Zacks Investment Research Review 2023

What is Zacks Investment Research?

Founded in 1978, Zacks Investment Research is a financial research firm. It provides subscribers with access to various services including stock research reports, earning estimates, analysis, and a selection of portfolio management tools.

The service is well-known for using a proprietary scoring system created by the founder himself. Ranking stocks on a scale of 1 to 5, the scoring system uses four different factors—agreement, magnitude, upside, and surprise—-when providing a score.

Features

Subscribers to Zacks Investment Research have access to a variety of different features and tools, although their exact access will vary (depending on which plan they’ve subscribed to). Information provided through the company covers stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs.

The most noteworthy points are portfolio management tools (Portfolio Tracker, Zacks Ranks, company news, etc.), industry analysis reports, earnings estimate revisions, and stock research reports.

Zacks provides information for over 10,000 different stocks. However, the company does exclude some stocks with limited market capitalization, making it a poor option for those whose portfolios consist largely of small-cap growth stocks.

Fortunately, Morningstar is an alternative research platform that offers comprehensive coverage for small-cap growth stocks. If you’ll need access to complete data for these types of stocks, we recommend checking out our complete review to learn more about this service!

Pricing & Plans

Zacks offers a few features for free, but you’ll need to subscribe to one of its paid plans if you want access to the stock research tools that could give you a real trading advantage  and raise your annual returns.

Free

A free account on Zacks will allow you to use some of the platform’s more basic features. Free users can read a limited number of free articles, subscribe to the daily newsletter, set up email alerts (with portfolio tracking), as well as enjoy access to both Zack Ranks and Zack Styles Scores.

Paid

Zacks Investment Research has three different main subscription plans: Zacks Premium, Zacks Investor Collection, and Zacks Ultimate.

• Zacks Premium costs $249/year, placing it about $50 more than a subscription to Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor. Premium gives you access to screeners, stock recommendations, Zacks #1 Rank List, and a few other features. However, the performance of Zack’s recommendations don’t perform nearly as well as Stock Advisors, which has achieved an average return—across all recommendations—of 403%. You can sign up for Stock Advisor here if you’re after higher average returns!
• Zacks Investor Collection” costs $495 per year and unlocks seven additional features including “Stocks Under $10”, “ETF Investor”, and “Zacks Top 10 Stocks”.
• Zacks Ultimate is Zacks top-tier plan. It costs $2,995 per year and gives you complete access to every portfolio recommendation service including “Black Box Trader” and “Blockchain Innovators”.

Limitations

Although Zacks Investment Research does provide many different portfolio recommendation services and extensive tools that the active trader can easily take advantage of, one thing it doesn’t offer is personalized recommendations.

Truthfully, not every investor will need these, but those who would like personalized recommendations will have to look somewhere else. We recommend Simply Wall St, a service which also provides research reports, performance data, and company reports, as well as personalized portfolio recommendations.

You can learn more by clicking here!

Is Zacks Investment Research Right for You?

As you’ve probably realized from reading this Zacks Investment Research review, the service is far from our #1 service. That’s not to say the platform is bad: it provides relatively in-depth research and has a lot of tools that investors can utilize to succeed.

However, the high prices and lack of personalized portfolio recommendations—combined with the fact that many of the same features can be accessed elsewhere for far less—keep us from being able to confidently recommend Zacks Investment Research to our readers.