VectorVest Review – Is The Platform Worth the Money?

About VectorVest

VectorVest is an automated stock market research platform that offers in-depth market analytics and timing tools for intraday trading. The software scans over 20,000 stocks across 8 global equity markets and automatically provides buy, sell and hold recommendations. It also includes algorithmic value, safety and timing ratings as well as premade trading systems and stock scans.

This stock analysis and portfolio management software is very powerful and provides a ton of ideas for traders. However, it can be overwhelming at first and certainly takes some time to get used to. Thankfully, VectorVest comes with very helpful training videos and tutorials.

In our VectorVest review, we’ll take a closer look at what this trading software can do.

VectorVest Pricing

VectorVest offers 3 plans: Basic, Enhanced, and Premium.

The Basic plan costs $69 per month and offers end-of-day data updates. You get access to most of the platform’s features, including value, safety, and market timing indicators and daily stock picks.

The Enhanced plan costs $99 per month. It is better-suited for intraday traders because it includes data updates every 15 minutes. You also get access to VectorVest’s dynamic stop loss recommendations.

The Premium plan costs $149 per month. It includes real-time stock market data, breakout alerts, and strategy backtesting tools.

All VectorVest plans come with a 30-day trial that costs $9.95.

VectorVest also has several add-ons, including RealTime Derby, OptionsPro, RoboTrader, and ProfitLocker Pro. These add-ons offer additional trade ideas based on custom, backtested strategies. Prices for these add-ons vary from $99 per month to a one-time fee of $495 depending on which add-on you choose.

VectorVest Platform and Features

VectorVest includes a variety of powerful fundamental and technical analysis tools to deliver stock recommendations and enable users to create their own trading strategies. The software tracks more than 20,000 stocks from 8 global exchanges and hundreds of industry groups and business sectors.

Market Timing Dashboard

The VectorVest dashboard appears overwhelming at first. But it basically comes down to a series of proprietary ratings and color-coded visual indicators. The first thing you’ll notice is the Color Guard. This is a color-coded dial used to illustrate market timing. Green means the market is bullish, while red means the market is bearish. VectorVest encourages traders to trade with the market, not against it, so this market timing indicator is important.

The rest of the dashboard offers more detail about market timing. You can see how the Color Guard has changes in recent days, as well as the distribution of buy, sell, and hold recommendations from the algorithm.

VectorVest was rated as one of the top technical analysis tools by Investopedia.

Technical Indicators

Unlike traditional technical analysis platforms, such as ThinkOrSwim, VectorVest incorporates a variety of proprietary indicators to analyze stocks. Some of the key indicators you’ll find in VectorVest include RS (relative safety), RT (relative timing), and RV (relative value). There’s also the VST (Value, Safety, Timing) score, which offers a single number for rating which stocks are potentially the best investments at any given time. Finally, VectorVest issues buy, sell, and hold rating for each of the stocks in its database.

Unisearch Scanner

The Unisearch stock scanner gives users a way to sort through VectorVest’s database of stocks to find candidates to trade based on these proprietary indicators. The scanner comes with a handful of premade strategies, although these aren’t well-explained. The best way to explore these strategies is to use VectorVest’s backtesting module, which lets you see how these trading systems would have performed over a custom historical time period.

While the scanner is far from self-explanatory, even simple scans based on VST and recommendation can be quite effective at identifying trade ideas. Plus, the premade strategies make VectorVest pretty useful right out of the box.

Charts

VectorVest includes a surprisingly powerful charting interface that lets you visualize price data, technical indicators, and even fundamental data like quarterly earnings. Helpfully, you can also plot VST ratings or use VectorVest’s pre-configured strategy layouts, The Enhanced Protrader Timing Layout adds momentum indicators like DPO and MACD. The Acid Test layout uses moving averages to visualize the trends and support/resistance levels. Users can also manually draw in trend lines and add various basic indicators to enhance the charts.

The charts aren’t a replacement for a standalone charting software like TradingView. But if you want to quickly analyze trade ideas generated from VectorVest’s Unisearch scanner, these charts will get the job done.

News

VectorVest provides news and daily market analysis to platform subscribers. The news feature is more similar to Yahoo Finance than it is to standalone platforms like Benzinga Pro and The Fly.

Compatible Brokers

Right now, VectorVest is somewhat limited in the brokers it integrates with for order entry. You can use TradeKing, Interactive Brokers, and QuestTrade.

Watch Lists

The platform has a ton of pre-configured watch lists that users can follow. The platform really does a great job of taking the grunt work out of finding stocks. The watch lists are categorized by strategy based on VectorVest’s proprietary algorithms. Naturally, you can create your own watch lists as well.

Training Tab

VectorVest goes a fine job of providing training tutorials and videos. Lessons can be quickly found on the Training Tab which includes compelling lessons like “30-second stock analysis”, “cherry-picking checklist” and “weed your portfolio”. The lessons are easy to follow and very well executed to save time.

How Does VectorVest Stand Out?

VectorVest packs a wallop of features, strategies and analytics. It compiles a huge amount of data into highly actionable ratings, recommendations, and trading systems to take the legwork out of finding trade ideas.

VectorVest is a little bit like Trade Ideas in that the service is something of a black box. There isn’t a lot of detail about the proprietary indicators that VectorVest uses or even what indicators make up its automated trading systems. In that sense, you do need to have a fair amount of trust in the software in order to use it effectively.

The other thing to keep in mind about VectorVest is that it can be overwhelming at times. There’s a lot of information and it’s not always well-organized. It’s important to take advantage of the trial period and tutorials to figure out the best way to incorporate VectorVest’s recommendations into your trading strategy.

What Type of Trader is VectorVest Best For?

VectorVest is best suited for experienced traders who want a way to find actionable trade ideas quickly. While newer traders can certainly benefit from the ideas and trading systems that VectorVest offers, they may find themselves overwhelmed by the software. More advanced traders are better positioned to incorporate VectorVest into their trading strategies as opposed to blindly following the software.

Alternatives to VectorVest

VectorVest is an interesting platform in the sense that it simplifies investing analysis while still maintaining some of the “confusing” components, like charts and data analyses. Accordingly, the platform attracts traders who already know how to navigate the market and want a faster way to generate trading ideas.

In that sense, it’s very similar to Trade Ideas. Trade Ideas is a real-time stock scanner with pre-built scans that help you find momentum, breakouts, and more. This type of scanner is ideal for active traders who trade daily.

Investors are likely to find that VectorVest is a bit too oriented towards short-term trading for their needs. If you are simply looking for stock recommendations, you can’t go wrong with Motley Fool. For only $99/year, you will get stock picks every month – no complicated analyses, just buy and sell alerts.

If you are looking for a tool that can analyze a stock and tell you whether it’s a “buy” or “sell,” we don’t have any solid recommendations. Quite frankly, these types of tools are hardly accurate over the long run. An automated technical analysis tool will miss fundamental factors and a fundamental analysis tool will miss technical factors (of course, both will miss “black swans” and surprises). You should never buy or sell a stock simply because it passed an automated analysis. Do your own research across multiple platforms. MarketBeat can provide some great information on analyst ratings and insider trading activity, TradingView can provide some automated technical insights, and IBD can combine the two for a CANSLIM analysis.

Pros:

Well-designed research platform with step-by-step directions

$9.95 for a 30-day trial gives plenty of time to test out

Excellent proprietary tools and watch lists for infinite idea generation

Flexible enough for seasoned veterans

Cons:

Add-on features can get expensive

Platform can be overwhelming, especially for beginners