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Quicken
Replacements
Over the
years, I’ve described many powerful investing tools that Quicken (www.quicken.com)
provided free to all users. But, as the saying goes, all good things
must end.
Quicken
apparently realized that it can’t make money by giving its products
away. It recently eliminated some of its tools altogether, and
restricted the remaining features to users who have purchased and
registered a Quicken software product.
That turn of
events inspired many of you to write asking where to find substitutes.
Here’s a rundown on what I’ve found.
Screeners
Quicken’s stock screener was the biggest casualty, at least in my
view. Its ease of use combined with powerful screening parameters made
it the search tool of choice for many investors. Alas, Quicken’s
screener has disappeared completely.
The closest
substitute, in terms of user-friendliness, is Wall Street City’s
ProSearch screener. You can find it from Wall Street City’s homepage (www.wallstreetcity.com)
by selecting ProSearch
and then ProSearch
Engines. Business Week’s site (www.businessweek.com)
also offers the same search engine. Get there from Business Week’s
homepage by selecting Investing,
then selecting Stock
Screeners under Stocks, and finally Advanced
Stock Search. The ProSearch screeners are free and work virtually
the same on both sites.
Note: as of 1/17/07,
Business Week's screeners were no longer available. You can run similar
screens using MSN Money's Deluxe Screener (moneycentral.msn.com)
or Reuters Investor's PowerScreener Lite (www.investor.reuters.com).
MSN's screener requires downloading special software and Reuters'
screener requires registration, but both are free.
Although
ProSearch offers more screening variables that Quicken’s screener, it
doesn’t provide the relative strength parameter that I used in many of
the searches that I’ve described in this space.
Relative
strength, as you may recall, gauges a stock’s price performance
compared to the overall market. ProSearch does offer a similarly named
“relative performance” search parameter, but it has an entirely
different definition and cannot be used in place of relative strength.
Another
drawback of ProSearch is that it doesn’t remember your search
parameters when you rerun a screen; you have to reenter everything.
The good news
is that two free web screeners; Reuters’s Power
Screener (investor.reuters.com) and MSN Money’s Deluxe
Screener (moneycentral.msn.com), offer everything that Quicken’s
screener did, and much more. The only downside is that they take some
time to learn. But it’s time well spent, and both are easy to use once
you get the hang of it.
Scorecard
Quicken’s One-Click Scorecard was another popular feature that I
described on these pages more than once. You could use the scorecard to
emulate the stock analysis strategies of well-known gurus such as Warren
Buffett or Geraldine Weiss. You could either find stocks that, in
Quicken’s view, met each guru’s selection criteria, or
alternatively, see how each guru would rate your stocks. Quicken’s
scorecard is still available to registered users, but, in my view,
Validea’s guru screener that I described in a May column is a better
choice because it offers a bigger selection of guru strategies.
You can use
Validea to evaluate stocks using seven guru strategies free in the Investor
Tools section of Nasdaq’s site (www.nasdaq.com)
or you can draw on even more gurus and features on Validea’s pay site
(www.validea.com).
Fair Value
Another popular Quicken feature, its Stock Evaluator, is still
available, but again, only to registered users. The evaluator grades
stocks based on a number of factors including growth trends, financial
health, and management performance. However, based on your emails, its
Intrinsic Value calculator was its most popular feature. Intrinsic
value, a.k.a. fair value, is, in theory, the current value of a
company’s shares based on its expected future earnings growth, and
expected future interest rates.
Fortunately,
several other investing sites offer fair value calculators, and ValuEngine.com
is the best of the bunch.
ValuEngine
calculates fair value much the same way as Quicken. But ValuEngine also
shows you much more. Based on considerable research, ValuEngine employs
a stock’s trading history, historical earnings growth, stability of
earnings forecasts, and other factors to calculate target prices for
time spans ranging from one-month to three-years out.
There’s
more. Besides for the target prices, ValuEngine also shows you the odds
of doubling your money, scoring any profit, or losing money on your
stock, again for time spans ranging from one-month to three years.
ValuEngine
also ranks stocks based on its overall assessment of a stock’s
attractiveness based on valuation, risk, expected returns, and other
factors. The rankings range from one to five engines, where five is
best. ValuEngine has data going back to 1991 showing that five-engine
stocks have outperformed lower ranked stocks in most years. The biggest
exception was 1999; the height of the bubble, when one-engine stocks,
returning 52 percent for the year, outperformed five-engine stocks,
which returned 17 percent.
ValuEngine
also provides a screener you can use to search for five-engine stocks,
undervalued stocks, low-risk stocks and more. All of ValuEngine’s
features that I’ve described are free.
It’s too
bad that Quicken deleted or restricted access to its stock tools, but as
you can see, there are plenty of alternatives.
published 6/27/04 |
