TipRanks Identifies the Financial Blogs With the Best Performing Bloggers

TipRanks, the world’s leading Financial Accountability Service, has identified the financial blogs which have provided the best stock recommendations over the past year.

The fintech company measures and ranks the performance of financial experts to provide accountability and transparency.

Uri Gruenbaum, CEO and co-founder of TipRanks said, “While financial bloggers may not attract the same attention as Wall Street analysts, they are a powerful source of information with their provision of independent stock research.

Over one hundred million investors visit financial blogs every month. They use the information they find to make important decisions. However, they don’t always know whose advice they can trust – and this is essential information.

Our research shows that while the top 10 bloggers outperform the S&P 500 by an average return of 23.4% on recommendations held for one year, the average return of an average financial blogger underperforms the S&P 500 by 3.6%.”

TipRanks looked at three key criteria – success rate, average return of each recommendation, as well as the number of recommendations made.

Best Financial Blog by Success Rate – InvestorPlace

InvestorPlace came in as the number 1 financial blog in terms of success rate. 59% of 4,586 predictions made by financial bloggers on the site were profitable on a one-year basis.

This was just above the 57% success rate scored by Motley Fool and beat the 51% success rate achieved by each of Zacks, Seeking Alpha, and GuruFocus.

Best Financial Blog by Average Return – GuruFocus

The data revealed that financial blogs showed a significant range in average return- with several blogs scoring negative returns on their stock recommendations.

The site with the highest average return was GuruFocus. The blog had a 12% average return across 154 recommendations, made by 24 different financial bloggers.

InvestorPlace and Motley Fool also performed very well – with a 9.3% and 9.2% average return, respectively. TopStockAnalysts delivered an 8.9% average return for its 841 stock predictions.

However, the next best-performing financial blogs only scored 2.6% and 2.5% average return, followed by an average return per recommendation of 0.5% from the blog that performed least well, according to the research.

Best Financial Blog Compared to the S&P 500 and to the Sector

The data team discovered that GuruFocus bloggers beat the S&P 500 by 4.6% – and InvestorPlace did even better, with a 6% return over the S&P 500. Motley Fool and TopStockAnalysts also performed strongly against the index.

Several websites significantly underperformed both the S&P 500 and the sector, with one financial blog underperforming the sector by 13% and the S&P 500 by 13.8%.

For the S&P 500, the performance was measured using a Buy & Hold strategy of 1 year (or Short & Hold for bearish calls), while comparisons to the sector were done against the relevant SPDR ETF (XLE, XLF, etc.).

The Best Financial Blogger – Luke Lango

TipRanks revealed that the top stock picker out of all the financial bloggers is InvestorPlace’s Luke Lango.

Overall, Lango scores an 81% success rate and 35.1% average return per recommendation, measured over a one-year period. Out of 503 stock recommendations, 407 were profitable.

Compared to the S&P 500, Lango achieved a 69% success rate and 24.1% average return vs the index.

Lango’s most recent stock picks include Uber and Square, as well as some lesser-known ideas such as Waitr Holdings and Galaxy Resources. Top semiconductor stocks for Lango include AMD; Nvidia; Qualcomm; Micron; and Intel.

Read the full report: Which Leading Financial Blog Has the Best Bloggers?