What if there was a way to cut through the massive amount of data we face when analyzing stocks? There is more data available to individual investors than ever before. Efficiently summarizing all that data and trying to make sense of it in a way to make actionable decisions can save us all a lot of time. This is what a service like Stock Card strives to do.
What is Stock Card?
Stock Card is a tool that lets you cut through a lot of the complexity of the market and summarizes stocks into ratings in a few categories. This way of looking at stocks makes it easy to see what the advantages and limitations of each stock are. When a stock is performing well, you can easily see that at a glance without having to dig into the numbers. But the interface is not so simplistic that it ignores value. Stock Card aims to give users an easy-to-use overview of the market.
What does Stock Card Offer?
Stock Card allows you to research specific companies that interest you, find new stock ideas, and monitor a portfolio quickly and efficiently. You can filter through thousands of stock symbols to find particular categories that interest you, like “undervalued stocks” or “company strength.”
Each stock is represented with a square made up of four quadrants. These quadrants are growth at the top left, strength at the top right, performance at the bottom left, and value at the bottom right. Growth is represented by a chart segment, strength by a dumbbell, performance by a building with columns, and value with a rectangle and a dollar sign.
A color is given to each quadrant based on whether the stock is good, neutral, or bad in that aspect. For example, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is green in all quadrants except value, as it almost always trades at a high multiple. Electrolux AB (OTC:ELUXF) is gray in the value quadrant because there is not enough information to estimate the value of the company’s stock. The site uses green for “good,” yellow for “neutral,” red for “bad” and gray for “unclear.”
Research Specific Companies
You can research a certain company by typing the stock symbol into the search field under “Research Specific Companies.” Let’s use EEFT as an example. The site brings up a summary page, which lays out many interesting insights about the stock.
On the left side of the page, you can see how many users viewed the stock, how many are following and watching the stock, how many own the stock and how many have sold the stock. On the right side of the page, you will see many quantitative and qualitative measures of the stock. The company’s high growth potential is identified as good, while “Stable operations”, “Same return as the market” and “Fair share price” all cause a neutral rating.
You can click on each of these cards for more analysis so you can dig into exactly what is driving each rating. A meter shows the investor sentiment for the stock. The “Investors’ strategy for EEFT” section shows what investors from the Stock Card community plan for this stock. You can click the box and add your own strategy to the record. At the bottom of this area, the stock chart for EEFT is displayed.
Below the analysis section, there is a box containing key information for the stock. Information discussing the business’s operations, the IPO date, and the company’s market value are all laid out in an easy-to-read format. A link is provided to the company’s investor relations website, making it easy to dig deeper directly from the source.
Additionally, the “Industries, themes, and country” box shows the categories that the stock fits into. You can see that EEFT is a technology and software-related company. You can use these collections to find similar stocks based on these traits. Lastly, the “Earnings report and dividend-related dates” box shows earnings release dates and dates related to the dividends for the stock.
At the bottom of this page, we have the content that anchors from the cards at the top of the page, which goes into detail for each rating. We see that the company has high growth potential because the “Technology” sector as a whole is expected to have moderate growth and the “Software – Infrastructure” sector is expected to have high growth.
The next box is Stable operations, which is a mixed bag regarding EEFT. There is a combination of positive and negative signs that combined to contribute to the moderate rating. Stable operations is split up into important segments, such as Sales Growth, Profitability, Cash availability, and Management Effectiveness.
You can click on each of these to drill down into why each of these subcategories got the rating they did. You can similarly drill down on the next cards under Valuation and Investment Returns.
Next is the Investor Sentiment card. This card uses a variety of fundamental and technical indicators to measure the investor sentiment for the stock. These include the Chaikin Money Inflow, Short Interest, Simple Moving Average and Relative Strength Index. With EEFT, you can see that all the measures are neutral except for the simple moving average, which is bearish.
Then we come to the Analyst Consensus section, where you see a pie chart of how financial analysts see the stock. With 8 buys 0 holds and 0 sells, analysts are bullish on the stock.
Discover Interesting Stocks
By clicking “Find Interesting Stocks” on the Home page or Discover on the menu bar at the top, you arrive at the Discover page. This page shows you Your View History, “Stock Cards You Follow” and suggests other stocks based on the stocks that you have previously viewed. Other tabs include “Featured Themes,” which shows you original collections of stocks grouped together to fit a theme.
For example, Microsoft, Slack Technologies, and Zoom are all components of the Work-From-Home theme. Other themes include “Companies shaping the future” and stocks that fit a particular style investor, such as stocks for dividend seekers or risk-takers.
“Popular on Stock Card” gives you the most-viewed cards, the top gainers and top losers for that day, and stocks reporting earnings today or this week. The “All Stock Cards” tab gives you all the available stocks, which you can narrow down using the filters on the left.
The filters on the left allow you to filter out stocks based on stock price, market capitalization, growth potential, company strength, past investment return, value, dividend yield and the age of the stock card.
Monitor Your Investments
Clicking on “Monitor Your Investments” from the Home page or clicking “Monitor” on the top menu takes you to your Portfolio page. Here, you can see your view history, which forms a portfolio of its own and you can see how it would perform. You can also see your watchlist and add or remove stocks from it. You can track the performance of your watchlist as well. Finally, you can create an unlimited number of portfolios and you can track their performance.
Get Well-Researched Picks
Clicking “Get Well-Researched Picks” on the Home page or clicking the “Stock Picks” option on the top menu gets you to the Portfolio Store. Only subscribers to the VIP plan can view the stocks in these portfolios. This feature offers you many well-performing portfolios and a few that haven’t performed so well.
For example, Phoenix is a portfolio composed of COVID-19-resilient companies like Slack Technologies and Clorox. This portfolio gained 86.76% from March 31, 2020 to August 3, 2020. However, The Green Fund, a portfolio of cannabis-related stocks, didn’t perform so well in the face of COVID-19, losing 82.16% over much the same period.
Stock Card Advantages
Here are some things that stand out about Stock Card that make it an excellent tool for stock analysis.
1. Great for Beginners
Stock Card is great for individuals who are new to investing and is a great way to offer investing newbies a simple and easy-to-grasp view of stocks. It clearly defines the four categories that make up a stock rating, making it easy to pick out stocks that fit all the criteria.
These are all solid criteria for judging stocks, but experts will have the advantage of being able to interpret the nuance inherent to each category. The simplicity of the analysis may be a good starting point for an expert, but the site is just what a beginner needs.
2. Simple Interface and Great Community
You can’t get much simpler than abstracting stocks down into a set of cards, and that’s what Stock Card aims to do. The website is uncluttered and very clean, with no wasted space. In addition to the Stock Card site itself, there is also a blog, podcast, Facebook group and YouTube channel.
The blog gives you good information about starting to invest in stocks and about the different categories of stocks. But much of the content leads you back into the site into parts where you will need a premium subscription. Their YouTube channel provides a lot of video content about how to use the site effectively.
3. Affordable Plans
The Starter plan limits you to five stock card and five ETF card views each month. In order to really dig into a particular group of stocks or a sector, you will need access to more.
Luckily, the VIP plans are affordable—$14.99/month and $24.99/month respectively at the time of this writing. All VIP plans give you:
- Unlimited access to Watchlist Ideas
- Unlimited access to VIP real-money portfolios and picks
- Unlimited personal Watchlists and Portfolios
- Unlimited access to strategy-based stock and/or ETF evaluations
- Detailed Stock and/or ETF updates notifications
The ETF VIP plan gives you access to unlimited ETF card views and unlimited ETF screener access. ETF VIP plan costs $14.99/month or $149.99/year.
The Stock VIP plan gives you access to unlimited stock card views and unlimited stock screener access. Stock VIP plan costs $14.99/month or $149.99/year.
With a Stock Card Full VIP plan, you get unlimited stock card and ETF card views as well as unlimited access to both stock and ETF screeners. The Full VIP plan will set you back $24.99/month or $249.99/year.
Stock Card Limitations
Given all its advantages, Stock Card is probably not for everyone. Here are a few limitations that the platform suffers from.
1. Probably Not Enough for Experienced Investors
Experienced investors may find Stock Card a good starting point or a kind of advanced stock screener, but they are unlikely to really feel the need for it. Fundamental traders and value traders might feel more at home here, but even they will want to dig deeper than what the site provides.
The service does a good job of summarizing fundamental measures into magnitudes (good, bad, etc.), and incorporates many value investing metrics like price-to-book and price-to-sales. Other software like Stock Rover are probably better-suited for experience investors who are detail oriented.
2. Starter Plan Too Limited to be Useful for Extensive Research
The Starter Plan, which is free, only allows you to view five stock cards per month. While this may be perfectly adequate for someone new to stock investing, someone who wants to really dig into finding stocks meeting certain criteria they’re looking for will need to upgrade to the Prime or VIP levels.
Is Stock Card for You?
If you are a beginning trader or someone with a budding interest in the stock market, Stock Card would be a great tool to view the vast array of stocks out there in a way that clearly frames them in an easy-to-digest way.
If you are an experienced investor with a fundamental or value investing perspective, Stock Card may be an interesting experience for you. While the data is mostly quantitative figures expressed in a qualitative way, it may be a good way to cut through some of the noise similar to how you might use a stock screener.
