Barchart Review – Are These Tools Useful for Traders?

About Barchart

Barchart is a stock, option, futures, forex, and cryptocurrency research platform designed to provide traders with a rapid overview of the markets. Barchart boasts a huge variety of tools and visualizations, but the site can feel somewhat overwhelming for new users. Barchart is especially well-suited for traders who want to monitor watchlists with actionable market data, quickly find the biggest movers of the day, and stay on top of financial news.

In our comprehensive Barchart review, we’ll cover everything this technical and fundamental research platform can do.

Barchart Pricing Options

Barchart recently updated its pricing structure to offer a free plan and two paid plans.

The free plan limits you to 20 page views and one watchlist. You can create basic price alerts, but you don’t get access to most of Barchart’s research tools.

A Barchart Plus plan costs $99 per year. It unlocks Barchart’s screeners and data visualizations, plus provides unlimited page views and up to 10 watchlists.

A Barchart Premier membership costs $199.95 per year. This grants you access to actionable trade ideas, options trading tools, and end-of-day reports. You can also create an unlimited number of watchlists.

You can try out Barchart Plus or Barchart Premier free for 30 days.

Barchart Features

Market Overviews

Barchart provides institutional-grade data about stocks, ETFs, options, futures, forex, and cryptocurrencies, each in a different tab of the website. For each of these markets, there is an overview page that includes a roundup of some of the additional information available on Barchart – including top movers, news, and recommendations.

However, most traders will be more interested in the specific overview pages, which give more information related to how the market is performing on any given day. For example, under stocks Barchart displays a chart of sector performance compared to index performance across global markets, as well as lists of stocks hitting new highs and lows and stocks with upcoming earnings reports. For options, traders can quickly see which options are trading with the most volume or have experienced the greatest change in volatility over the day.

These displays can be useful in identifying potential trades, but beware that there is a steep learning curve to simply accessing relevant information. Because the overview pages offer so much data across multiple different market types, it can be difficult to identify what pieces of data are most relevant to a coherent trading strategy. Barchart isn’t heavy on fundamental analysis tools, so it’s not a replacement for a fundamental stock research platform like Stock Rover.

Stock Data

Barchart offers a large amount of data about individual stocks for free, but it’s not the kind of fundamental data you might find on Yahoo Finance. Instead, Barchart focuses on price history, technical indicators, insider trading, and earnings estimates. This data can be really helpful for swing traders, but it’s not as useful for long-term investors who want to conduct thorough financial analysis.

One thing that’s noteworthy is that Barchart offers historical data downloads going back as far as 2000. You can download a CSV of prices, which can be useful for backtesting a strategy or other custom analyses.

Trading Signals and Recommendations

One of the most helpful research tools that Barchart offers is Barchart Opinion. Barchart Opinion monitors 13 different short-term, medium-term, and long-term technical indicators and highlights stocks and ETFs that have triggered these indicators in either the buy or sell direction. Based on these indicators, the platform issues ratings-based trading signals for hundreds of stocks and ETFs every day. Furthermore, Barchart also makes it easy to identify top stock picks that have been given a 100% buy or sell rating by the platform’s algorithm.

Stock, Options, and ETF Screeners

Barchart includes separate screeners for stocks, options, and ETFs. The stock screener is not as comprehensive as the screeners in FinViz or Trade Ideas, but it does offer enough versatility to begin identifying potential trades. There is a holistic set of financial data and technical analysis parameters to cater to both short-term and long-term investors, although it falls somewhat short on available technical indicators compared to other stock screeners. The ETF screener is highly similar to the stock screener and features many of the same parameters.

Additionally, creating custom screeners can be time-consuming because of the cumbersome drop-down menu setup for adding filters.

The Barchart options screener, on the other hand, is quite capable. This is only available to Barchart Premier subscribers. There are a decent number of filters related to the stocks underlying available options, although Barchart still can’t compare with dedicated options screeners like Option Samurai or Optionsonar. There are also pre-defined screens for common options trading strategies like covered calls, straddles, butterflies, and iron condors. Keep in mind that while free Barchart users can access the options screener results and even create basic options screens, they cannot add advanced filters to create more complex screens.

Market News

Barchart isn’t a dedicated market news platform like Benzinga Pro, but for the sheer volume of news it captures it can certainly be utilized like one. The platform pulls in news from major news outlets as well as financial outlets, and organizes articles according to the market type or market sector they relate to. It’s very similar to Yahoo! Finance or other market news aggregators. Since there are so few stories that escape Barchart’s aggregation, it is a very effective way to stay on top of relevant financial news.

The downside to Barchart compared to a stock news platform like Benzinga Pro is that the news isn’t quite as fast or as digestible. Barchart doesn’t put the same premium on instant headline delivery. There is also no way to quickly see the beginning of an article for most stories – you’re limited to previewing the headline. Finally, there is no squawk box function for traders who prefer to receive news via audio.

Technical Analysis

Somewhat surprisingly, Barchart offers interactive charts for stock price data. The technical charts have a wealth of capabilities, including drawing tools and the ability to overlay a huge variety of technical studies. Importantly for day traders, the charts can even plot intraday data down to one-minute intervals. You also have the option to save custom chart templates for quick analysis in the future.

While the technical analysis components of Barchart are somewhat disconnected from the rest of the platform, they are surprisingly powerful. They can be very helpful for conducting your own due diligence around the stock picks generated by Barchart Opinion.

Watchlists and Portfolios

Barchart also includes the ability to create custom watchlists and portfolios. Traders can sign up for end-of-day emails that update them on the performance of their watchlists and portfolios. The reports are beneficial for traders who like to spend 30 minutes at the end of the day preparing for market open the next morning.

Barchart Platform Experience

Barchart is a browser-based platform that separates its different markets – stocks, ETFs, options, futures, forex, and crypto – into different tabs. Overall, the organization of the website is relatively straightforward, especially given the immense amount of data and displays that are available. However, it is this sprawling amount of information that can make it challenging for beginning users to figure out which data is relevant and which tabs to ignore.

Paid Barchart users have some ability to customize how the site looks for them, particularly in the side boxes. However, even with these modifications, the overall structure of Barchart does not change much. Once you get over the initial learning curve, though, the platform starts to feel pretty natural.

Barchart Platform Differentiators

Barchart is a news aggregator, although it’s not a dedicated news streaming platform like Benzinga Pro. It offers surprisingly versatile technical charts, although they can’t compare to the flexibility of charts from software like ThinkorSwim. And most of all, it offers a broad overview of the markets similar to what any major financial website would provide.

So, the main innovation of Barchart is that it has combined all of these features in a single platform. On the one hand, this is helpful for day traders and swing traders who need access to information quickly and in one place to make decisions. On the other hand, the platform can appear crowded and overwhelming.

What Type of Trader is Barchart Best For?

Barchart is designed to cater to the widest possible array of traders. There is information about not only stocks, but also ETFs, options, futures, forex, and cryptocurrencies. On top of that, it caters to both day traders and long-term investors by offering a balanced mix of fundamental and technical filters in its stock screener, as well as technical and performance overview charts that can span from intraday to multi-year.

Barchart is a solid platform and the paid plans come at a fairly affordable price. So, many traders will find the service to be worthwhile even if they don’t use all of its features. The platform is perhaps best suited for beginning and intermediate traders who want an all-in-one resource before diving into more specialized paid platforms. In the long run, more advanced traders will generally be better off with more focused tools for technical analysis or trading news.

Pros

Information about stocks, ETFs, options, futures, forex, and cryptocurrency

Surprisingly versatile technical charts

Advanced options screener

Excellent financial news aggregator

Watchlists with end-of-day reports

Cons

Amount of information can be overwhelming

Stock screeners are relatively light on technical parameters

Stock news is slower and less digestible than dedicated news services