These are the best stock market forums for curious investors.
Online stock market forums have perhaps never enjoyed more publicity than they did in the early days of 2021, when several “Reddit stocks” like GameStop (ticker: GME), AMC Entertainment (AMC) and Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY), among others, soared due to rabid investor interest from a trading forum on Reddit called WallStreetBets. Stock message boards have been a part of the internet practically since the web’s inception, but there’s a lot of clutter and noise out there, and individual investors can benefit from a reliable guide to great free resources for new investing ideas. Few have the hype or risk tolerance of Reddit’s WallStreetBets community, and for most investors, that’s arguably a good thing. Here are seven of the best stock market forums around.
Value Investors Club
Value Investors Club, or VIC, is a buttoned-up, relatively little-known stock market forum that deserves more credit as a top-tier resource for quality stock picks. In fact, it’s quite different from Reddit and other stock message boards because at its core VIC is a hardcore idea meritocracy — you can’t just become a full member. You have to submit a well-researched, original idea, which is vetted for quality before admission is granted. Anyone can read member ideas that are 90 days old, and anyone with a valid email address can read picks 45 days or older, but only members can post ideas or read the most up-to-date stock picks. Members must submit two high-quality ideas a year to maintain full membership, and all ideas are vetted by a tight cabal of top money managers. The site was co-founded by legendary value investor Joel Greenblatt.
Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax
Subtitled “The Value Investor’s Haven,” Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax is another great resource for devout investing nerds. That said, unlike the Value Investors Club, there is a one-time registration fee of 29.99 Canadian dollars for users who’d like to be able to post themselves. With stock message boards broken down into sections like general discussion, investment ideas, strategies, personal finance and books, COBF features a potpourri of information and idea exchange. It’s also a relatively tight-knit, engaged community of fundamental analysis and deep dives, which you might expect from a forum taking its name from Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B, BRK.A) and Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial.
The Motley Fool
Although these parts of its website have been de-emphasized over time, both the discussion boards and The CAPS Community sections feature user-generated investment ideas and exchanges. With roots going back to the early days of the internet, The Motley Fool’s discussion boards are lively with engaged users posting ideas in a traditional message board format. CAPS, for its part, is a novel idea in which a community of investors can rate a stock as “buy” or “sell,” building up a track record over time that follows the performance of their picks. This allows members to prove their stock-picking skills over a period of years, decades even, and for users to see what stocks the best of the best like over time. Although tailored to a more casual community than the previous two investing forums, it’s still a good place to generate and exchange ideas.
Yahoo! Finance
The least formal of the stock message boards mentioned thus far, Yahoo! Finance has leveraged its position as a destination for retail investors checking out stock quotes and financial news to allow for user-generated takes and back-and-forth discussions. Although perhaps more voluminous than other forums yet listed, the “Conversations” tab under any given stock symbol tends to be better for very short takes, chatter, rumors and opinions on recent news developments, earnings announcements or press releases. In other words, you’re more likely to get a feel for short-term sentiment and bite-sized takes than well-researched discounted cash flow analyses looking years into the future.
Stockaholics.net
More of a traditional, old-school web forum, you can easily find active threads about some of the hottest trending topics of the day on Stockaholics.net. In early 2021, hot topics like GameStop, AMC, Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood and popular special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, Churchill Capital Corp. IV (CCIV) all have active threads of their own, with hundreds, sometimes tens of thousands, of posts dedicated to each individual topic. The site goes out of its way to welcome both long- and short-term investors, and users can sign up for free with a valid email address. While some features, like its search, charts and tools sections, leave much to be desired, the stock message boards themselves can contain the sort of back-and-forth reminiscent of Reddit, if a bit more dialed down.
StockTwits
It’s like Twitter (TWTR), but with a focus on the stock market. Bite-sized takes on certain tickers make for a good degree of noise, nonsalient information and investors talking their book, but some of that just comes with the territory of being an online forum for stock market banter. You can follow tickers or individual accounts, and StockTwits also has a feature called “Rooms” — some paid and some free — where members focus on a particular investing theme. StockTwits’ feature of trending tickers is useful for telling you what names are getting the most buzz on a given day. Not a platform for deep dives or value investors, StockTwits tends to be better for day traders, short-term investors and those driven by technical analysis.
TheLion.com
If you do not enjoy a screen full of data and headlines, TheLion.com isn’t for you. Although it can be difficult to sift through all the clutter, this site does provide an interesting view of the day’s trending news stories, and each day a column of the most popular forums and individual stock discussions are featured prominently on the front page. Although more geared toward action-oriented, short-term investors, there are some fun and useful features like a Q&A section for market experts and an ability to create portfolios that go head-to-head against the rest of the community. And, like any useful stock market forum or message board, the site is chock-full of actively engaged users.
Seven top stock message boards:
— Value Investors Club
— Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax
— The Motley Fool
— Yahoo! Finance
— Stockaholics.net
— StockTwits
— TheLion.com
More from U.S. News
2021’s Dividend Aristocrats List: All 65 Stocks
Artificial Intelligence Stocks: The 10 Best AI Companies
8 ESG Stocks With ‘Buy’ Ratings
7 Reddit-Esque Stock Market Forums originally appeared on usnews.com
