Best Stock Picking Services

The Motley Fool provides readers with expert analyses of stocks to buy and sell. In addition, its newsletters offer model portfolios that have outperformed the S&P 500 index for at least 10 years in a row.

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor is the company's flagship investment newsletter. Launched in 2002, it features two new monthly stock recommendations, 10 timely buys, and foundational stock recommendations for novice and experienced investors. It costs $199 annually, which isn't much compared to the competition.

It’s important to note that all Motley Fool stock picks are long-term investments: The service usually advises holding an investment for at least five years and sometimes even longer. For example, its advice to buy Amazon stock has been active since 2010.

The Motley Fool website creates recommendations by combining fundamental and technical research. Its fundamental analysis investigates a company's financial health, competitive advantages, and value, while the technical analysis covers price fluctuations and trade volume.

To make the most of your subscription, you should fill your portfolio with 20–30 Motley Fool picks. Why? Well, not every pick can be a winner. If it were that simple, we'd all be millionaires, and money would be worthless.

This doesn't mean the service’s suggestions are useless, however. Approximately 60%-70% of all Motley Fool picks produce a positive return, with 30% earning back more than 100% and 10% earning more than 500%. Statistically, if you follow its recommendations, you will earn money in the long term, with the operative word being “long.”

Since the Motley Fool’s recommendations are intended to be held for extended periods, you can't rely on them for day trading. Still, the service provides enough free research materials to help you make informed decisions regarding any kind of stock trading, including day trading.

Read our detailed review of The Motley Fool services.

Pros:

• Long-term investment
• Excellent long-term returns
• Provides analysis for each pick

Cons:

• No free option

To start with, it's important to note that Mindful Trader is not a get-rich-quick scheme. The stock picks and research materials offered are helpful tools for those who want to learn about and invest in the stock market, but it's still up to each individual to do their own research and make investment decisions.

That said, Mindful Trader's stock picks have proven generally accurate and profitable over the past few years. Eric Ferguson, the one-man team behind the picks, does a great job of analyzing the market and finding undervalued stocks with good growth potential. His picks outperformed the S&P 500.

Eric audited his strategy by doing a 20-year-backtest, giving him an average annual return of 143% with an average account drawdown of -28%. As he himself states, he has a healthy risk appetite; nonetheless, if you scale down the risk, you get an average return rate of 54% and an average account drawdown of -18%, which still outperforms the S&P 500.

For only $47 a month, you get access to Eric’s stock picks, what he bought, how much he paid, his profit target (exit point), and stop-loss point if the stock fails to perform. Due to how stock transactions are executed, having an exit strategy is crucial.

The Mindful Trader stock picking website recommends utilizing trading platforms like thinkorswim, which is operated by TD Ameritrade, one of the leading online brokerages, but you don't have to. As Eric mentions in his FAQ, you are free to use whatever online brokerage you like.

Mindful Trader is excellent for beginners and people who want to get into day trading, but don’t have time to spend most of the day in front of their computer following and researching the market. Eric does that for you, and you get all the information delivered. Eric also provides educational material on his trading method, and you can contact him with any questions regarding his or your trading style.

Pros:

• Easy to follow
• High transparency
• Backtested

Cons:

• No mobile app

Headquartered in Israel and with offices in New York, Ukraine, and India, Seeking Alpha is an investing community used by 20 million investors every month. 

On the Seeking Alpha website, you can invest in stocks, mutual funds, commodities, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies, as well as participate in investor discussions, get informed about the latest news in the industry that interest you, or share your investing ideas. 

There are three Seeking Alpha subscription plans: Basic, Premium, and Pro. The first one is free and gives you access to email alerts, real-time news updates, stock prices, and Wall Street ratings.

The Seeking Alpha Premium plan will set you back $214 per year. It also gives you unlimited access to Alpha’s premium content with one million investing ideas, Seeking Alpha ratings, and a range of sophisticated investing tools, such as quant ratings, data visualizations, peer comparisons, and more. 

Seasoned investors with large portfolios, however, will be best off with the Pro package, which costs $499 per year or $69.99 per month. With it, you get all of the Premium features, plus exclusive investing ideas, weekly digests sent to your mailbox, and VIP phone and email customer service. 

Additionally, your experience using the Seeking Alpha website will be completely ad-free and you’ll be able to use various filtering options to find the investing ideas and news you’re looking for. 

Both the Premium and the Pro plans have free trials, and they last seven and 14 days, respectively. 

Another product offered by Seeking Alpha is the Investor Market. In the Investor Market, you can filter the services you’re interested in by theme, annual or monthly price, and the number of reviews, and then subscribe to the ones that best fit your investment plans.

Each service is led by an expert investor and includes a community chat room used for exchanging ideas. 

All of Seeking Alpha’s services are available on its website and the mobile app you can download from Google Play or the App Store.

The app offers a handy way to manage your portfolio, stay up to date with the latest news and analyses, and what’s particularly important, it sends you real-time alerts about individual stocks you own so you can react to market changes and maximize your profits.

Pros:

• Free trial for paid plans
• Free portfolio health check

Cons:

• Contributors’ articles are of an uneven quality

Trade Ideas is definitely worth checking out. This powerful tool has many features and customization options, making it perfect for both beginners and experienced traders. 

Trade Ideas employs its Holly AI to run scenarios at night and devise the best strategy for the next day. The presented strategies all have a probability of success above 60%. The idea is that if you use an AI service to curate your daily picks, you can successfully stop human emotions from interfering with your calculations.

The service also has scanning software you can use on its website or as a Windows desktop app. The desktop version provides more customizable options compared to the browser one. The program is also capable of automating trades for you. 

For now, the Trade Ideas website doesn’t have an integrated trading platform. Still, you can use the Brokerage Plus feature to connect your portfolio management module with an online brokerage account for no additional charge.

Trade Ideas offers two pricing plans that aren’t exactly cheap, but we believe them to be worth it. The standard plan doesn’t offer AI assistance and costs $84 monthly or $999 annually.

The premium plan costs $167 monthly or $1,999 annually and offers AI assistance, Brokerage Plus, suggested entry and exit signals, and much more.

The premium options make this site great for day trading, but if its prices are too steep for you or you don’t like its service, you can always check what other algorithmic trading platforms have to offer.

Pros:

• Brokerage Plus
• Desktop app
• Free live trading room

Cons:

• Can be overwhelming for beginners
• No free trial

Zacks Investment Research is an investment research firm providing extensive coverage of stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, and more. Founded more than 30 years ago, the company is one of the industry's oldest advisory services, respected by individual and institutional investors alike. In addition to stock recommendations, it also offers investment insights and analyses.

Unlike The Motley Fool, which sends out top picks to its subscribers, Zacks Investment Research focuses on providing subscribers with materials, tools, and analysis to guide their investments. Of course, that doesn't mean the customers are not pointed to the best-performing stocks.

When you become a member of the Zacks Premium program, you get access to the Zacks Rank Lists, which provides a list of stocks that its experts believe will outperform the market. Zacks Rank has a five-tier list ranging from #1 (strong buy) to #5 (strong sell). The #1 rank list is updated daily with new stocks.

The Zacks Earnings Expected Surprise Prediction (ESP) filter is a valuable tool for identifying swing trading stocks since it predicts business earnings projections and indicates how many days are left until the earnings release.

Membership in the program comes with a $249 annual price tag and gives you access to Zacks's best picks, tools, and research materials to help you make an informed decision.

Zacks isn't a standard website that provides you with easy answers. Still, its materials enable you to double-check its choices or make bold new investments.

Pros:

• Free resources for new investors
• Free access to basic Stock Screener functions
• Mobile app

Cons:

• Outdated web UI

Founded in 1978, the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) is a nonprofit educational organization that provides resources and information to help traders become more knowledgeable and confident about investing.

One of the ways the AAII accomplishes this is through its investment newsletters with stock recommendations, market analysis, and educational articles.

What makes the AAII great is the fact that it offers a complete package: Everything you need is in one place, from picks to tools to make your own decisions, combined with webinars and live events allowing you to mingle with fellow investors.

Whether you're just starting to invest or looking to take your knowledge to the next level, the AAII is an excellent resource. It offers multiple portfolios, which you can follow or search for ideas.

One is the Shadow Stock Portfolio, which focuses on undervalued small-cap firms and outperforms the S&P 500.

The AAII also offers a Superstars Portfolio that includes stock picks from investment gurus such as William O’Neil, David Dreman, James O’Shaughnessy, and John Neff. You can also find each of their portfolios and use them to create your own strategies. All the portfolios are updated monthly, and you can subscribe to email updates so you won’t miss anything.

The best part of the AAII platform is that it offers almost everything in one place for an affordable price. It has two plans: The AAII Basic membership and the AAII Plus membership.

AAII Basic costs $49 annually, providing access to daily stock ideas, research and educational materials, webinars and live meetings, a tax planning guide, and a mutual fund guide.

The AAII Plus membership is $189 annually and provides access to everything from Basic, as well as a stock scanner, diversification analysis, stock grades, and data on stocks and funds.

Remember how we said that the AAII has almost everything? Unfortunately, they don't offer portfolio management and stock price alerts, which we thought was surprising for an otherwise comprehensive package.

Pros:

• Multiple investment tools for a low price
• Networking possibilities
• Diversification analysis

Cons:

• No portfolio management

One thing that sets Warrior Trading apart from other companies is its focus on education and day trading. It offers a variety of courses and resources to help users learn more about the market and how to trade successfully.

In addition to its educational materials, Warrior Trading also offers a powerful, customizable stock screener. You will be able to set up multiple screens to track different industries while on the prowl for a new investment. Being able to track all the relevant stocks simultaneously is important for a day trader who wants to stay on top of their game.

Warrior Trading also provides tools and services such as a paper trading simulator for practicing strategies. The only problem is that the trading simulator isn’t free or part of the Warrior Trading packages.

Instead, you must pay an additional fee for it, which we found strange given that most services provide this feature for free or integrated into a package.

Warrior Trading offers two packages to its subscribers: Warrior Starter and Warrior Pro. The Warrior Starter gives you access to on-demand education, live trading chat rooms, partial access to Stock Screener, and the Warrior Starter course. The starter course costs $997; after the first month, it’s an additional $197 per month.

Warrior Pro gives full access to Stock Screener, additional pro courses, live trading archives, and live group mentoring and recordings.

You have two payment options available: An annual membership that costs $5,997 and a 90-day membership that costs $4,297. The former is not a subscription, while the latter is and will automatically renew unless canceled. After the initial 90 days expire, you’ll be charged $197 per month.

If you want to have access to the Paper Trading Simulator, you’ll have to pay an additional $79 per month or $197 per quarter. If you are only interested in this feature, you may want to check out the leading paper trading simulators the competition offers to find either a cheaper or free alternative.

Warrior Trading doesn't offer day-trading stock picks or any other kinds of picks, which we have singled out as a major “con.” On the other hand, judging by all the positive user reviews on BBB and Trustpilot, it is doing a great job with its education-based approach. However, we do hope the platform will introduce asset picks soon.

Pros:

• Fantastic learning materials
• Live mentorship
• Large trader community

Cons:

• Expensive
• Paper trading simulator isn’t free
• No trading picks