List of 10 Best Stock Picking Services

Best Stock Picking Services
Regardless of your investment strategy, there’s a stock picking service designed for you.

Here are the best currently available to help you beat the market.

The Motley Fool Rule Breakers

Designed For: Buy-and-hold investors

The Motley Fool offers more than its flagship Stock Advisor subscription. The Rule Breakers newsletter features “hidden gem” growth stock picks, particularly companies that are poised to disrupt their industries.

Since its inception in 2004, the Rule Breakers stock picks have returned 371%, according to The Motley Fool. That’s in contrast to the S&P 500’s 123% over the same period.

If that sounds weaker than Stock Advisor’s pick returns, bear in mind that Stock Advisor launched several years earlier.

The Rule Breakers stock picks tend to be up-and-comers, rather than established mega-corporations. That adds an element of risk, so consider Rule Breakers only if you’re looking for scrappy growth stocks that the wider market hasn’t discovered yet.

Like Stock Advisor, subscribers receive stock recommendations on the first and third Thursdays of the month, and five New Best Buys Now on the second and fourth Thursdays. You also get sell notifications in real-time and access to The Motley Fool’s Starter Stocks.

At $299 per year, Rule Breakers costs a bit more than Stock Advisor, and you get the same 30-day guarantee.

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor

Designed For: Buy-and-hold investors

The Motley Fool has been around for roughly three decades and has earned its place at the head of the table among long-term stock pickers.

The Motley Fool showcases that their Stock Advisor picks have delivered nearly five times the returns of the S&P 500 since their inception, as of October 2021. That’s a cumulative return of 683% compared to the S&P’s 143%, which makes for a pretty impressive visual:

Further reinforcing the integrity of their approach, they urge you to commit to three investing principles when you enroll:

• Own at least 15 stocks.
• Hold your stocks for at least five years.
• Expect market downturns every five years.

The Motley Fool was founded in 1993 by two brothers, David, and Tom Gardner. In the decades since, the two brothers have written four bestselling books, partnered with NPR for investing in radio segments, and launched a series of wildly popular podcasts.

With more than 700,000 subscribers, their Stock Advisor service has performed spectacularly by any standard.

The service includes four newsletters every month, starting on the first Thursday of the month and then arriving weekly.

The first and third newsletters contain a new stock recommendation, and the second and fourth Thursday’s newsletters contain five New Best Buys Now stock picks. The latter comprise previous picks that they still recommend as strong buys.

When market conditions change, subscribers receive “sell” recommendation emails in real-time. Subscribers also get access to Fool’s “Top 10 Best Stock to Buy RIGHT Now” report and their “Top 5 Starter Stocks” that they recommend for all new investors.

The Stock Advisor subscription costs $199 per year, with a discounted $79 offer for the first year (new members only). With its 30-day money-back guarantee, you can try a full monthly cycle before deciding whether to continue.

Trade Ideas

Designed For: Day traders

The software platform Trade Ideas uses an artificial intelligence named “Holly” to generate real-time trade recommendations for subscribers. Made up of more than 70 proprietary algorithms, Holly runs more than 1 million simulated trades each night before the trading day starts.

She then proposes stock trade picks in real-time, along with recommended entry and exit points. That delivers a complete day trading plan for each pick.

Trade-Ideas also features its own internal broker, so you can authorize Holly to execute trades on your behalf rather than buying or selling manually through your own separate brokerage account.

One particularly nice feature that Trade Ideas includes is their simulated trading option. It lets you trade with fake money and build your comfort level before you start slinging your hard-earned cash around the market.

Trade Ideas’ many features come with a hefty price tag. Plans start at $1,068 per year, and if you want the full Holly AI experience, you need to upgrade to their Premium plan at $2,268.

But for that price, you get access to arguably the best day trading software in the business.

Seeking Alpha Premium

Designed For: Buy-and-hold investors, day traders

Seeking Alpha Premium is a powerful package of market intelligence tools designed to help you become the best investor or trader — or both — you can possibly be.

For $19.99 per month — an annual savings of $120 — Seeking Alpha Premium delivers:

• Unlimited access to premium content created and curated by Seeking Alpha’s deep stable of expert contributors
• Seeking Alpha Author Ratings and Author Performance metrics
• Proprietary quant ratings are available nowhere else
• Unlimited earnings call audio and transcripts
• Powerful stock screeners
• Article sidebars with key data, charts, and ratings
• Tracking each investment idea’s performance
• And much more

Warrior Trading

Designed For: Day traders

Warrior Trading excels at education, and that starts at the top with its founder Ross Cameron.

Cameron leads highly personal chat room discussions, audio feeds, and video feeds in real-time. Subscribers can even see Cameron’s own trades in real-time, along with the company’s other professional traders and educators.

To help new traders get started, Warrior Trading provides a series of free educational videos in addition to their premium education tools.

In a fun exercise, Cameron opened a publicly visible new account with only $500, and he lets subscribers watch as he grows it to a target of $1 million. In the first month alone, he grew it from $500 to more than $53,000.

Warrior Trading delivers a newsletter every day with a handful of stocks to watch that day. You can use their real-time scanner to track them and other stocks throughout the trading day and create SMS message alerts in addition to email alerts for timely trades. To build confidence, you can trade with fake money using their simulator.

All that personal attention costs a pretty penny. Warrior Trading’s Pro service charges a dizzying $5,997 per year, so it doesn’t exactly appeal to the mildly curious. Alternatively, you can try their Warrior Starter Course, but it’s not cheap either at $997 for the first month then an auto-renewed $197 per month thereafter. I also dislike that they don’t list the price on the sales page. But they have a strong reputation for results.

Mindful Trader

Designed For: Swing traders

The beauty of Mindful Trader is that you don’t need to constantly stay on standby waiting for trade alerts.

The recommended swing trades take up to 10 days between buying and selling, so you can buy at any time during the trading day. That’s a crucial perk given that most of us can’t glue our eyeballs to the screen all day waiting for alerts to pop up.

Eric Ferguson, the founder of Mindful Trader, put decades of stock market data through statistical analysis to create an algorithm that alerts him — and you — to high-probability market movements. He includes stock trades, futures traders, and options trades. In 2021 he also added a stock equivalent to his futures trades, so you can mimic them even if you don’t want to hassle with trading futures.

Eric updates his website for logged-in subscribers when he executes a trade, so you can do the same in your own brokerage account. He makes the overwhelming majority of his trades within the first half-hour of the markets opening every day, so you can simply check the site once per day. As swing trades, these aren’t nearly as time-sensitive as faster day trades.

I also like the backtest review of Mindful Trader’s hypothetical returns. Over the last 20 years, Eric’s trading system would have yielded an average annual return of 143%. You can view the year-by-year return breakdown here.

I’ve personally been following Eric’s trades for around nine months now. During that time, I earned an annualized return of 31.2%.

That doesn’t mean you don’t get hit with losses some months. All traders know the stomach-dropping feeling of a string of losing trades. In Eric’s backtests, the median account drawdown was 28%.

That’s nothing to take lightly. I can personally attest to how jarring it is to go from thousands of dollars up for the month to thousands of dollars down, all within a window of just a few days.

Mindful Trader charges a monthly subscription fee of $47. Although not cheap per se, it’s less expensive than many competitors. And the monthly billing interval means you can try it for a month or two and then cancel without losing a fortune if you don’t like the trading style.

Pilot Trading

Designed For: Traders of cryptocurrencies, futures, forex, and ordinary stocks

Pilot Trading features psychology-based AI algorithms that anticipate when asset prices will shift directions, beyond simply showcasing their current trends. To make trading even faster and easier, they connect directly to many brokerage accounts for in-app trading.

One feature that sets Pilot Trading apart is the breadth of assets it covers. Beyond stocks, they also include futures, forex, and cryptocurrency trends and anticipated swing points. And if you’re new to trading any of those assets, Pilot Trading offers a simulated paper trading account to practice.

Best of all, Pilot Trading foregoes the massive membership fees charged by many competitors. They charge a flat $19.95 per month, with access to all features. No upselling, no separate pricing for bells and whistles, just one affordable price for all users.

Investors Underground

Designed For: Day traders

Another education-centric platform, Investors Underground provides more than 700 video lessons and guides. It hosts frequent webinars with plenty of question-and-answer sessions.

Investors Underground sends a daily newsletter with stock watchlists and game plans, so you come to the market prepared. When the bell rings to kick off the trading day, you can join other traders in the chatroom to compare notes, ask questions, and monitor real-time stock scanning and alerts.

Those stock alerts don’t include an SMS option however, a feature many day traders prefer to more passive email alerts.

Although far from cheap, Investors Underground memberships still clock in at under one-third of Warrior Trading’s fee. The service costs $1,897 per year, and you can optionally add access to its premium courses if you want to up your trading game. If you want to try it for a month, you can pay monthly at $297 per month.

According to Investors Underground, their customers remain happy to keep paying. They claim 91% of their subscribers report the membership to be a good value, and that 83% say their trading improved after they joined.

Superman Trades

Designed For: Scalp traders, swing traders, and technical traders

Paul Scolardi has nearly two decades of experience as a trader and Certified Public Accountant, and became a self-made millionaire trading stocks.

Scolardi runs his Superman subscription service through Timothy Sykes’s Profit.ly platform. Subscribers get daily stock watchlist newsletters, real-time alerts via email and SMS, and real-time commentary with Scolardi and other traders in his chatroom. The Superman Alerts package costs $147 per month.

For an extra $100, Superman Pro subscribers get weekly videos, access to a rich educational video library, premium stock research reports, and an earnings tracker.

Although Scolardi does teach day trading — often in quick, in-and-out “scalp” trades — what sets him apart from other trading gurus is his experience as a swing trader. Swing traders hold stocks longer than one day, but still a short term (often a few days or weeks).

Tim Alerts

Designed For: Penny stock day traders

Timothy Sykes started trading in his preteen years with around $12,000 in bar mitzvah gift money. By the time he was a senior in college, he’d become a self-made millionaire through trading penny stocks.

Since then, Sykes has launched a series of finance-related platforms and services, largely designed to help mom-and-pop day traders earn more money.

His Tim Alerts provide daily newsletters around 8am EST to lay out stock watchlists for the day, and traders receive alerts by email, SMS, or push notifications in real-time throughout the day about Sykes’s trades. Subscribers get live chat room access along with a proprietary mobile app.

The Tim Alerts subscription costs $697 per year, making it more affordable than some of his competitors. At a higher subscription level — Pennystocking Silver for $1,297 per year — members get access to more than 6,000 educational videos and weekly video updates.

Beyond Tim Alerts, Sykes has launched a range of successful financial platforms. His Profit.ly platform serves as a community for more than 160,000 day traders where they can openly share their trades and performance.

Sykes also created Investimonials.com, a community-based platform for reviews of financial products and services, and StocksToTrade.com, a stock screener and trading platform.