I currently manage accounts on several major platforms, and it is very frustrating that none of them are good when it comes to surfacing all the basic financial data in an easy way for either finding stocks or just seeing the data for stocks that you currently own. (International Brokers is a bit of an exception, but its UI is really awful.)
All the things I'm looking for are done by someone, but no one does them all.
I'm looking for any advice on finding a platform that can do this.
So far as I can tell, Charles Schwab, ThinkOrSwim, Vanguard and Fidelity all fail (I currently manage portfolios on each one). Interactive Brokers is viable from a data angle, but is a bit of a pain. If someone has a suggestion for a platform that can do this with a better interface/experience than IBTW, I'd love to hear it!
Here are my basic criteria. I'd like to see data on my current stocks and find stocks based on basic financial data. Examples of the data of interest are:
- Price-to-Earnings Ratio
- Price-to-cashflow Ratio
- Implied volatility (based on option values)
- IV rank
- Operating Profit Margin
- Debt
- Projected Earnings per Share
- Revenue Growth over last X years
Amazingly, not a single platform I appears to support this.
Here are my notes for each of the platforms I have tried to use:
Fidelity
- Their stock screener does not let you include Implied Volatility or IV Rank.
- Otherwise their stock screener is excellent but there is now way to display these same data for your actual stocks or a list of designated stocks. There is no way to import a list of stocks and have them give you the data on just that list. There is also no way to include this data on your basic view of your own stocks.
- You cannot even make a watchlist from a csv.
- Nor can you use their screener as a work-around because you cannot limit the screen to a watchlist.
ThinkOrSwim
- As far as I can tell, this platform would be perfect for my needs—or nearly so, except they bizarrely do not have any data on Revenue Growth or Projected earnings. They don't even have a Forward EPS. This makes it hard to evaluate the merits of a growth stock.
Interactive Brokers Traders Workstation
- This platform is viable, but requires extra work, and I'm not a fan of the interface.
- Trader Workstation has almost all the data in it I want. You cannot directly get projected change in earnings per share, but at least you can get Forward PE, which is good enough I guess.
- The problem is that you cannot simply enter a list of ticker symbols and get data on each one because Interactive Brokers serves so many exchanges that the ticker symbol alone is not sufficient. You have to enter the exchange for each one.
- I find the interface for IBTW pretty awful…
Charles Schwab
(I have not tried out their desktop platform)
- Their web platform appears to be a (slightly) worse version of Fideltiy: screener does not include IV or IV-Rank, and there is no way to get any of the information in a single table for a fixed set of stocks (including the stocks you currently own).
- You cannot use their screener as a work-around because there is also no way to limit the screener to just a watchlist or your portfolio.
Vanguard
- Does not make it easy to screen for stocks.
- No method for creating watchlists
- No method for seeing the relevant data about the stocks in your current portfolio
Please, I would really love some suggestions for other platforms. I'm fine paying money to use an independent platform, I just don't want to spend 40 hours trying out 20 of them.
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