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Atom Finance Review 2024


Atom Finance Logo

Our rating

4.0/5

Pros

  • thumbs-upStrong freemium model
  • thumbs-upAffordable pricing
  • thumbs-upTime-saving tools

Cons

  • thumbs-downNo brokerage options
  • thumbs-downNo wealth management service
  • thumbs-downSome redundant features

Historically, getting access to the same tools and research as the “big guys on Wall Street” has been impossible or prohibitively expensive. Atom Finance is working to change that. With affordable monthly pricing and an impressive depth of research tools and features, Atom Finance truly makes stock investing more accessible.

If you’re brand new to stock investing, some tools, like the stock sandbox, won’t be of much use. However, beginner investors can use Atom Finance’s free plan to improve their knowledge of the stock market. For seasoned investors, Atom Finance Premium provides everything you need to become an informed investor and trade with confidence.

What Is Atom Finance?

Atom Finance has everything you need to research individual stocks and monitor your portfolio. A lack of trading functionality and some redundant features are downsides. However, if you want an affordable solution for in-depth stock research and financial modeling, Atom Finance is the right choice.

If you want to start investing in the stock market, you have a few options.

For complete beginners, it’s usually best to keep things simple. Thankfully, investment options like robo-advisors and micro-investing apps make it easy to get in on the action without having to research individual stocks and closely monitor your portfolio.

However, if you’re a more seasoned investor, buying individual stocks is probably something you’re considering. In this case, you need the right stock market news and research platform to help you make informed decisions with your hard-earned cash.

With Atom Finance, you can now enjoy cutting-edge investing tools and research for an incredibly affordable price. If you want to take your stock investing to the next level, Atom Finance is what you need.

Atom finance began in 2018 in Brooklyn, New York, and was founded by Eric Shoykhet. The company aims to give regular investors access to institutional-quality investing resources and tools. To accomplish this, Atom Finance works on a freemium model, meaning you can use some features for free but need to pay to unlock the entire platform.

Key Features of Atom Finance

Atom Finance Basic is free to join and includes breaking stock market news, daily market briefings, and real-time stock quotes, and it lets you monitor your portfolio. Additionally, the basic plan has numerous stock research features, which are what make Atom Finance so powerful.

Granted, the basic plan has monthly limits on most reports and lacks in-depth market research and analyst estimates for performance. Luckily, Atom Finance Premium unlocks the complete platform for only $9.99 per month. Plus, your first 30 days are free.

In any case, there’s a plethora of investing features that make Atom Finance one of the best stock research platforms on the market.

1. Portfolio Integration

One of the first features to look for when picking a stock research platform is how easily your existing investment accounts integrate with the service. After all, you often want to make decisions based on your current holdings, not just future buys.

With Atom Finance, you can seamlessly integrate multiple brokerage accounts under a central dashboard. This makes it easy to monitor positions, profit-and-loss statements, and trading history for your entire portfolio. Atom Finance also breaks down your portfolio’s asset allocation, and it’s easy to compare your performance against major indexes with a single click. Atom Finance also lets you create portfolio alerts to help track stock movement and how your holdings are performing.

The real strength of Atom Finance is how easy it is to integrate multiple accounts. For example, if you have accounts with Webull or Robinhood or a brokerage account with your bank, you can integrate all that data into a central dashboard. You can also manually input your positions if you don’t want to link your portfolio to Atom Finance or want to paper trade and simulate the stock market to see how your investing ideas perform.

2. Hubs

Basic stock trading apps usually let you set up a stock watchlist to monitor the performance of stocks you’re considering. If you invest through your bank, there’s a decent chance you can set up a stock watchlist as well.

Atom Finance takes stock watchlists one step further with Hubs. As a free or paid member, you can create a central dashboard of stocks to quickly track performance, just like a regular watchlist. However, you can create metrics to compare stocks against each other, such as their growth rate and valuation multiple. Atom Finance presents all this data in an easily digestible chart to help you compare companies over different time frames.

Finally, your Hub also contains a feed of market commentary and news relating to the stocks you’re watching. Atom Finance essentially aggregates relevant news about companies in your watchlist, pulling information from sources like Reuters and its own press releases.

You could find similar news with market news and analysis websites like Benzinga, The Motley Fool, or MarketWatch, but Atom Finance lets you stay on top of relevant stock news without wasting time digging for information yourself.

3. Stock Screening

If you want to find completely new companies to invest in, Atom Finance also has you covered. Its stock screening tool helps you narrow down your stock research to find new opportunities that match your goals.

To start off, you set up different search criteria that you want in a stock. Filters include year-to-date return, growth rate, valuation multiples, and market cap. Atom Finance also provides real-time quotes and investment news so your stock screening process is up to date.

Once you enter relevant metrics, Atom Finance presents a list of companies that match your search criteria. You then select specific stocks to compare against one another. Atom Finances then breaks down stock performance in chart format and includes relevant stock news, like your Hub.

The best part is that you can also save these stocks to your Hub. Ultimately, this creates a linear yet powerful flow for your stock research process. Use Atom Finance’s screener to save time, compare your ideal candidates, and save the ones you want to track.

4. Stock Sandbox

One of Atom Finance’s most powerful features is its modeling capabilities. Atom Finance makes it easy to create your own financial models by using its sandbox tool. If you want to go beyond a simple stock research tool, this is what you’re looking for.

Sandbox lets you test various scenarios by changing assumptions about a stock, ultimately influencing a stock’s valuation. Once you dive into a stock, you can edit data like share price, cost of goods sold, gross profit, outstanding debt, and dozens of other values. Models are also pre-loaded with the latest stock projections from analysts so you don’t have to start from scratch.

As you edit assumptions, Atom Finance automatically recalculates the valuation of a stock and metrics like the price-to-earnings ratio. Again, Atom Finance includes detailed consensus estimates about each stock, making it easy to compare your new model to what experts think.

If you’re happy with a model, you can export the data to Excel. You can also save models for future use and update assumptions as you learn more about a company or as breaking news hits.

5. Document X-Ray

Another strength of Atom Finance is the in-depth documentation you can access for companies you’re researching. With Atom Finance, you gain access to:

  • The latest equity research from major banks and research firms
  • Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and event transcripts
  • Historical financials of all publicly traded companies
  • Breaking stock news, articles, and analyst projections

This is an immense amount of data. However, data is only useful if you put in the time to digest it.

With Atom Finance X-Ray, it’s easy to save time and find relevant stock research to empower your trading. X-Ray lets you search for keywords within SEC filings, transcripts, presentations, and news. If you’re searching for a specific event or company, this instantly narrows your search.

Additionally, you can enable email alerts to notify you when a new document comes out that contains specific keywords. Between X-Ray features and Atom Finance’s news feed, it’s never been easier to get the latest information on companies in your portfolio and watchlist.

6. Collaboration

At launch, Atom Finance investors couldn’t collaborate with team members or engage with other investors to discuss ideas. But the platform continues to improve, and the new Atom Finance Chat feature lets you connect with other investors or your investing team to discuss ideas in real-time.

You can search for specific companies or topics to find existing chat channels with tens of thousands of investors. Popular channels include day trading, value stocks, growth stocks, mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings (IPOs).

You can link your portfolio to your chat account, and this verifies if you’re a shareholder in a particular company, so people you’re chatting with know you have skin in the game. Out of all the Atom Finance features, the ability to chat isn’t the main selling point. However, if you want to learn more about investing from other individual investors or collaborate with your team, it’s a useful feature to have.

Advantages of Atom Finance

The world of stock market research is incredibly competitive. Plus, titans like The Motley Fool Stock Advisor and other stock picking tools have been in the industry for years.

In contrast, startup Atom Finance began helping investors in late 2018. However, despite being in its infancy, there are numerous advantages to Atom Finance that are worth noting.

  • Strong Freemium Model. Many personal finance apps have lackluster free plans that are frustratingly sparse on features. In contrast, Atom Finance provides a wealth of free information and tools to help you get started and test the platform.
  • Affordable Pricing. Atom Finance Premium is $9.99 per month and you get a 30-day free trial. This is incredibly affordable, and finding a single winning stock can easily pay for the annual cost. Additionally, Atom Finance is significantly cheaper than paying for services like Bloomberg Terminal, which provides individual and institutional investors with various research and forecasting tools plus market news for approximately $2,000 per month.
  • Time-Saving Tools. Free and paid Atom Finance users have access to an impressive amount of stock research and numerous investing tools. However, you don’t need to dedicate hours of your day to use them. Atom Finance helps you save time with tools like X-Ray and Hubs, making stock investing more accessible for everyday traders.
  • Integration. Atom Finance lets you integrate multiple accounts under a single dashboard, making it easy to track your portfolio’s performance. Additionally, Atom Finance uses Plaid, a leading technology provider for the fintech space, to ensure your financial information is secure.
  • Real-Time Financial Data. Real-time quotes and breaking stock news help you make investment decisions based on the latest market analysis.
  • Simple or Granular. If you want to keep things simple, Atom Finance serves as an intuitive portfolio management tool and stock tracker. Alternatively, you can take a deep-dive on individual stocks, create your own financial models, and research company financials and SEC filings to gain a more in-depth understanding. This flexibility makes Atom Finance ideal for first-time and experienced investors alike.
  • Mobile Support. Although Atom Finance shines on their desktop version, you can also download mobile app on Android and iOS app store to research while on the go.

Disadvantages of Atom Finance

Despite the time-saving tools and affordability, Atom Finance still has several disadvantages you should consider:

  • No Brokerage Options. Atom Finance is purely a research and portfolio monitoring tool, not an online broker. This means you still need to find another platform to buy and sell stocks.
  • No Wealth Management Service. If you’re comfortable with DIY-investing and don’t want guidance, Atom Finance is a powerful research tool. However, if you prefer working with a financial advisor, you’re better off with options like Personal Capital that help you monitor your portfolio but also offer wealth management services.
  • Some Redundant Features. Atom Finance has a wealth of investment research tools. However, you might find some features are redundant depending on who you bank with or if you use an online broker. Pretty much any online trading platform lets you set up watchlists and research stock performance these days, so Atom Finance is most beneficial if you want to take a deeper dive into stock investing.

Final Word

There isn’t a right way to start investing because everyone has different goals and levels of experience. In fact, for many, keeping things simple by investing in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or using a robo-advisor is probably the most reliable way to build wealth.

However, if you want to add individual stocks to your portfolio, you need to invest based on data, not emotions or headlines. In this case, a service like Atom Finance is an incredibly affordable way to take your stock investing to the next level.

Start out with a basic online stock broker, learn the ropes, and use Atom Finance to guide you along the way. Investing in stocks doesn’t have to be scary, especially in this day and age when you have the world’s leading research and stock advice right at your fingertips.

Atom Finance Logo

Our rating

4.0/5

Pros

  • thumbs-upStrong freemium model
  • thumbs-upAffordable pricing
  • thumbs-upTime-saving tools

Cons

  • thumbs-downNo brokerage options
  • thumbs-downNo wealth management service
  • thumbs-downSome redundant features
Editorial Note: The editorial content on this page is not provided by any bank, credit card issuer, airline, or hotel chain, and has not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities. Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of the bank, credit card issuer, airline, or hotel chain, and have not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.
Tom is a freelance writer originally from Toronto, Canada. Tom's passion for finance and discovering methods to make money originally sparked in college when he was trying to make ends meet on a tight budget. Outside of freelance writing, Tom also manages the blog This Online World - a personal finance website dedicated to helping young adults make and save more money.
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