ask yourself to determine which of these tools are the right fit.

What is your budget? Quickly eliminate any options that fall outside of your price range.

How do you work? If team collaboration is a significant aspect of your workflow, make sure to choose a research tool that will enable you to effectively work with others and that will seamlessly integrate into your existing systems. If you normally focus on individual research, you can go with an option that is less collaboration-driven and more streamlined.

What are your goals? As outlined in this guide, some tools (like AlphaSense) are built to drive a complete, full-scale investment research strategy. Others focus more exclusively on stock valuation and comparison. Still others are built for specific individuals and goals. Choose a platform well-aligned with the things you want to accomplish.

Try AlphaSense For Free

The AlphaSense platform offers a comprehensive set of features so you never have to sacrifice one capability for another — you’ll have the tools, resources, and support you need to execute a full-scale stock and investment research strategy to drive results.

If you’re ready to level up your research for smarter investing, you can start by exploring all that AlphaSense has to offer. Sign up for your free trial today!