ChartMill Review 2024: Is This Stock Screener Worth it?

In this ChartMill review, I will take you through the main conclusions from my extensive testing of this stock research platform.

Throughout it, I will showcase the impressive flexibility of its stock screener, the vast library of pre-built screens, key charting capabilities, and useful stock reports. I will also share some of its shortcomings and suggest better alternatives for those areas.

Finally, I will disclose information about how you can claim a free trial and take advantage of any discounts available.

ChartMill Review Highlights

Pros

• Versatile stock screener with 180+ fundamental and technical filters
• Over 200 pre-built screens covering all investment styles
• Algorithmically generated stock reports
• Daily trading ideas from popular day trading scans
• Great value for money

Cons

• User-unfriendly charts
• 15-minute delayed data

What is ChartMill?

ChartMill is a stock market analysis tool that combines stock screening, charts, and financial data into a neat web-based platform.

The platform specializes in both technical and fundamental analysis, with a whole host of pre-built screens from both ChartMill themselves and their users. This allows you to hit the ground running with popular technical and fundamental screens, including those from world-renowned “Guru” investors.

ChartMill Pricing

ChartMill offers 2 subscription plans (monthly or yearly), or a unique credit system to access its tools.

Credits

This is how the credit system works…

At the beginning of each month, you receive 6000 free credits in your account. You can then use these credits to perform certain actions like opening charts, running screens, and generating reports.

For example, viewing a chart will cost you 10 credits, running a report costs 250 credits, while running a screen costs 75 credits. Follow this link to see the full list of credit charges.

As long as you consume less than 6000 credits each month, ChartMill is completely free to use, although note that the credit version is ad-supported. Moreover, unused credits roll over into future months so you don’t need to worry about them expiring. However, the maximum amount you can accumulate is 60,000.

If you run out of credits, you will face the following restrictions:

• No more analyzer reports
• No more intraday charts
• Only the first 3 results will be visible in the screener
• No more reports from the analyzer
• Only 1 chart can be viewed at a time
• Charts will be limited in size

Don’t worry if this happens though, as you can top up your credit balance for a one-time payment of $10/10000 credits.

While the credit option can take a bit of time to get your head round, I think it’s great for those who only want to run a few basic functions on an ad-hoc basis each month.

Subscription Plans

However, if you find yourself constantly running out of credits and needing to top up, then you may be better off purchasing one of their subscription plans.

ChartMill offers monthly and yearly plans for their subscribers, which gives you unlimited access to all of its features without the ads.

This option is far superior for those planning to use ChartMill on a regular basis, as you never need to worry about running out of credits.

The link below shows the most up-to-date prices currently on offer at ChartMill. Note, paying upfront for the annual subscription will give you a 28% discount compared to the monthly subscription.

ChartMill Features

Now let’s do a deep-dive into all of ChartMill’s research tools…

ChartMill Stock Screener Review

ChartMill’s stock screener is the core feature of the platform, so I was expecting it to be good. However, I was still surprised with how versatile and user-friendly it was.

There aren’t many stock screeners that let you apply over 180 technical, fundamental, and descriptive filters to more than 22,000 stocks across North America and Europe.

Within these regions, they give you multiple ways of narrowing down the investment universe. This is great if you already have a particular area of the stock market you want to target.

For example, you can group stocks based on their:

• Stock Exchanges: Nasdaq, NYSE, LSE, Euronext, Madrid, Oslo, etc.
• Index: S&P 500, Russell 1000, FTSE 100, EuroStoxx 600, DAX, etc.
• Sector: Energy, Materials, Industrials, Technology, etc.
• Industry (Sub-Sectors): Chemicals, Metals & Mining, Aerospace, etc.
• Security Type: Stock, ETFs, ADRs, REITS

Once you’ve selected your investment universe, it’s time to build your screening criteria.

As mentioned, the ChartMill stock screener has a broad range of fundamental and technical indicators to help you do this.

These are sub-divided into separate tabs across the top of the stock screener, which makes it easy to find the metric you’re looking for. In this sense, the layout reminds me very much of Finviz.

Fundamental

Fundamental metrics are organised into the following categories:

• Dividend: Yield, 5yr Growth, Payout Ratio, Years Increased, Industry/Sector Rank
• Valuation: P/E, PEG, P/S, P/B, P/FCF, EV/EBITDA, ChartMill value indicator
• Growth: EPS, Sales, EBIT, OCF, FCF (YoY, TTM, 3yr, 5yr, Next 1/2/3/5 yr Estimates)
• Profitability: ROE, ROA, ROIC (Current, 3/5yr Average), Asset Turnover, Margin
• Health: ROIC/WACC, Debt/Equity, Current Ratio, Piotroski F-score, Altman-Z
• Analysts: Analyst Ratings, Price Targets, Revisions, (EPS, Sales, Price Target)

The above only scratches the surface, but as you can see, there’s plenty to get your teeth into.

The breadth of data is only the tip of the iceberg, though.

The condition parameters are also incredibly flexible.

Not only can you set “greater than/less than” ranges with the sliders, but you can also filter by industry and sector percentile ranks for most metrics.

For example, instead of setting arbitrary thresholds like “5yr average ROIC > 10%”, you can screen for stocks with an ROIC in the top 10%, 20%, 30%, 50%, or 75% of their sector or industry.

This solves an important problem in screening that often gets overlooked.

Companies in different industries have completely different economics, which means they also have completely different valuations, profitability, and growth prospects.

In other words, what might constitute a solid metric for some industries, would be deemed sub-par for others. For example, a 10% ROIC would be great for an auto company, but below-average for a technology company.

Therefore, if you want to remove sector bias from your screens, you need to compare stocks relative to their peer group. This is something I explain further in these two quality investing articles regarding ROCE screens and profit margin screens.

I love that ChartMill includes this screening option.

It shows that they are like-minded investors who really understand their users’ needs.

EPS Revisions Screen

I now want to demonstrate how to use ChartMill’s stock screener with one of my favourite fundamental based scans.

In particular, my criteria takes inspiration from an earnings revisions backtest that I published recently. As you can see in the article, my findings show significant outperformance of stocks with positively revised earnings estimates in recent months.

I apply this criteria to S&P 500 stocks and also add in a price to free cash flow and health rating filter to narrow my search further. All in all, this screen should find stocks with positive earnings momentum, attractive valuations, and healthy balance sheets. Below is the exact criteria I used:

• S&P 500 Stocks
• Next Quarter EPS Revisions (last 3 months) >= 8%
• P/FCF Sector Rank > 70th Percentile
• ChartMill Health Rating >= 5

This screen generated 15 results from the S&P 500, which you can display in multiple formats ranging from custom data columns, charts, or in depth technical and fundamental analysis reports.

Technical

Moving onto the technical screening criteria, they are split across the following sub-categories:

• Performance: % Price Change, Relative Strength, Beta, Moving Averages
• Indicators: RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, Stochastics, Candlestick Patterns, Chart Patterns
• Support/Resistance: Horizontal, Channels, Distance

As you can see, the number of technical filters is just as impressive as the number of fundamental filters, including a wide range of proprietary ChartMill indicators.

Moreover, the condition parameters are extremely granular once again. For instance, you can screen for stocks within a certain distance of a support or resistance level, a specific channel width, or flag pattern length.

Whether you’re screening for price momentum, indicator conditions, or pattern recognition, ChartMill will almost certainly cater for your technical screening needs.

If that wasn’t enough, they also let you create custom expressions to build more complex scanning criteria. This is done through an intuitive “point-and-click” rule builder, so you don’t need any coding knowledge.

ChartMill Charts Review

Stock charts are also included in ChartMill, which come with a broad range of technical analysis tools.

You can display your charts as candlestick, bar, or line charts across multiple time frames – from 1-minute intraday bars all the way up to monthly bars. However, note that data is delayed by 15 minutes, which means it probably isn’t suited to day traders.

There are also around 80 technical indicators & chart overlays that you can add, including:

• MACD
• Bollinger Bands
• Ichimoku Kinko Hyo
• Automated Support & Resistance Lines
• Money Flow Index
• And Much More…

In terms of drawing tools, you are limited to basic trendlines, circles, and Fibonacci retracements. Having said that, I do like how each horizontal line distinguishes between resistance levels (red line) and support levels (green line). This is great for identifying pivot points for the swing traders amongst you.

However, my main criticism of the charts is the user experience. In particular, I was disappointed with the lack of interactivity. For example, there is no manual zooming function, so you can’t slide your mouse or adjust the scales to focus on different time periods.

Also, there is no option to remove any indicator or annotation directly from the chart. Instead, you have to do this through a series of drop-down menus, which makes the user experience a bit clunky.

If you’re looking for a more sophisticated charting platform, I would recommend looking at MetaStock or TrendSpider instead.

ChartMill Trading Ideas

The “Trading Ideas” function is one of my favourite things about ChartMill.

Essentially, it’s a library of pre-built screens created by the team at ChartMill as well as their users.

There are more than 200 screens available for all different types of investor. Whether you’re a technical analyst, long-term value investor, or a growth/momentum investor, you will no doubt find something of interest to you.

It comes with a useful search engine that helps you narrow down the trading strategies most suited to your investment style.

For instance, you can search for strategies based on the following characteristics:

• Long or short
• Fundamental or technical
• Long term investing, position trading, day trading or swing trading
• Growth, value, momentum, mean reversion, quality investing, dividend, etc.

By clicking “More Info” on any screen, you get a general overview of the strategy as well as the exact screening criteria.

If any catch your eye, simply click “Run Screen” and the criteria will automatically populate the stock screener and generate a list of stocks currently matching its rules.

Funnily enough, ChartMill’s Martin Zweig screen is actually based off of the rules outlined in my own article on the topic. You should definitely go check it out (no bias here!).

They also include screens from other Guru investors, such as Peter lynch and William O’Neil’s CANSLIM strategy.

ChartMill Stock Analyzer Review

The stock analyzer in ChartMill generates automated reports summarizing each stock’s key technical and fundamental attributes.

The technical analysis reports include the following information:

• Overall technical rating & commentary
• Performance statistics
• Support and resistance levels
• Possible trading setup

Meanwhile, the fundamental reports give each stock an overall fundamental rating based on the following sub-components:

• Profitability
• Valuation
• Growth
• Health
• Dividend

I think these reports do a great job of consolidating the most important qualities about a stock in one place.

However, note that the information is algorithmically generated, so it only gives you the general perspective on a stock. You still need to do your own research to arrive at a more nuanced decision.

Other Features

Below is a quick summary of some other ChartMill tools that make it a great all-round online stock research platform:

• Alerts: Receive email notifications when a stock hits a certain price target or meets a technical condition
• Watchlists: Keep track of interesting stocks from your screens and other research
• Insider Trading: A list of all the latest insider transactions
• Up/Downgrades: See all the latest analyst upgrades & downgrades
• Stock Market Scans: A dedicated dashboard for popular day trading scans, such as Top Gainers/Losers, 52-week Highs, Gappers, Premarket Movers, etc
• News: An aggregation of all the latest articles and press releases from reputable financial media outlets, such as Bloomberg, MarketWatch, Seeking Alpha, CNBC, etc.

FAQs

ChartMill Review Summary

Overall, I found ChartMill to be a very neat, user-friendly stock research platform. It has a great stock screener for fundamental and technical traders alike, that allows you to hit the ground running with a vast library of pre-built screening strategies.

Moreover, their Stock Analyzer reports provide you with a sea of information about key technical and fundamental characteristics, which provides a great starting point for further research.

The only feature that needs improving in my opinion is the stock charts, which have limited drawing tools and outdated settings.