Chaiken Analytics Review – Is This Platform Worth The Money?

About Chaikin Analytics

Chaikin Analytics is a stock market analysis and research platform operated by Marc Chaikin, the creator of the Chaikin Money Flow indicator. Chaikin Analytics leverages this indicator to provide stock and options trading ideas along with comprehensive analysis and in-depth stock research. The platform offers tools like Hot Lists, Sector View, stock screeners, and Chaikin Money Flow-based buy and sell alerts.

Chaikin Analytics can dramatically simplify the process of finding potential trades, but the service is also quite pricey. In our Chaikin Analytics review, we’ll help you determine if this trading platform is worth the investment. 

Chaikin Analytics Pricing Options

Chaikin Analytics offers several different services with a variety of stock research tools.

The flagship service is called Power Gauge Investor and it’s designed for active investors. It costs $5,000 per year and provides complete access to the Chaikin Analytics platform. You get interactive charts, buy and sell signals, Chaikin Power Gauge ratings, a stock screener, detailed stock ratings, and three model portfolios.

You can try out Chaikin Analytics for 30 days, but refunds are only offered in the form of a credit to Chaikin Analytics – you cannot get a cash refund after signing up.

The Power Tactics and Power Trader subscriptions are similar to Power Gauge Investor, but they focus more on active traders. Both plans cost $5,000 per month and include full access to the platform, but the model portfolios differ from those offered with Power Gauge Investor.

For investors on a tighter budget, Chaikin Analytics offers the Market Insights plan for $999 per year. This includes charts and stock ratings, but not access to screeners, alerts, or model portfolios.

The Power Gauge Report, which costs $199 per year, is a monthly newsletter that delivers a new large-cap stock pick each month. It also includes two model portfolios you can follow along with.

The Power Feed service is a daily newsletter that offers trade ideas and up-to-date stock ratings for stocks that have triggered alerts within the Chaikin Analytics platform. Power Feed doesn’t offer direct access to the platform, but it’s completely free.

Chaikin Analytics Features

Here are some of the notable features and indicators that Chaikin Analytics provides. 

Chaikin Power Gauge Rating

Chaikin Power Gauge ratings are one of the most powerful features of this platform. Illustrated in the form of a simple colored speedometer dial, these ratings visually depict how bullish or bearish a stock is. This Power Gauge system is based on an analysis of 20+ fundamental and technical indicators that are grouped into four sub-categories: Financials, Earnings, Technicals, and Experts.

The Financials rating is based on debt to equity, price to book, return on equity, price to sales, and free cash flow. The Earnings score is based on earnings growth, earnings surprises, earnings trends, forward P/E ratio, and earnings consistency. The Technicals score is based on strength compared to the broader stock market, Chaikin Money Flow, momentum, and volume. The Experts rating is based on insider trading activity and analyst ratings.

Many of the features of Chaikin Analytics revolve around the Power Gauge. It’s incorporated into charting and serves as the foundation for stock and ETF recommendations. Chaikin Analytics offers Power Gauge ratings for more than 5,000 stocks.

Sector Analysis

Chaikin Analytics uses Power Gauge ratings to analyze market sectors and rate them as strong or weak. This can be useful for taking a quick look at the market and deciding what opportunities to pursue. For each sector, you can see the number of strong, neutral, and weak-rated stocks based on the Power Gauge.

Interactive Charts

The Chaikin Analytics charting platform is intuitively designed and offers an excellent mix of technical and fundamental indicators. Available momentum indicators include overbought/oversold, Chaikin Money Flow, and Power Gauge. There are also price indicators including trend lines and price envelopes.

One unique overlay is the Relative Strength vs. SPY indicator, which illustrates buy or sell fades beautifully. For traders, this means a stock that is fading the SPY will likely sell off faster when the SPY weakens, thereby creating short-selling opportunities.

OptionsPlay

Chaikin Analytics includes OptionsPlay, an options analysis platform designed to help you plan out options trades. Just click the OptionsPlay button for any stock to instantly generate stock and options trade ideas such as share purchase, directional 1-leg, and 2-leg spreads.

Recommendations are based on the bullish/bearishness of the underlying stock. The potential outcomes and an explanation of the strategy are conveniently provided for you along with an OptionsPlay Score, which measures how highly the strategy is rated.

Users can also adjust the strategy parameters and use the P&L Simulator to calculate potential outcomes. While this is deceptively simple, it is important that you have a methodology in place to manage your trades.

Chaikin Hot Lists

Chaikin Hot Lists are pre-configured stock screens that can be used to find very bullish stocks or very bearish stocks to trade. Hot lists include Featured Bulls and Bears, Signals, Indicator Hot Lists, Power Gauge Hot Lists, Factor Movers, Earnings Hot Lists, and Other Hot Lists.

The Hot Lists are great for finding trade ideas at the start of each trading day. When you click a category and select the type of hot list, it pulls up a visual list of stocks complete with their Chaikin Power Gauge rating, last trade, and performance on the day. Clicking on a stock will pull up its chart already filled in with a set of technical indicators.

Screener

For those who prefer a do-it-yourself approach, the Chaikin Analytics stock screener lets users create custom scans using the platform’s 20+ stock rating factors and Power Gauge ratings. The filters are geared towards momentum-oriented trading strategies.

The screener pulls up stock panels with the symbol, Power Gauge ratings, and intraday performance. This format for visualizing results is really nice and greatly improves the decision-making process for traders.

Alerts 

Chaikin Analytics sends out bullish/bearish alerts on stocks derived from preset filters. You can also set up custom alerts by using any of the filters available in the platform’s scanner.

News Feed and Educational Content

Chaikin Analytics provides streaming news feeds as well as individual news applied to any symbol including press releases, upgrade/downgrades, and analysis reports. There is plenty of educational and informative content through the free blog , tutorials and webinars.

Watch Lists

Users can create multiple watch lists and pull up charts scrolling through and selecting stocks directly from the lists. I also like the ability to compare different stocks based on technical analysis and quantitative metrics. Screen results are also compiled onto a default watch list that users can filter through and add to customized watch lists. 

Platform Differentiators

Chaikin Analytics is intuitively designed and offers all the tools investors and traders need to do a full analysis on any stock within minutes. Much credit must be given for the visual enhancements and color coding of signals that streamlines the user experience. It’s simple to type in a ticker and know in seconds if the stock is bullish or bearish, or whether it offers any trading opportunities based on the day’s price action.

The real power of Chaikin Analytics lies in the Power Gauge indicator. This 20-component indicator is behind many of the platform’s best tools and is what users will base a lot of their trading and investment decisions on. The Power Gauge indicator is unique in that it incorporates both technical and fundamental metrics, whereas many platforms focus exclusively on one approach or the other. 

Is Chaikin Analytics a Good Value?

The Chaikin Analytics system offers a lot of tools and holds a lot of potential for traders, but it’s also very expensive compared to other stock rating and research platforms.

For seasoned traders who can utilize Chaikin Analytics to its full potential, the annual subscription can be worth the cost. A few strong options trades or momentum trades can pay off the subscription cost and save you a ton of time finding trading opportunities each day.

However, you need a relatively large amount of capital to make a $5,000 annual subscription worth it. If you’re trading or investing with less than $50,000, Chaikin Analytics probably isn’t worth it. The result is that for many non-professional stock traders or active investors, Chaikin Analytics may be cost-prohibitive.

What Type of Trader is Chaikin Analytics Best For?

Chaikin Analytics is ideal for advanced traders who want a way to find trade ideas quickly. Time is money and the visual tools that this platform offers save a lot of time. The charting features are also solid and the hot lists are great for finding trade opportunities at the start of each market day.

Active investors can also benefit from Chaikin Analytics. The Power Gauge and sector ratings can be enormously helpful for generating investment ideas. The model portfolios available with a Power Gauge Investor subscription can also help guide your investments.

One thing to bear in mind is that Chaikin Analytics can appear deceptively simple. Putting trade ideas and strategies suggested by the platform into action requires having a trading methodology. There’s enough educational content for beginners to learn the tools and get acclimated, but managing a trade requires experience.

Pros

Robust trade ideas generation platform with in-depth research analytics

Convenient tools and indicators like Chaikin Power Gauge rating system

Intuitively designed to move from filtering to analysis to monitoring to trade management

Excellent use of precious screen real estate

Streamlined features like color coded signals, colored dial, panel view, and graph-based tools

Strong library of educational content including webinars, market reports, and commentary

Cons

Very expensive with no free trial

Requires experience to put suggested strategies into action