Introduction

My website offers you a lot of information that you won’t find anywhere else in this form. But if you are looking for current stock market prices with detailed charts etc., then there are plenty of sites on the Internet for this, I don’t have to do that too. In the web tips section, we want to introduce you to interesting, high-quality and mostly free websites that will certainly be useful to you.

New articles will be added to the section regularly. Please note that although many of the offers presented are free of charge, there are also paid versions of many of them, which of course have considerably more functions. We will limit ourselves to the free versions, but you are of course free to subscribe to the premium versions and benefit from a wide range of additional options.

Key facts

• Good for getting initial ideas
• Good smartphone app available
• Offers little additional information, lives from user contributions
• Basic version free of charge, Plus version hardly worthwhile (minimal added value)
• Various rooms offer information for those interested in a specific topic

Details

StockTwits, as you might have guessed from the name, is a bit like Twitter. It’s basically a chat for people interested in stocks to talk about any stock, with a focus on the US market, of course. StockTwits is used very actively, and for popular companies the opinions of traders just flutter past you, similar to Twitter/X. Companies that are not so popular are of course much quieter.

This concept may sound particularly interesting for beginners. You can see what others think about a share (and of course write your own posts). But here’s a warning up front. As with Twitter, there is hardly any editorial intervention and therefore a lot of nonsense is written. This can result in misinformation (intentionally or not), exaggerations, but also completely unqualified and technically incorrect statements. Beginners who buy shares on the basis of such posts will very quickly wake up to reality. Some push a share at any price with some fantasy stories just to somehow drive inexperienced buyers to push up the price. Others berate a company because they are interested in the price going down (because they are shorting that stock). So you see, it is wise to take everything on this page with a grain of salt.

We are looking at the web platform here, although StockTwits in particular has a very simple and good app on Android and iOS. The basic website is free, and after logging in (on the web platform) you will see a screen like the one below.

On the left you see your current, personal watchlist, which you can of course customize as you wish. At the top you can see the main indices such as Dow30, S&P500 etc. On the right you see the selected stock with chart and below the chart you can enter your comment on the stock, which will immediately appear in the timeline of the stock. Further down (not in the picture) you would now see the comments of other users, in this case on Facebook.

So if you type in a stock ticker like MSFT, you can get some fundamentals, basic charts, news etc. An example would look like this:

The webpage is fairly simple. For example on the right upper corner, you can click on “Earnings” which shows upcoming earnings releases (no surprise here!). You can create your own watchlists and include all your stocks that you’re interested in.

There are sections for “News” and “Crypto” as well as “Press Releases”. To be honest, nothing spectacular, and considering how long StockTwits is on the market, the evolution is rather underwhelming.

As StockTwits is a kind of Twitter/X for stocks, you can of course not only post something about a stock, but you can also contact any other member.

Premium version

The subscriptions offer some small advantages and only costs around US$ 8 per month. The “Edge” version is considerable more expensive.

Among other things, it is ad-free, includes an improved search function and light and dark mode. As I said, very cheap, but without much added value. It’s better to invest the money in a premium room that provides you with really high-quality information and good tips, even if it costs a little more.

Conclusion

You won’t find great charts or extensive financial ratios here, it’s really about chatting, the exchange of opinions between investors and traders. But once again: as with all chats, there is a lot of background noise without added value. It takes a while to recognize good quality users who you can then follow.

All in all, a useful addition to other classic stock websites. But also keep in mind that you can get lost in StockTwits and the countless tweets and spend endless amounts of time that you might have better spent doing your own serious research. For me, StockTwits is a nice toy, a diversion, but nothing more. StockTwits can give you some input, ideas or hints what could be an interesting stock to invest. But standalone, it’s not something you should rely on solely as information source.

Note:
If you are registered with a US broker, they often also offer trading tools that are sometimes very complex and also contain a lot of information. eToro, Interactive Brokers or Charles Schwab are among them. However, these tools are usually almost too extensive. Charles Schwab has stored hundreds of technical indicators in its “thinkorswim” app (origjnally from TD Ameritrade). Many of them are hardly known even to stock market gurus.

Alternative

There is a platform that looks quite similar and might come along a bit more modern. It’s called CommonStock, you can go here if you want to take a look.

Here’s an example screenshot: