We’re pleased to announce that Stock Rover 6.0 has arrived. The focus of this release has been redesigning our user interface (UI) to make it cleaner and more intuitive. This also includes new functionality that expands the range of analytical tasks you can do in Stock Rover.
First, for posterity, let’s see a snapshot of Stock Rover 5.0:
Now, meet 6.0:
At first blush, they may not look dramatically different—it’s still a blue-themed dashboard with interactive panels. But the differences are many. This blog post will review all the major updates. If you’d like to jump to a particular section, use this menu:
Contents
We’ll start with one of our favorite upgrades, the Quotes Box. The Quotes Box is the new Research Box, which had been a bar at the top of the Table. Now, the list of research tickers, or quotes, lives in the left-side panel, below the Market Summary (which has just relocated from the Insight panel) and above Navigation.
Just as before, you can enter a series of tickers you want to see in the Table and they will be compared to any dataset you are viewing. But there are a few additional perks to this new system. For one, as you’ll see in the following image, the box itself displays the 1-day price change information, so you can use it as a quick quotes reference that is always in view. You now also have an option of whether or not you want to include the quotes in the Table, using the “include in Table” box.
Another cool thing about the Quotes Box? You can add portfolios and watchlists to it. This allows you to mix different items, even ones from different levels of navigational hierarchy, in the Table. For example, you can view a portfolio right alongside a set of stocks, or a watchlist. Previously, this was not possible. Just begin typing the name of a portfolio or watchlist where it says “Add Ticker….” and find it in the search results. In the screenshot above, you can see that the Sample Momentum watchlist and Bill Gates Like portfolio have both been added to the Quotes box.
To view all your quotes together with no other tickers, click ‘Quotes’ in the Navigation panel.
With the Research Box gone from the Table, we saw fit to save space by removing that whole line and putting table options in a different location. View options and navigation are now in the new ‘Views’ dropdown menu, left of the view tabs. ‘Add Column’ and all other table actions, such as filtering, are now in buttons on the Table’s header. We’ve also added the ‘Group By’ option to the Actions list, so you can more easily group the table by sector, industry, tag, or color. These changes are called out in the screenshot below.
One simple but extremely helpful improvement occurs in the Add Column searchbox. When you search for a metric, say equity, the search results now tell you if that metric is already in one of your other views, and it hyperlinks to that view:
As shown above, rather than adding the equity column to my current view, I can just click on the hyperlinked ‘Balance Sheet’ to open up that view and see that column. Note that the hyperlink is only visible when you mouseover it.
Another change in the Table is a brand new filtering window, which replaces the multi-level menu that used to open up when you clicked on ‘Filter.’ Here’s the new system:
As you can see, it’s very easy to set up column filters either by searching for a column or using the list of columns from the current view. Just as before, these filters can be edited and removed via the Table’s column headers.
We’ve gussied up our ticker info tooltip, which is the informational box that appears when you mouseover a ticker name in the Table or Quotes box. As a reminder, here is what it looked like before:
It was humble in appearance, but very useful, because it allowed you to get all this information without even having to click, no matter what Table view you were using. The new tooltip works in exactly the same way, but it adds graphical price information and has a new look. Behold:
Tooltips can be controlled through your account preferences.
The Market Summary panel (pictured below) has moved from the Insight panel to the left side of the screen, above Quotes. (This is where the Task Wizard used to be.) This means you can keep the panel in view at all times.
You can also collapse it if you don’t need it. Speaking of collapsing things…
Per your feedback, the whole left panel is now collapsible. Previously, this was not possible. This means you can go full Table, like this:
We’ve also made it easier to re-open collapsed panels just by clicking on the blue bar placeholder. Previously you had to find the little double-arrow button in the corner. For example, to re-open the Navigation panel, I would just click anywhere on the blue bar on the left side of the screen, called out below:
As we’ve added functions, we’ve removed clutter. One key player in the redesign is our new ‘Start’ menu in the top lefthand corner of the screener, which replaces the Task Wizard. When you open up the Start menu, you’ll see something like this:
Clicking on a button will either run the action immediately, or open up a wizard to guide you through the task. The Start menu is much more powerful than the Task Wizard it is replacing. Notice the ‘Customize’ option in the lower right corner. You can completely customize your list of Start tasks, so that it contains all the things you like to do often. Make the list as long or as short as you like! You can also use the searchbox on the right to search or browse all Stock Rover actions. Check it out—you might find a feature you didn’t know about.
We believe that both new and seasoned users will find the Start menu to be a valuable new addition.
In the center of the toolbar you’ll see your subscription level, as well as an image of the dog from our logo, Rover. Clicking on Rover will open our homepage in another tab.
If you see a number in orange, like in the screenshot above, that means you have alerts. Just click on the number to see which alerts have triggered.
On the right side of the toolbar, you’ll find just three items: a searchbox, a help menu, and an administrative menu. The Help menu contains a link to our help pages (note we are currently in the process of updating these pages for the new UI), as well as ‘Contact Us’ which is where you can send us a suggestion, ask a question, report a bug, or praise a favorite feature. This contact form was previously accessed through a toolbar button called ‘Feedback.’
The administrative menu, headed by your username, is where you can control account settings as well as email and system preferences (like which tooltips you want to enable). This is also where you can request to change your Stock Rover plan.
This is a brand new addition to our Premium toolbox. Portfolio Rebalancing allows you to set desired allocations for stocks in your portfolio, with a drift tolerance (that is, how much you are willing to stray from the desired allocation). Stock Rover will then calculate what trades you need to make to get back in balance.
To test out the feature, right-click any portfolio and select ‘Rebalance.’
The Chart functions the same as before, but it has undergone some light cosmetic surgery. First, the primary ticker (previously, the ticker in the left-most position of the search box), is more clearly defined, as it is now the only ticker that occupies the search box on the left, as XOM is doing in the screenshot below:
You can enter a new primary ticker in that space simply by typing in it, or use the dropdown arrow to select from a list of recent primary tickers. You can add additional tickers (or portfolios, screeners, or watchlists) to your chart using the ‘Compare’ menu right next to that menu:
Note the squiggly icon to the left of the “X” in the compare menu above allows you to set the associated ticker as a baseline in the chart. There is another more direct way to do this. We’ve taken a cue from our mobile and tablet apps and made it possible to set any item as a baseline simply by clicking on that item’s name in the legend. For example, see what it looks like when the S&P 500 is set as a baseline:
Eliminating the need for the ‘set as a baseline’ button to appear in the Chart legend has freed up some space.
The rest of the Chart toolbar has been reorganized ever so slightly. The only change here I want to alert you to is that the ‘link to table’ option is now controlled through the Settings menu (previously it was a toggle setting in the toolbar).
There are three changes of note to the Insight panel. The first is that the portfolio allocation pie chart—found at the bottom of the Summary tab when you have a portfolio open in the Table—now lists the allocation of the currently selected stock, as shown in the example below:
The second Insight panel improvement is that the Peer tab filtering has been expanded so that you can more easily find peer stocks of similar stature to the selected ticker. When you click the ‘Filter Peers’ button, you’ll have the option to filter by absolute values (for example, market cap between $2B and $5B), which was possible before, but now you’ll also have the ability to filter by a range that is tied to the selected ticker (for example, market cap is within 25% of the selected ticker), or both. The new filtering capability is called out below:
By the way, when I say “selected ticker,” I am talking about the selected row in the Table, which affects what information is loaded in the Insight panel.
The Peers tab also has a new option to ‘Load in Main Table’ which does exactly what it sounds like (with filters factored in). So, for example, you could use a filter to narrow down the list of peers to only those with a similar amount of sales, and then transfer that list into the Table for further research and comparison against quotes.
Finally, the Notes tab, a Premium feature, is now detachable and has new search options. Detach this tab using the pop-out button located by the (also new) ‘Options’ menu, so you can keep your notes accessible in another window while you work. The Options menu allows you to refine your note searches and control whether or not you want to link the searchbox to the Table so that, by default, only notes pertaining to the selected ticker appear.
As always, there is a slew of minor refinements that, in the interest of not making this blog post any longer, I won’t enumerate here. However, please note a few name changes: Portfolio Reporting is now Portfolio Analysis (listed as ‘Analyze Portfolios’ in the Start menu), and Modeling is now Trade Planning. Both of these items, as well as our brand new Portfolio Rebalancing feature, can be found in the menu when you right-click any portfolio in the Navigation panel.
For those of you who have been patiently waiting for transactional portfolios (we know there are a lot of you!), hang on for just a couple more months. Our development team is still working hard on this problem and we want to make sure we get it right. Our next release will feature a significantly improved portfolio manager.
We truly hope you enjoy the redesigned UI and the new features. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback, so send in any comments to feedback@stockrover.com or via ‘Contact Us’ in Stock Rover’s new help menu.
