Bring Your Investment Ideas in Sharp Focus with Stock Rover
Stock research will either make or break your investing. Are you using the best stock research tool in the market?
There are 3 things I want in a stock research tool:
- I want it to let me create different screeners exactly the way I want and save it for reuse again and again,
- I want it to be easy to integrate in my workflow. So well designed that it is actually a pleasure to use. You know the feeling where the software or the tool gets out of your way and connects you intimately with the data, and,
- I want this tool to seamlessly integrate with my watchlists and portfolio tracking and at the same time give me the flexibility to manage them the way I want
Now of course there are many other details that I want. I want the historical data that goes back many years, I want to be able to create my own filters (hey, how about letting me write custom equations!), I want to be able to go back to the stocks in my watchlist and check if they still meet the filter criteria that I had set weeks or months ago, and I want to be able to analyze my portfolio for correlations, sharpe ratio, drawdowns, I want to be able to deep dive into the financials for any stock I choose, and while we are throwing everything and the kitchen sink in our wishlist, perhaps an “at the finger tip” access to SEC filings would not be a bad thing to have either!
Surely, that is a lot to ask of just one tool. Isn’t it?
Turns out, it definitely is not.
Meet the swiss army knife of the stock screeners and portfolio managers all rolled into 1 ridiculously versatile tool: Stock Rover
What is Stock Rover?
The company says it provides “insights and tools to help you be your best investor”. This is true. Stock Rover does all the hard work of finding the data you need, organizing it in a very intuitive way that lets you execute your investment strategy without the distraction of the market noise. You are able to do everything from screening the stocks, to conducting fundamental research and manage your portfolio through your Stock Rover account.
Prefer to work off some time tested strategies such as Magic Formula or Buffetology or filters such as Margin of Safety or Piotroski F-Score or Altman-Z score? You are in luck. Stock Rover ships with a library of as much as 640+ different metrics you can screen on, and has 100s of prebuilt screeners for you to import and start using.
The software itself runs in the cloud and the stock screens execute blazingly fast. The interface is very intuitive and fades into the background. With so many features and enormous volume of data on the offer, a lesser tool can quickly overload you with data. In the case of Stock Rover, the quietly powerful interface keeps everything neatly organized and well managed. You have everything you need, when you need it.
It does this with intelligent use of the frames, views and navigation. Let’s take a quick look.
Please note: in the screenshots that follow, the portfolios do not represent my actual VSG Premium portfolio. Any stock tickers visible in these pictures do not imply my endorsement or recommendation for an investment in that stock
The Stock Rover Dashboard View
Perhaps you like to start your day with a quick overview of the market and your portfolios. The Dashboard can be accessed from the navigation panel on the left.
Below is the same dashboard scrolled down so the portfolio details become visible.
Other tabs let you check the Markets (quick scan of different indices and sectors) and News from multiple sources like Barron’s, WSJ, Yahoo, Marketwatch, etc. You are able to set up the news sources you want.
If you are like me, I suspect you will quickly navigate off to the deeper and more detailed views such as the ones below.
The Stock Rover Portfolio Views
With the Premium Plus membership, you can set up upto 60 different portfolios in Stock Rover. This is very likely to be enough for most people even if you decide to import your 401K, IRAs and all the other accounts. Stock Rover does not currently includes data for Options and Bonds, but you can certainly set up a portfolio that contains these instruments (use Assets instead of Shares when adding these).
The Portfolios can be accessed by selecting the Portfolio tab in the main Navigation panel on the left. You are able to organize your portfolios in different folders. In the picture below I have two folders – Default and VSG Premium Portfolios. The Default folder contains 2 portfolios – FANG and an ETF portfolio. VSG Premium Portfolios contains 1 portfolio.
The folders come in handy if you want to organize your portfolios by the type of accounts (for example, 401Ks, IRAs, Spouse’s 401K, Different brokers, etc)
As mentioned earlier, you can create upto 60 different portfolios. Just right click on the folder you want to add your new portfolio to.
You have 3 choices in how you can setup your portfolio.
- Create your portfolio manually,
- Connect to your broker and link your portfolio for automatic updates, and,
- Import your portfolio from a file
Below I have a picture of how the Broker Connect screen looks. As you can see, most popular brokers are included and there is a way of adding other brokers as well if you want.
Taking a Look at the Portfolio Analytics
All investors are portfolio managers. Your investments do not begin and end with the stocks you pick. Your primarily goal is to make your portfolio grow within the bounds of risk and volatility that you are able to handle. When you consider this, the concepts such as drawdowns and asset correlation become important.
The screenshot above shows the portfolio correlation with S&P 500. As value investors we try to build portfolios that are as much un-correlated with the market as possible.
The screenshot below shows the correlations between the stocks held in the same portfolio. Reducing these correlations help you diversify and hedge the risk within the portfolio.
Over time portfolio allocations drift as different securities generate different returns. In Stock Rover, you can go to Rebalancing tab in Portfolio Tools and input your desired allocation. The tool will suggest the transactions you should make to bring your portfolio back with the desired allocation parameters. Depending on how you manage your accounts, this feature by itself can save you many hours of work every year.
Overall, Stock Rover’s portfolio management tools are robust and offer many times more functionality than any other similar tool I have seen.
Now let’s look at the strongest suite of the tool – it’s powerful screeners
Stock Rover Screener – A Quantitative Research Tool Par Excellence
The software ships with many default screeners already setup. The quickest way to start is to take one of the default screeners that is closest to what you want to do, and then select “Update Screener” (right click on the screener name in the navigation panel). Now you can modify the criteria or filters that you want to change.
More screeners are included in the Library and can be imported to your Stock Rover account.
Here I show the included Magic Formula Screener. Please note the panel on the right called Insight. This panel populates for the stock that you select in the center table. In the insight panel, you are able to view different attributes of the selected stock. In this picture I have chose to look at the Financial Statements, specifically the Balance Sheet. A lot of data is available by selecting these different attributes. If you wish, you can export this data as csv and analyze it further in Excel (if you are a paid Stock Rover customer).
The following Graham Enterprising Investor screener shows the free form equations you can use to set up your screens.
Once you have the results from the screener, you can review each stock by selecting it and checking the Insight panel. If you like a stock and want to come back to it later, you have several options. You can add it to one of your watchlists right from the table
Alternatively, you can color the stock ticker or tag it or add a note to the stock that you can look up later. Tagging, coloring or adding a note makes a lot of sense when you are reviewing your watchlist stocks in greater detail. This is the organizational structure that keeps your stocks straight and your insigths on the right path. You do not need to depend on the quickly scrawled pieces of paper and walls full of sticky notes (I don’t kid – some investors are like that :))
As a brief introduction to Stock Rover, I have not touched upon many of its features. We briefly mentioned watchlists, and you saw examples in some of the screenshots. I am still discovering new features and benefits. This should give you enough insight into the power of this tool and how it will benefit you in your investment research process.
Wrapping Up – Stock Rover can Seriously Save You Time and Improve Your Investment Success
I have been a dedicated Fidelity Screener user till now. My analysis depended on a number of Excel models I have built over the decades of value investing. All these still work. However, ever since I have started using Stock Rover, my research process is now order of magnitudes faster and more accurate.
Best of all, I do not struggle with data manipulation to flesh out the insights. I am now able to click through a few tabs in Stock Rover and quickly grasp the merits or demerits of each investment.
Will it make this amount of positive change in your own investment research process?
Yes. You will have to spend a day or two to set up your portfolios (if you connect to your broker, it is quick and automatic), set up your screeners and watchlist. This one time effort will save you 100s of hours each year and you will be able to review potential investments faster and more extensively.
I fully recommend Stock Rover for stock research. You can try it out for free for 2 weeks here and see how well it works for you. If you decide to get the subscription, go for the Premium Plus. It is very affordable at just $27.99/month after your free trial (Yahoo’s Premium stock screener costs more than this and Yahoo’s data is often wrong and gives you less features. Plus, the ads are still there on Yahoo Finance). Let me know how you like Stock Rover.