YCharts Review – Does The Service Justify the Price?

About YCharts

YCharts is a comprehensive charting and analysis platform that focuses on a stock’s fundamentals more than technical analysis, in contrast to many other charting platforms. The service offers hard-to-calculate metrics in an easy-to-navigate format, which is exactly what many advanced fundamental investors need.

YCharts is designed to suit individual investors and financial managers alike. The platform offers extensive analyst research into stocks in order to provide value-driven traders with the most information possible while also highlighting potentially winning stocks.

So, is YCharts right for you? Keep reading our YCharts review to find out.

YCharts Video Review

YCharts Pricing Options

YCharts offers three pricing tiers: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. Pricing for all plans is by quote only.

The Standard plan is designed primarily for individual investors. It includes all of YCharts charting, watchlist, and scanner features, as well as most of the tools available on the platform. Notably, the Standard plan lacks the advanced time-series analysis that allows investors to visualize how a company’s fundamentals have changed over time, as well as the Excel add-on that will enable you to apply this timeseries analysis in Excel.

The Professional plan is designed for financial professionals and money managers, including hedge fund managers, investment advisors, and research analysts. However, it can also be useful for individual traders who want the time series analysis capabilities, as well as the ability to run financial models for a stock and to quickly compare multiple stocks based on screener results. The Professional plan offers time-series analysis, branded reports, and model portfolios.

The Enterprise plan is designed for large fund managers with many employees. It offers compliance controls, implementation support, and support for building custom integrations.

YCharts offers a 7-day free trial so you can test out the service before you get in touch for pricing.

YCharts Features

Charts

As the name suggests, charts are at the heart of YChart’s platform. That said, YCharts isn’t your typical charting platform, and there are many differentiations between this service and services like TradingView, TC2000, and StockCharts.com.

There are two types of charts available in YCharts – fundamental charts and technical charts.

Fundamental charts are handy for visualizing the change in a stock’s financial metrics over time and for comparing two or more companies in the same industry. The list of financial data that can be plotted is quite exhaustive and includes most data from a company’s income statement, revenue and profit metrics, returns over multiple time periods, and information about various asset types. The platform has more than 4,000 financial metrics available.

You can search fundamental parameters to add them to a chart, or there’s a browser window to see all available fundamental data types. In addition, fundamental charts can be viewed on timescales ranging from one day to 10 years. This is one of the most unique features of the YCharts platform. The ability to be able to plot fundamental data, such as a company’s revenue and EPS, on a chart is an incredibly valuable analysis tool.

Technical charts are more similar to the candlestick charts commonly used to conduct technical analysis. The flexibility of these charts is limited as they are intended primarily for long-term technical analyses. Thus, the bars can only be toggled between candlestick and line patterns. A variety of technical indicators are available, both via search and via a browser window, as for fundamental data types on fundamental charts. However, the selection of charting indicators is somewhat limited to popular momentum indicators, especially compared to charting software that is specifically designed for technical analysis.

Stock Fundamental Data

The most useful aspect of YCharts for many investors is the extensive data that it provides, which can be found by clicking on any stock ticker or searching for a stock. The quote landing page shows a rough chart, analyst recommendations, key stats related to income and performance, and news and upcoming stock events like dividends and earnings reports.

The Key Stats and Financials tabs allow you to dig into the data underlying the stock, with options to export data for additional analyses in Excel or other programs. The Key Stats page is essentially an organized list of tables showing statistics related to price performance, company income and losses, EPS and PE estimates, and other fundamental data that is useful for investors to evaluate a company’s value. It is also simple to compare these statistics across other companies within the same industry. The financials page offers digitized versions of income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, organized for easy export and re-analysis.

YRatings

Another helpful feature is the rating that YCharts gives to every stock based on its fundamental data. This can be especially useful for individual investors who don’t have a team of analysts to help with investment research. The YRating takes into account earnings yield, EPS and revenue, and the stock’s valuation compared to its historical valuation. The YRating itself is similar to analysts’ buy, hold, and sell ratings. We’ve seen ratings and metrics like these in platforms like Value Line, Stockopedia, and StockInvest.us and they are always helpful for doing quick analyses.

Time-series Analysis

Time-series analysis is an extremely powerful tool within YCharts for evaluating how a company’s fundamentals – and those of its competitors – have changed over time. This feature is only available to Professional and Enterprise subscribers.

The full range of fundamental data types is available for timeseries analysis. You can examine it over multiple timescales ranging from daily to monthly to annually. In addition, YCharts lets you save sets of fundamental data types as frequently used datasets for quick loading in the future. The data in time-series analysis is also formatted so that you can export it for additional analysis and organization.

Screeners

YCharts is equipped with screeners for both stocks and mutual funds. In contrast to the stock screeners found on other platforms, the screener on YCharts focuses on fundamental data rather than at-the-moment technical indicators. The mutual fund screener resembles the screener offered by Morningstar, with filters based on fund performance as well as risk and fees.

The screeners in Ycharts cater to self-directed investors who rely on very specific criteria that you may not be able to find in other screening platforms. Some interesting filters include:

Consensus analyst estimates

Upcoming earnings and dividends

Company headquarters locations

Investment firms

Investment strategies

And more

These filters are actually very impressive, but they will be overkill for most retail investors. Helpfully, the screener also features built-in screens modeled on popular investor portfolios and top-performing hedge funds.

Portfolio Management Tools

YCharts has an impressive range of portfolio management tools. These are more geared towards the needs of fund managers than individual investors, but they can still be very useful for individuals.

One neat feature is portfolio simulations. The software enables you to simulate contributions and withdrawals to a portfolio. You can see what happens to your net worth in 20 years if you make monthly or annual contributions to a portfolio, or what happens if you make a large withdrawal for a life event like buying a home.

A portfolio optimizer tool lets you compare your current portfolio with a hypothetical portfolio across metrics like risk, performance, diversification, and more. The optimizer will backtest the real and simulated portfolios, then display their key metrics in charts so that differences are easy to visualize.

YCharts also lets you build custom reports based on your portfolio’s performance. The drag-and-drop report builder works a bit like PowerPoint, but it’s nice to have all of your portfolio’s financial data close to hand. Investment firms can even add their firm’s branding to these reports.

Customization and Saved Layouts

YCharts operates inside your browser, so there is little in the way of customizing or saving screen layouts. However, the dashboard screen does allow you to save multiple dashboard formats as individual windows. Also, you can save custom screens as well as sets of fundamental parameters for quick charting and timeseries analysis in the future.

YCharts Platform Differentiators

YCharts differs from many of the charting and analysis platforms available in that it focuses on fundamental corporate data rather than technical analysis of historical data. The fundamental charting capabilities, and especially the ability to compare multiple stocks within an industry on the same set of charts, are extremely useful for traders looking to benchmark a company against its competitors.

A few other platforms offer similar fundamental charting capabilities, including Stock Rover and FinViz. However, YCharts has a wider range of advanced financial data available than either of these tools and the charting module just feels easier to use. In addition, the time-series data tool available in the Professional and Enterprise plans can be extremely useful for determining the value of a company compared to its current stock price and its potential future trajectory.

The inclusion of data for mutual funds and a fund screener is useful for traders who invest in funds as well as in individual stocks. Morningstar offers comparable screening tools at a lower price, but you get a lot more fundamental analysis firepower from YCharts.

Overall, YCharts offers excellent fundamental analysis and portfolio building tools that few other platforms can match.

What Type of Trader is YCharts Best For?

YCharts is designed primarily for long-term investors and fund managers who want to invest in companies that they believe are undervalued based on their fundamentals.

Our YCharts review found that the platform lacks many of the technical analysis tools commonly associated with charts. Instead, it focuses on providing traders with the ability to compare fundamental data across companies within the same sector. The YCharts rating system gives investors additional analytical insight into companies’ value, while the inclusion of data and a screener for mutual funds makes the platform suitable for investors who also invest in mutual funds.

While YCharts can be very useful for everyday fundamental investors, it seems like the platform is trying to cater mainly to financial advisors, hedge funds, family offices, and other professional investment managers. A lot of the features, like firm-branded reports, won’t be that useful for individual investors.

Pricing by quote only suggests that YCharts will also be prohibitively expensive for many individuals. If you are looking for a cheaper alternative, you may consider Stock Rover, a service that offers fundamental charting alongside an impressive range of other features. Stock Rover plans start at only $79.99 per year, which is a great deal for the data management tools this platform provides.

Pros

Fundamental data for multiple companies can be displayed on the same fundamental charts

Table organization makes exporting to Excel simple for further analysis

YRatings feature offers simple analytical insight into stock’s valuations

Timeseries analysis provides a detailed look into companies’ financial histories with comparisons

Includes screeners for stocks and mutual funds based on fundamental data

Cons

Lacks many of the technical indicators found on other charting platforms

Technical charts are relatively limited in their customizability and flexibility

Subscription plans cater to professional money managers, not individual investors