With so much information at our fingertips these days, it’s vital you know how to separate the signal from the noise as an investor. Information overload is a one-way ticket to “analysis paralysis” – a deadly sin in investment management. I know from my experience as a former hedge fund manager, that data can be your best friend if streamlined correctly, but also your kryptonite if not. This Koyfin review divulges everything that makes this platform one of the best in the game for that task.
Hear what I have to say about this amazing free Bloomberg alternative, as a former industry “insider” with extensive experience of these tools. From the dashboards, charts, analytics, and screener, it’s all included below.
Koyfin Review Highlights
| Features | Market Dashboards, Screening, News, Financial Analysis |
| Operating System | Web Browser |
| Subscription | Monthly, Yearly |
| Regions | Global |
| Designed For | Stock, Bond, FX, Commodity, Mutual Fund, Crypto & ETF Investors |
| Discount | -40% Discount With Annual Subscription |
| Free Trial | Sign Up For Free Account |
Pros
- Most tools are free
- Global, multi-asset data coverage
- Intuitive dashboards
- Real-time news from trusted sources
- Capable fundamental screener
- Comprehensive financial data on companies
- Transcript search tool
- Technical & fundamental charts
Cons
- Limited technical analysis tools
- Certain dashboards are a bit cluttered
What is Koyfin?
Koyfin is a web-based market dashboard and financial analytics platform, covering global stocks, bonds, FX, commodities, mutual funds, cryptocurrencies and ETFs. It gives users access to an endless stream of market, financial, and economic data, as well as real-time financial market news – helping you stay on top of the latest developments at both a macro and company level.
Developed by ex-Wall Street pros, Koyfin aims to provide retail traders with the same information that the professionals use. And for a fraction of the cost. In fact, most of the core features are free to use!
Their dashboards consolidate the mountains of information available today into intuitive, user-friendly modules. As you will see below, these are beautifully presented with charts, tables, matrices, heatmaps, and other useful visualization tools.
The upshot?
Koyfin is one of the most efficient platforms for conducting both top-down and bottom-up research.
Koyfin Pricing
Koyfin offers a free plan and 2 paid plans.
Free: The free plan gives you access to market dashboards, advanced graphs, and 2 custom screens, watchlists, dashboards, and chart templates.
Plus: Plus offers unlimited screens, watchlists, dashboards, and chart templates, plus access to a filings and transcripts search tool.
Pro: The Pro plan includes everything in Plus, as well as unlimited custom formulas, mutual fund data, custom FA (financial analysis) templates, priority support and webinar training.
Koyfin Features Review
While there are many features available in Koyfin, there are generally 2 main functions: Dashboards and Security Analysis.
Koyfin Dashboards
Let’s start with dashboards.
Essentially, Koyfin’s interface is organized across several dashboards, which consolidate key financial data, charts, and news in one place.
These are all conveniently located in the left sidebar, which makes it easy to switch between your favourite screens.
Alternatively, you can toggle directly to a page by using the shortcut codes assigned to each dashboard. Simply put a “/” in the search bar followed by the relevant function code. These are shown next to each page in the sidebar.
Some of the dashboards available include:
- Today’s Markets: Shows daily performance of securities across different asset classes, latest market news, and performance chart of US equity benchmarks
- Market News: Live stream of the latest market-moving news
- Market Movers: See the biggest 1-day movers in regular and extended hours trading
- Market Dashboards: Customizable data tables and performance charts for individual markets
Of course, you can also create your own dashboards from scratch using the pre-set layouts available. You can then populate these with any combination of data, charts, and news according to your preferences.
In essence, dashboards provide a quick snapshot of current market trends so that your finger is always on the pulse.
Koyfin Market News
As mentioned above, one of the main dashboards in Koyfin is called Market News.
Unsurprisingly, this does exactly what it says on the tin. In short, it aggregates news articles from some of the most reputable financial media outlets in the world, helping you stay on top any market-moving events.
This is cool you might be thinking, but nothing you can’t get elsewhere.
However, this is where you’d be mistaken. And here’s why…
What sets this dashboard apart in my view, is how easy it is to find the news you’re looking for. In particular, there are 9 different news categories that an article can fall into, ranging from Top News, Macro, Corporate Events, Analyst Changes and more.
Therefore, all you need to do is choose the tab that best suits your interests and scroll through the article list. You can even create your own custom news screen based on any topic, asset class, sector, and region of your choice.
In contrast, I’ve found other news aggregation platforms, like Finviz, to be quite lazy with their presentation. Unlike Koyfin, there are no categories or filters to help narrow your search; just a wholesale dump of the latest articles.
All this does is barrage you with a minefield of words on your screen, causing your eyes to glaze over. Koyfin, on the other hand, makes it easy to filter out the noise and pinpoint the information that matters to you.
Koyfin Market Dashboards
Market dashboards are a whole new kettle of fish.
Whereas “Today’s Markets” gave you a birds-eye view of every asset class on one screen, the “Market Dashboards” allow you to delve deeper into the individual asset classes themselves.
There are 12 different market overview dashboards, including:
- World Equity Indices
- US Sectors
- Countries
- Factor Analysis
- Global Yields
- Recent IPOs
- Currencies
- World Economics
- Commodities
- Corporate Credit
- Fixed Income Factors
- Yield Curves
Most of these include a data table with important technical metrics such as price change, Z-scores, and 52-week ranges, as well as historical price charts of individual securities. Some even have an extra panel containing a yield curve matrix or performance rankings.
The columns can be customized to include a handful of different technical measures. However, it would be nice to see some fundamental metrics amongst these, such as valuation ratios.
The only 2 market dashboards that don’t follow the format above are Recent IPOs and World Economics.
The Recent IPOs dashboard shows a list of all the recent IPOs in the US along with a scatter plot of each company’s market cap vs their performance since IPO.
Meanwhile, the World Economics dashboard contains a table of economic indicators for different countries. It’s pretty cool having all this data in one place as a macro investor.
Koyfin Analytics
The Analytics section consists of 4 different dashboards:
- Earnings Calendar: See upcoming earnings releases for US & Canadian stocks including detailed earnings estimates
- Lots of Charts: Display up to 16 stock price charts on one screen
- Market Scatter: Create a scatter plot of any technical or fundamental variables
- Economic Calendar: Schedule of upcoming economic events across the world
If you are an event-based trader that feeds off volatility around earnings or economic events, then calendars are a must.
I particularly like how the earnings calendar provides detailed earnings estimates, including the number of analyst estimates, the lows, highs, and average of the range, as well as the standard deviation (dispersion) in the estimates.
The charts dashboard is another convenient tool to help you eye-ball stock price action. Simply flick through the charts using the left and right arrows on your keypad and see if anything catches your eye.
Lastly, the Market Scatter dashboard allows you to combine any technical and fundamental metrics as X and Y variables in a scatter plot.
For example, the scatter plot below shows the EV/Sales ratios of Nasdaq 100 stocks against their corresponding EPS estimate revisions.
Advanced Search
The final dashboard I want to cover in this Koyfin review is called “Advanced Search”. It essentially works as a search engine to help you find instruments based on any asset category, country, sector, exchange, or transcript term.
In fact, “Transcript Search” is one of my favourite features about Koyfin.
Have you ever been interested in a certain theme, but not known which stocks are involved in that space? Well, transcript search is one solution to that problem.
For example, artificial intelligence (AI) is a popular investment theme at the moment. By the way, Koyfin is doing a great job analyzing AI stocks of 2023 in their blog. If I want to see what companies are talking about AI in their earnings calls, presentations, or analyst/investor days, I can simply type “AI” into the search bar.
Immediately, I’m presented with a whole list of companies that have been talking about AI recently. I can then narrow this list down further by filtering for any one of 10 event types (e.g. earnings calls), major US indices, or sectors. I can also change the dates if I’m only interested in a specific period when the keyword was mentioned.
When you click on any of the results, you get a detailed breakdown of each instance the company mentioned your keyword in the respective communication.
For example, the screenshot below shows every paragraph throughout Adobe’s Q3 earnings call where the term “AI” was mentioned. Clicking any paragraph takes you to the relevant section in the document so you can get more context.
Koyfin Screener Review
While broad data coverage is one of Koyfin’s hallmarks, it creates the challenge of utilizing it efficiently. As most traders know, too much data can lead to analysis paralysis if you’re not careful.
Henri Frédéric Amiel once said: “The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides”.
Thankfully, Koyfin’s built-in screener addresses this issue.
In short, the screener lets you screen for stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds across the entire world based on a wide range of technical and fundamental filters. This helps you wade through the minefield of data and focus your attention on assets with your desired qualities.
If you’re unfamiliar with stock screening, you will appreciate the fact that Koyfin provides about a dozen pre-built screens.
You can use these as they are, modify them with your own settings, or start completely from scratch. If nothing else, they’re a great way to find your bearings and see what’s possible.
The stock screener is easy to use, as it walks you through a simple 3-step process:
- Define a Universe: Choose which countries, sectors, ETFs, exchanges, etc., to screen through
- Select Filters: Define the conditions to pass your screen based on thousands of fundamental filters
- Name: Choose a name for your screen
I’m not sure the exact number of filters available, but there appears to be thousands. Any obscure financial item you can think of is likely included, for example policy benefits, fuel & purchased power, amortization of goodwill, the list goes on. I’m not sure how useful some of these are, but rest assured you’re spoilt for choice.
The one thing I will say though, is that the number of technical filters is rather limited. Outside of volume, price data, and moving averages, there really isn’t a lot of choice. This screener is clearly designed with fundamental investors in mind.
Koyfin Security Analysis Review
As mentioned earlier, the other main function in Koyfin after Dashboards is Security Analysis.
While dashboards provide a top-level view of broad asset classes, markets, and trends, the security analysis tools provide the means to perform technical and fundamental analysis on individual securities. By combining these 2 functions, Koyfin facilitates both top-down and bottom-up analysis of financial market data.
The Security Analysis section includes the following stock research tools:
- Snapshots: Provides a broad overview of the business, key financial statistics, ownership structure, dividends & earnings trends
- Analyst Estimates: Detailed breakdown of analyst sales/earnings estimates and price targets, including how they’ve trended over time
- Financial Analysis: Complete financial statement data along with key valuation, profitability, and solvency ratios
- News, Filings & Transcripts: All the latest news articles and filings on the underlying security
- Graphs: Technical and fundamental charts of the underlying security
If you have used a Bloomberg terminal before, these features will feel like second nature to you. Personally, I think they do a great job at mimicking some of its core functions. In particular, the “FA” function in Bloomberg (IYKYK) is very reminiscent of the Financial Analysis section in Koyfin – both in terms of the information provided and the layout.
As a seasoned Bloomberg user myself, I found the transition to Koyfin incredibly easy. Pretty much every Bloomberg function I used to research stocks was replicated in some way shape or form. Comparing Koyfin to a product used by some of the biggest money managers in the world (at a hefty cost) is probably the biggest compliment I can give.
Financial Statement Analysis
As alluded to above, one of my favourite functions in Koyfin is the financial analysis module.
Here is where you will find the all-important financials generated by a business. This includes a detailed breakdown of its sales, gross profit, EBITDA, EPS, capital structure, and cash flow, with the ability to switch between annual and quarterly data. The data coverage stretches back 2 years for free users and 10 years for paid subscribers.
It also includes comprehensive financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement) so you can pore over each line item in more detail.
In addition, it translates this raw data into valuation multiples like EV/EBITDA, profitability ratios like ROE, and solvency ratios such as EBIT/Interest Expense.
In summary, this module allows you to get into the weeds of each business and perform institutional-grade fundamental analysis.
Koyfin Graphs Review
Koyfin also has some neat graphing features that allow you to plot different technical and fundamental data alongside each other.
Note, this isn’t a fully-fledged charting platform like TradingView or TrendSpider, so the range of technical analysis tools is quite limited.
There are 6 different chart types, including OHLC bars, line charts, and candles. There are also around a dozen technical indicators, including the MACD, RSI, Stochastic Oscialltor, moving averages, and Bollinger Bands. Not to mention a handful of drawing tools like trendlines and Fibonacci retracements. Essentially, everything you need to perform basic technical analysis.
However, the coolest thing about these graphs is the ability to plot a wide range of fundamental fields. This includes pretty much every financial metric you can derive from a company’s financial statements, as well as analyst estimates.
Point-in-time statistics are great, as they tell you about a company’s current situation. However, sometimes you need to visualize a metric evolving over time in order to gain some context. This is what the fundamental charts are designed for.
Koyfin FAQs
Koyfin Review Summary
In many ways, conducting this Koyfin review took me back to my hedge fund days; where my eyes were glued to a Bloomberg terminal all day.
Of course it can’t compete with a $25,000 bit of kit, but I still drew many comparisons nonetheless.
The global data coverage, live news, screener, even the design of the financial analysis module – all gave the feel of a professional-grade platform. Compared to similar services I’ve tested, Koyfin is one of the best for streamlining all of the information and tools you need in one place.
And when you consider that most of these tools are free, you see why so many choose it as their go-to financial market portal. If you want to level-up your investment analysis, I certainly think it’s worth trying for this reason.
At the beginning of this review, I mentioned that Koyfin’s mission was to bring institutional-grade research capabilities to the masses.
To conclude, I’d like to confirm that they’ve accomplished their mission.