Today the Stock Rover Team is proud to unveil Stock Rover Markets, a brand new platform for financial news and quotes, as well as Stock Rover Version 6.1, which includes a wide range of enhancements.
There is a lot of good stuff to tell you about, so we’ll try to keep this blog post as organized and on point as possible. Read on, or jump ahead to any item of interest:
Contents
Stock Rover Markets is a brand new free finance site focusing on market information across many different markets, news, quotes, and earnings announcements. It is accessible through the “Markets” menu item in the header above, and by clicking the “Market Summary” header text in Stock Rover (yes, that’s a link!).
W created Markets because we recognized that Stock Rover, while incredibly powerful for investment research and analysis, overshoots what most investors are looking for on a daily basis—namely, a place to take the market’s temperature, compare the performance of world markets and specialized markets like bonds and commodities, and get quotes and other key information about individual stocks. We also felt that our team could deliver this type of information (and more to boot) better and faster than other free financial sites.
We think you’ll find it quite easy to pick up Markets. Just use your Stock Rover username and password to login for unlimited access. If you’re a Premium member, logging in will also erase the advertisements from your window.
You might notice in the screenshot above that Markets offers summaries of foreign markets, such as the Hang Seng and Nikkei, as well as data on bond yields and commodities. This means that in just a few clicks, you can gain a well-rounded understanding of what is happening in world markets and at home.
Explore the tabs at the top to see the different sections. Markets, News, and Quotes all have subsections for you to explore. You’ll find that the Quotes section offers a significant amount of detail about the selected ticker, including analyst estimates and ratings, nearly all the price charting capabilities found in Stock Rover, as well as the ability to graph financials such as net income, payout ratio, and number of shares. Below is an example of one such graph:
One tab you won’t want to miss is the Earnings Calendar, where you can easily see the expected earnings release dates for any company in our data feed.
View the calendar by day, week, or month. Select a date to see which companies plan to announce earnings that day, or type in a ticker on the left to learn when that company will release earnings.
You can link to the Earnings Calendar straight from Stock Rover by clicking on the (brand new) hyperlinked “Next Report Date” in the Insight panel, called out below.
The rightmost tab in Markets is Forums. Stock Rover Forums is a major new piece of infrastructure that connects our user community. For a long time, we have wanted to make it possible for our users to connect directly with each other to discuss investing ideas, ask questions about Stock Rover, and more, so we are truly thrilled to present this new facility.
In Forums you can create a custom handle and profile, and then you can post, reply, and like/dislike posts. Use hashtags to categorize your posts for search. We are starting with four forum channels:
Forums are in beta and we are eager to hear your feedback on how we can make them a success. Stock Rover staff will be monitoring the forums and tending to support questions on a regular basis. But of course we are counting on you, our users, to make the forums an engaging and inspiring place for investors. So venture a #longterm or #value idea!
Markets isn’t the only new thing this week. Stock Rover Version 6.1 brings a swell of upgrades—in fact, too many for this blog post. Let’s take a look at the biggest changes.
Here is a new addition that we think investors of all skills levels will love:
It’s a detailed but digestible overview of analyst recommendations. (The ticker represented above is UNP, by the way, in case you want to look into it!) Found in the Detail tab of the Insight panel, the Analyst Ratings panel organizes buy/sell/hold ratings into a clear “consensus” of equity research firms that follow the given stock.
In Stock Rover, these ratings are also available in the Table and Screener, so you can compare analyst ratings across all the stocks in, say, your portfolio, or you can screen for stocks that have no sell ratings. Note that, as of now, access to Analyst Ratings in the Table and Screener is scheduled to become a Premium feature in the next major release. So be sure to test out these metrics in the Table and Screener while they are free for all.
In fact, to make it easy on you, we’ve created a view and a few screeners in the Library using analyst ratings. So head to the Library to download the two Analyst Ratings views and the Analyst Picks screener.
Just below Analyst Ratings in the Detail tab is another new panel, EPS & Sales. Here’s a look at it:
At the top you’ve got an easy-on-the-eyes chart that makes the general growth trajectory of the company in question extremely clear. Notice that there are two y-axes on either side of the graph; the one on the left-side pertains to sales (blue), while the one on the right side pertains to the EPS values (orange). The dotted line tracks the estimated values for the current year.
Below the graph are two tables showing the same information in a tabular form, as well as a Cash Flow table, so you can see how cash flow trends compare to earnings and sales trends. All tables in the EPS & Sales panel can be expanded or collapsed.
Many users have requested the ability to jot notes directly in the Table (which is a little different from both our existing Notes and Tags features). And we’re pleased to report that now you can do just that, with our brand new Comments feature. Comments are a Premium feature, but they are currently free for all to use until our next release.
You can add the Comments column to your view (just as you would add any other column) in order to type directly into a Table cell, or simply add a comment to any ticker in the table through the right-click menu, whether or not the Comments column is open. Both versions of commenting are shown below:
Adding a comment from the right-click menu:
Adding a comment from the Table:
By default, the Comments column is “frozen” so that it stays in view at all times. You can easily unfreeze it by right-clicking the column header and selecting “Unfreeze column.” The Tag column can be frozen as well.
You might spy a few new items in the Navigation panel. There is Commodities, which shows the prices of gold, oil, copper, corn, and other commodities whose prices can have far-reaching economic implications. There is also a new line for All Indices under the Indices parent, where you can get pricing data for indices we previously did not support, such as the Russell 2000, FTSE 100, and the DAX 30.
Both of these new items can help you gain a broader context on the marketplace before drilling into deeper stock research. The 52-wk Range column is particularly helpful when viewing commodities or indices in the Table:
Note there is a currently a limitation for foreign indices in that pricing information is only updated during the US trading day. We are looking into ways to improve on that.
We’ve also added a host of new metrics to our inventory. This includes the following Basic metrics (i.e, accessible by all users):
There are also new Premium metrics: This is a new designation in Stock Rover, denoted by a yellow star. These metrics can be found in the main product, but are only usable by Premium members. In addition to those below, a number of metrics that were previously only available in the Library as custom metrics are now designated as Premium metrics.
And we’ve added a few new custom metrics (these are only available to Premium members via the Library):
We’re always looking for ways to improve the workflow and usability of the Stock Rover interface. Here is a sampling of some of the small-but-mighty changes we’ve made in this release.
First, it is now possible to selectively show quotes in the Table. Previously you could only show all quotes or no quotes. Select the quotes you want to appear in the Table using the individual checkboxes on the left side of the Quotes panel:
Also, a handy new shortcut: the word “Quotes” in the Quotes Box header is hyperlinked. When you click it, your quotes will load in the Table (without any other datasets). This is the same as selecting “Quotes” in the Navigation panel.
Speaking of shortcuts, there is now breadcrumb navigation in the Table header. Take a look:
This means you can quickly jump up a level of hierarchy by clicking on one of the hyperlinked breadcrumbs, rather than using the Navigation panel.
Per user feedback, you can now highlight a column in the Table. We’ve always had the ability to color a row, but never before could you color a column. To color a column, right-click the column header and find “Color” in the menu (this is also how you un-color a column). This makes it extremely easy to keep track of a certain line of data in the table, for example:
We’ve also added a number of friendly touches to the Chart. If you are adding something to the Chart via a right-click in the Table or Navigation panel, you can now designate whether it gets added as the primary charted item, or if it goes to the “Compare” box. Previously, charting something by right-click menu always resulted in replacing the primary ticker. Sometimes this was a desirable behavior, but sometimes it was not. Now, as illustrated in the image below, users can choose whether they want to “Chart” (replace primary ticker) or “Compare in Chart” (add to the Compare box).
Similarly, we’ve made it possible to swap a compare ticker with a primary ticker in one click. Just hover over any item in the Compare box until you see a special double-arrow cursor icon. Click, and the trade is made.
Also in the Chart, it’s now easier to clear multiple chart additions (such as events or technicals) by clicking “Clear All” at the bottom of each menu, shown below. Previously, you had to individually remove each event or technical, or clear the whole chart.
In the Alerts facility, we’ve added the ability to set alerts for upcoming earnings events. We’ve also made it possible to “throttle” your alerts. That might sound a bit violent, but it’s actually a completely peaceful method of optionally limiting the number of times you are alerted per day:
This will keep you from wanting to throttle your phone, or us, on high-activity days (of which we have recently had many). You can find the alert throttle in the top right corner of the Alerts Manager.
Finally, a name change. For clarity, quant screening is now called ranked screening. We will be making changes to our help documentation accordingly, but please note that ranked screening is still referred to as quants or quant screening in many places on our site.
Thank you for reading. We hope you love the new stuff and that you find it easy to integrate Stock Rover Markets into your routine. And, as always, we welcome your feedback.
As a final note, I want to acknowledge those users who have been long awaiting our improved transactional portfolio facility, which is still in development. Barring any unforeseen problems, the facility will be released with Stock Rover 7.0, which is on track for 2015. We greatly appreciate your patience.
