The question is: Which—if any—of these services are worth your time and money? Here are some answers. These are the best stock picking services compared.
Quick Summary on the Best Stock Picking Services
BEST FOR LONG-TERM INVESTORS
The Motley Fool
The Motley Fool combines decades of experience, data-driven analysis, and intuition to provide some of the best stock recommendations in the business. Each of their managed portfolios follows a slightly different theme and investing strategy, but each will give you about two new stock picks per month that are meant to be held for at least five years. Read more
Pricing
Stock Advisor $199/year
Rule Breakers $299/year
Everlasting Stocks $299/year
Full Access $13,999/year
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BEST COMMUNITY-DRIVEN STOCK RECOMMENDATIONS
Seeking Alpha
Seeking Alpha is a diverse community of investors that provides crowdsourced research, analysis, and recommendations. Signing up for a paid membership gets you a massive number of reports and analyses from independent analysts, access to their advanced Quant Ratings, and more information than you probably know what to do with. Read more
Pricing
Basic Free
Premium $4.95 for the first month,
PRO $2,400/year
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BEST AI-POWERD SERVICE
Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas uses the power of artificial intelligence to optimize every aspect of the trading process. You’ll get constant real-time updates, suggestions for when to enter and exit trades, and assistance for everything from charting to portfolio optimization. It’s best suited to day traders, but almost any investor can find a ton of value in the recommendations that the AI provides. Read more
Pricing
Standard $84/month
Premium $167/month
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BEST FOR BIG READERS
Morningstar Investor
Morningstar Investor is a paid subscription service run by the legendary stock and investing research firm itself. A subscription gets you access to years of best-in-class research on all kinds of different securities, plus the ability to check out Morningstar’s list of incredibly accurate ratings and recommendations that they’ve compiled over the years. Read more
Pricing
Investor $34.95/monthly or
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BEST FOR ACTIVE INVESTORS
Zacks Investor Collection
Zacks Investment Research uses a complex set of algorithms and data-driven quantitative models to identify companies with outsize growth potential and recommends them to their customers. Subscribing to their Zacks Investor Collection service gets you access to a library of managed portfolios, each of which provides its own recommendations each month. If you aren’t a fan of one portfolio, you can always look to find one or more that fits your personal philosophy or focus on your preferred industries. Read more
Pricing
Zacks Investor Collection $59/month
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The Best Stock Picking Services Compared in Detail
Let’s take a closer look at the best stock picking services.
1. The Motley Fool
Best for Long-Term Investors
The Motley Fool is a stock picking service that prides itself on its dedication to telling the whole, unvarnished truth, no matter how unpopular it might be.
The Motley Fool makes a point to only tell the truth about investments that they arrive at using a combination of big data, in-depth fundamental analysis, and the combined knowledge and experience of their big and growing team. They have little patience for flavor-of-the-month plays or even for good companies with fair stock prices. They make their money by digging deeper into the data, analyzing the trends, and finding companies that are currently undervalued and poised for big gains in the future.
You can subscribe to any one or a combination of the Motley Fool’s managed portfolios , each of which will give you a set of detailed recommendations, past performance comparisons, and at least two new recommendations each month. Their Stock Advisor service is their flagship product with the longest track record, but there’s plenty of value in each portfolio.
Learn more: When we talk about stocks and money, understanding the basics is key, and this post serves as a quick-start guide for beginners in stock investing .
Pros:
Long track record of successful trades.
Wide range of stock and investment recommendations.
Fairly reasonably priced, considering potential returns.
Cons:
Have to hold stocks for at least five years.
Not great if you want to trade on trends and headlines.
The Motley Fool
Price $199 – $13,999/year
Investing Philosophy Fundamentals-based
Recommendations Stocks, options, ETFs
Features Two research-supported picks per month include supplemental research and reasoning.
Pricing
Stock Advisor $199/year
Rule Breakers $299/year
Everlasting Stocks $299/year
Full Access $13,999/year
2. Seeking Alpha
Best Community-Driven Stock Recommendations
Seeking Alpha is an investing community with a semi-crowdsourced base of knowledge, research, and analysis on pretty much every kind of investment out there. This is one of the best stock picking services if you’re looking for an incredibly diverse range of data-backed opinions from thousands of finance and investing professionals. You can access a huge trove of information without signing up for any of their subscription tiers, but you really need to sign up for at least the Premium tier if you want to get your eyes on the best information.
Seeking Alpha’s value doesn’t just come from the sheer volume of crowdsourced analysis that it pumps out every month. The service itself goes out of its way to monitor analyst performance, keeps track of their ratings and track record, and weighs their advice based on their calculations, which is very helpful when you’re sifting through page after page of analysis looking for good material. They also employ a quantitative system they call their Quant Ratings to grade each and every stock, meaning you can combine human advice and predictions with pure math to make better, more timely picks.
Learn more: If you’re delving into the world of stocks, you might find this post on the best stock backtesting platforms useful for optimizing your strategies.
Pros:
Huge library of analysis and diverse opinions.
Constantly updated content from professional investors.
Quant Ratings make finding good picks easier.
Cons:
The crowdsourced analysis isn’t always as good as professionally curated analysis.
A lot of information to sift through.
Seeking Alpha
Price Free – $2,400/year
Investing Philosophy Crowdsourced analysis with quantitative support
Recommendations Stocks, options, bonds, ETFs
Features Quant Ratings, analyst performance ratings, stock dividend grades, a huge library of premium content
Pricing
Basic Free
Premium $4.95 for the first month,
PRO $2,400/year
3. Trade Ideas
Best AI-Powered Service
Trade Ideas is a little different from the other services on this list for one major reason: Holly. Holly is an AI that acts as a researcher, assistant, watchdog, analyst, and stock recommendation service all rolled into one.
Learn more: For those interested in emerging technologies, this post discusses the top AI stocks & ETFs to watch this year.
Most stock picking services give you a couple of recommendations each month. That makes it nice and easy for long-term investors looking to place a few trades here and there and pretty much forget about their portfolios the rest of the time. Trade Ideas does things a bit differently. Holly stays active around the clock, running numbers and simulating outcomes millions of times each day, which means she’s going to give you more than two trade ideas each month.
This service is a bit more involved than the ones that just send monthly recommendations, but it’s one of the best stock picking services for anyone who wants to leverage the power of AI to take their day trading to another level. You’ll get real-time recommendations for entry and exit points for stocks, suggestions for optimizing your portfolio, and even the ability to run your own simulations and backtesting to find ideas that even Holly might have missed.
Learn more: Aspiring to learn from the best in the field? This post outlines the composition of Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio .
Pros:
AI assistant provides constant trade ideas and guidance.
Can run in-depth simulations to see how certain trades will turn out.
Advanced AI-driven portfolio optimization and automatic portfolio management.
Cons:
Steep learning curve.
It could be more user-friendly.
Trade Ideas
Price $84 – $167/month,
Investing Philosophy Using artificial intelligence and in-depth simulations to optimize trades
Recommendations Stocks, options, ETFs
Features Backtesting, OddsWindow, simulations, AI-assisted charting and portfolio management
Pricing
Standard $84/month
Premium $167/month
4. Morningstar Investor
Best for Big Readers
Morningstar is as close as stock research and picking services get to royalty. They’ve earned a name for themselves as one of the best, most thorough stock research companies in the business, and it isn’t hard to see why. Over 150 different professional, independent analysts—all of whom are highly educated industry veterans—come together to form what may be one of the most significant sources of fundamentals-driven research out there.
Morningstar Investor, their paid membership, gives you access to all the past, present, and future research and analysis that their team of independent analysts puts out on a regular basis. You’ll get access to volume after volume of data-driven research and analysis, plus a massive list of ratings on securities, individual managers, ESG investments , and a whole slew of other topics that touch just about every corner of the industry. You won’t get handed a couple of recommendations each month, but you will be given access to a rating system with a track record that’s so good it almost seems like cheating.
Learn more: If you’re exploring different investment analysis approaches, this post detailing the differences between fundamental and technical analysis could provide some valuable insights.
Pros:
Professional research on a huge range of topics.
Incredibly accurate ratings for tons of different securities.
Practically a master class on investing that can help you improve your portfolio.
Cons:
Lots of information to sift through.
Requires a lot of reading and patience.
Morningstar Investor
Price $34.95/month or $249/year
Investing Philosophy Using in-depth, fundamentals-driven research to build understanding and find trade opportunities
Recommendations Stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, bonds
Features Huge library of research and analysis from over 150 independent analysts
5. Zacks Investor Collection
Best for Active Investors
Zacks Investment Research was started by an MIT Ph.D. back in 1978, and it’s been building on his quantitative ideals and mathematical prowess ever since. The firm churns out some of the industry’s best, most mathematically supported recommendations on a monthly basis, almost all of which are underpinned by their original stroke of genius: the Zacks Rank system.
Much like the Motley Fool, Zacks maintains a number of recommendation services and lists that function a lot like managed portfolios, each with slightly different investing philosophies and themes. For instance, their Home Run Investor service—one of their more prominent offerings—focuses on identifying and recommending small- and mid-cap companies that have a lot of room to grow. Its recommendations have a much shorter time frame than most similar services, which makes it one of the best stock picking services for investors who want to be more actively involved in their portfolios.
Learn more: Are you interested in stock trading? This post explains how you can practice without putting actual money on the line .
Pros:
Great for active investors.
Lots of portfolios to choose from.
Includes a lot of information and research.
Cons:
Some portfolios are better than others.
Requires more interaction than other services.
Zacks Investor Collection
Price $59/month
Investing Philosophy Using a special blend of proprietary algorithms and quantitative modeling to find trade opportunities
Recommendations Stocks, ETFs
Features Includes six portfolios, tons of research, proprietary insights, and advanced investing tools
Methodology
We wanted to find a nice mix of stock recommendation services that cover a wide range of assets, investing philosophies, methodologies, and features. Every one of the services on this list has an impressive track record, of course, but you should never even think of giving your money to a service that doesn’t. So instead of focusing just on that, we wanted to open things up a little and try to think of stock picking as more than just getting one or two new recommendations each month as an email attachment.
We focused on these factors:
Price
A good investor should recognize a good investment when they see it. Some services charge an absolutely crazy amount of money for what they do, and they aren’t always worth the price of admission. If a service wanted to make its way onto this list, it first needed to pass one simple test: How much would you need to make off the service’s recommendations to make the subscription fee worth it?
In other words, if an average investor were to sign up for a service, how much would the stocks that the service recommended need to appreciate over a reasonable time frame for the investor to make their money back and earn a profit?
Investing Philosophy
Every firm has its own way of doing things. Some make recommendations based on fundamental analysis. Others use their own special blend of algorithms and models. Others rely on AI or even just plain old instinct. We found services that use a mix of the best data-driven approaches, plus a good variety of stock types, time frames, and central tenets that drive their philosophies.
Recommendations
This one was pretty simple. The article is about stock picking, but we figured it’d be a good idea to find services that didn’t just focus on one specific asset class if possible, though it’s fine if stocks are their main area of expertise.
Features
This one’s also pretty simple. We mostly cared about the “stock picking” part of “stock picking services,” but who doesn’t like some extras thrown in? It’s always nice to know that you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck, so we felt it’d be nice to point out the features that come with each of the services on the list. Charts, research, analysis, investing tools, and anything that moves the needle.
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