What Is a Stock Picking Service?

Stock picking services are services designed to help investors choose the best stocks for their portfolio.

You can use them to help you screen through the noisy markets to choose the right investments for your portfolio.

They come in a variety of forms, each with its pros and cons. Some intricate and quite expensive. Some low cost or even free.

Some are purely financial advice, others are more automated.
There are plenty of expensive paid stock picking services available.
Some popular paid programs include Dow Theory, Jason Bond Picks, and Jim Cramer's Action Alerts Plus from The Street.
Essentially, these are stocks recommended by investment professionals.

Free stock picking services are generally not as high quality (read detailed) as paid ones. Usually light on information they can be as sparse as simply recommending a ticker to trade with seemingly no reason or logic attached. Call us cynical but if they’re being recommended to everyone there’s a good chance the old ‘pump and dump’ is in operation and you could be left holding the bag. Our advice is steer well clear.

What are Stock Screeners?

If you’re starting out or the whole stock market is a little overwhelming a quick and handy way to refine your search across the whole market is by using Stock screeners.
These are tools that allow you to define a specific set of criteria (read characteristics) to create a list of qualifying stocks. From there, you can do an individual stock analysis to decide which should go on your buy list.

What About Social Stock Picking Services?

If you want to see and compare what other investing enthusiasts are up to there are a growing number of services which caters to your social side.
‘Social investing services’ seem to be a recent trend so if what drives your trading is knowing what others are up to then there are options for you.

Here are three ‘fun’ options to connect with other excited investors.

• KINFO — Compare your portfolio to those of professional investors and hedge funds and get other details on stocks you own and ones you are interested in.

• StockTwits — A real-time feed to see what people have been saying about specific stocks. Sign up to track your portfolio.

• Shares.io – An investment app where friends chat, invest and build strategies together.