The world of finance and investing is one of high stakes and constant change.
Prices rise and fall, companies come and go.
Investing used to be the exclusive purview of small groups of pinstriped men with slicked-back hair and BMWs they paid for by selling junk stocks to rubes and charging exorbitant fees to manage the portfolios of the well-to-do.
Things started changing when the internet started looking less like a toy for nerds to play with and more like a game-changer.
E*Trade was the first of the digital self-serve brokerages.
It promised a service it couldn’t yet provide: to give regular Joes the ability to trade like Wall Streeters from anywhere in the world.
Traders and asset managers from Manhattan to San Francisco laughed and shook their heads. At first.
The Great Recession threw another Lehman Brothers-sized wrench into the financial machinery underpinning the economy.
A huge chunk of the professional investor class found themselves unceremoniously kicked to the curb over the course of a few short months.
An entire industry crumbled in the blink of an eye, but from the rubble rose something new.
And that’s where Benzinga comes in.
This Benzinga review will tell you how Benzinga changed the game.
The Who, the What, and the Why
Benzinga.com launched in 2010.
The site was the brainchild of a man named Jason Raznick, a prolific businessman and investor who saw an opportunity in the new class of independent investors that arose in the wake of the Great Recession.
Raznick recognized the need for real-time, in-depth financial news, actionable trading ideas, and analyst-quality information for new and newly independent investors.
He wanted to help independent investors navigate the markets with the same access and fluency as the traders still employed by the big banks and investing firms, and he envisioned a website that could provide everything an investor would need on one website.
And thus, Benzinga was born.
The Value Proposition
Benzinga has grown from a small financial outlet to a one-stop digital shop for all things finance.
Over 25 million readers visit the site every month, drawn by Benzinga’s mix of original content, curated news feed, and wealth of investing ideas for everything from options to cryptocurrency and back.
Unlike some similar sites, Benzinga is more than willing to shift its focus in response to its users’ preferences.
When an asset class like crypto or NFTs rise in popularity, Benzinga responds by adding a whole new section on their front page with bespoke coverage from their writers supplemented by carefully curated content sourced from reputable sites around the net.
Benzinga’s much-vaunted news feed—even the 100% free version you get without signing up for a subscription—is both wide and deep.
You can spend half of your day reading through the content on Benzinga’s front page alone, and that barely scratches the surface.
You want news about certain sectors or industries? Analysis and news coverage of specific companies? How about reports on company earnings, dividends, buybacks, management, and IPOs? How about mergers and acquisitions, legal issues, the implications of government policies, and even a bit of politics here and there?
Benzinga has you covered. And again, that’s only scratching the surface.
Monitoring Markets
One of Benzinga’s biggest benefits is its expansive coverage of just about every market you can think of from all manner of altitudes and angles.
The site has a semi real-time ticker at the top of the page that tracks the biggest movers and most interesting trades of the day, plus a search bar that lets you find specific companies by name or stock symbol.
Speaking of specific companies, if you click on any of the tickers or search for a stock you’ll be taken to a page that’s absolutely packed with information on that company/security.
There are important statistics like the daily and 52-week range, a chart that you can adjust to show the performance from as little as 1 day to as long as 10 years.
And yes, you can find a good bit of that info on Yahoo Finance or similar services, but Benzinga doesn’t stop at the surface level.
Each stock/security’s page has stats and charts, sure, but the real value comes from all the extras that Benzinga throws in.
Each page has a collection of related news stories and press releases, a set of frequently asked questions, links to buy the stock or security, and lists of stock ideas and short interest provided by both analysts and community members.
The fact that Benzinga provides all of this for free is incredibly impressive, to say the least.
Investing Ideas
Benzinga doesn’t want to tell you what to do with your money.
They’re more interested in helping you become fluent in all things finance and investing so you can grow as a trader by providing actionable information and letting you make your own decisions. Hence the trading ideas section.
The front page of the trading ideas section of the site is home to an ever-changing lineup of stories on individual stocks and all the important events that may help or harm their share prices, plus stories on cryptocurrency, cannabis, penny stocks, and anything else that may present an opportunity for profitable trades.
Once you’re done with the articles, however, you’ll soon click your way into a very different kind of trading ideas.
The Covey analyst metrics page gives you a selection of trades made by the best 10% of a huge, open community of analysts, complete with a chart comparing their performance versus the S&P 500 (hint: it’s higher than the S&P).
The long ideas section is home to stories that may help inform long-term strategies (duh), and the short ideas section has a similarly descriptive name.
There are pages for technicals, for ideas based on external press, for Jim Cramer-based ideas, and even for rumors. And then there are the lists of the best penny stocks, ETFs, swing trade stocks, blue chips, and so on.
Finance Gets Personal
The last free services that Benzinga offers are a collection of options for comparing stock, forex, bond, etc. brokers, lists of top stocks, offers for all kinds of insurance, and links to help you find a mortgage broker.
There’s even a list of alternative investment pages that help you get into investing in things like art, gold, watches, real estate, and land.
One-stop shop indeed.
The Verdict
As our review has shown…Benzinga is awesome.
The sheer amount of content, information, analysis, and investing ideas dwarf most other similar services out there, and all without spending a dime on a subscription.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or a veteran, Benzinga has something to offer you that you can’t find anywhere else.
It may be the exclusive coverage. Or the broad range of subject matter. Or the strength of the analysis that Benzinga gets from its partners.
Whatever the case, you should give it a shot. It’ll be worth your time.