There are tons and tons of services out there that promise the best research, the best advice, the best proprietary algorithms and advice, and the best investment tools that can do everything but tuck you into bed at night.
Some of them are reasonably priced, but a lot of these services seem to think that it’s okay to charge a mortgage payment’s worth of subscription fees.
The average independent trader doesn’t need, want, or have the spare cash to subscribe to more than one of these services, so it’s important to do your due diligence before you enter any credit card details.
You’ve read the title already, so you know we’re here to talk about Benzinga Pro.
What does it offer? What does it do best? Is it better for some investors than others? And, most importantly:
Is Benzinga Pro worth it?
Let’s dive into our Benzinga Pro review to find out.
What is Benzinga?
The Detroit-based Benzinga.com was launched in 2010 by a man named Jason Raznick with the goal of empowering a new generation of investors and helping people build wealth.
The site has financial news, tickers, statistics, and a wide knowledge base on personal finance and investing/trading just about every security under the sun.
Raznick intended the site to be a comprehensive resource for individual investors by offering the information they need to make informed decisions, rather than providing direct financial advice.
The site has expanded over the years to encompass additional asset classes as well as becoming a source for original financial journalism, as well as offering numerous paid services including stock picks, trade alerts, and educational programs. (Read our review of Benzinga as a whole here.)
Oh, and Benzinga Pro. They have that now, too.
What is Benzinga Pro?
Benzinga Pro is an offshoot of Benzinga that was originally meant to be a fancy news feed.
Over time, however, the browser-based service has added services like an event calendar, stock scanning and screening, watchlists, detailed analysis, custom alerts, real-time daily gainer and loser tracking, signal tracking, live training, and the ability to get your own trading mentor.
In other words, it does a lot.
You can access Benzinga Pro from any browser on desktop or on mobile.
You can also download the Benzinga Pro app if that’s more your speed.
You can try out Benzinga Pro for free, though you’ll have to shell out a subscription fee if you want to keep using it after the trial lapses.
How much is the subscription, you ask?
Great question.
Can You Put a Price on Useful Information? (Yes)
There are four different membership tiers of Benzinga Pro: Free, Basic, Essential, and Options Mentorship.
Free Tier
Features:
Nasdaq Basic 15-minute delayed news quotes
Bazinga BZ Wire newsfeed – search, no filters
Current session’s movers
Details tool with key stock stats
Benzinga Pro’s free tier is surprisingly robust considering its price.
You get charts, you get free key stock stats, you get a functional if stripped-down newsfeed, and you even get a watchlist for keeping an eye on securities you’re interested in.
Basic Tier
The Benzinga Pro Basic tier includes all the Basic features in addition to:
Full newsfeed (but no advanced filtering)
Access to Benzinga Premium offers on Benzinga.com
This is kind of a weird tier.
On the one hand, it’s a lot less expensive than the Essential and Options Mentorship tiers, but on the other hand you may not think it offers enough value to justify the $27 subscription.
The full newsfeed is great, as is the access to the Benzinga Premium articles.
You’re basically getting a subscription to a great digital newspaper.
That’s definitely worth something, at least.
The rest of the stuff may not be quite as valuable to you unless you really want to chat with other Benzinga Pro users, get automatic alerts from your watchlist, or find out what the biggest movers were in prior trading sessions.
Essential Tier
$1,404 Annually ($117/Month Paid Annually)
The Essential Tier includes all the features from the two cheaper tiers as well as:
Nasdaq Basic real-time quotes
Advanced newsfeed (filter by price, volume, float, and other technical indicators)
Audio squawk for equities and options
Unusual options activity (additional $27.97 monthly)
Options trading newsletter starting on 3rd month
Enhanced options trading newsletter starting on 6th month
This is apparently the most popular tier, and it isn’t hard to see why.
The Essentials tier includes all kinds of important features that you can’t get in the Free or Basic tiers, plus a bunch of features that may be more than worth the price of admission.
Real-time Nasdaq quotes combined with the charting tool and key stock stats will give you the power to watch stocks and make decisions with lightning speed (great for you day traders out there), and that’s barely scratching the surface.
Benzinga’s newsfeed has always been one if its biggest selling points, and the version you get with the Essential tier has all the information and the advanced filtering features you need to chase down your hunches and get pertinent information as soon as it’s available.
The calendar is a calendar.
The signals, real-time scanning, and audio squawk features will help you stay clued in and on top of the market while you scour the data to find investing opportunities—again, great for day traders.
The unusual options activity feature comes with an extra premium, but anyone who knows how to take advantage of the feature will definitely get their money’s worth.
Tack on the additional options trading newsletters that come after your 3rd and 6th month of subscribing and you’ve got yourself a recipe for success.
Options Mentorship
$3,372 Annually ($281/Month Paid Annually)
The Options Mentorship tier includes everything from the other tiers as well as:
Trading mentorship and education from Nic Chahine, leading trader
Access to options inner circle chat room
Regular market overview to match Nic’s winning trading strategy
The Options Mentorship tier is not messing around.
This tier is designed for individual investors who’ve reached the limit of what they can teach themselves and want to truly immerse themselves in the art of trading.
This tier gives you exclusive live training from an experienced trader (hence the price. Guy’s gotta eat).
If you pay attention and take good notes you may even find yourself making a hell of a lot more than $347 per month after Nic’s through with you.
The options inner circle chat room could be cool, but it’s hard to say without joining and saying what’s up.
Presumably you and the other people in the chat room will be able to talk about all the unusual options activity that’s happening, so that might be neat.
Well? Is it Worth It? Benzinga Pro, I Mean
Let’s do this in order, shall we?
Free: Worth it. Duh. It’s free.
Basic: Maybe. You get some good stuff, true, but it’s 100% up to you whether it’s worth the price.
Essential: Worth it. This tier is popular for a reason. It’s more than worth the price of admission, especially if you’re into options trading.
Options Mentorship: Probably worth it. In theory, the advice and education you get from the mentorship and the regular market overview could be worth their weight in gold, but again, it’s hard to say from the outside.
Conclusion/Recommendation
Benzinga Pro has a lot to offer, and hopefully reading this Benzinga Pro review has helped illuminate some of the valuable features the platform provides.
Every one of the subscription tiers brings its own kind of value to the table, and you’ll probably be happy with any of them.
That said:
We recommend you start with the Free tier to get a sense of what the platform is like.
If you don’t like it you can move on without spending a dime.
If you like what you see (and if you can finagle your way to a free trial of the higher tiers) you should go ahead and leapfrog over the Basic tier and right to Essential.
You’ll spend more than you would if you stuck to Basic, true, but it’ll be worth it.
Then, once you’re ready, make the switch to the Options Mentorship tier.
And if you do end up on the Options Mentorship tier, do us a favor and tell Nic we say hi.