Earnings Whispers Review
If you ask a Wall Street analyst or just a regular stock trader, which is the most crucial time of the year, they would probably answer: “The earnings season.” Earnings season is a period during which publicly traded companies release their quarterly earnings reports. Depending on whether the company has missed, met, or beat the analysts’ expectations, it can trigger a significant stock price movement of up to 20% or more in either direction. That is why anticipating eps estimates and projecting earnings results is among the essential activities for traders.
The following review focuses on Earnings Whispers – the leading earnings reports and earnings forecasts platform. It goes through the pricing options Earnings Whispers offers its users, the market consensus about the platform, the supported features and functionalities and how they power investment decisions, and how they prove useful to the different stock market participants. How does it compare to other stock news apps? Let’s get into it.
About Earnings Whispers
Earnings Whispers is an earnings research firm focused on gathering the most reliable earnings expectations for upcoming quarterly releases. The solution provides its members with crucial trading information to help them derive actionable insights and stock market ideas. Many consider the site as one of the most accurate sources for published earnings information and estimates.
The research firm was founded in 1998 and, over time, has managed to establish itself as the go-to source for earnings data, not only for retail and individual investors but also for asset managers, trading firms, brokers, hedge fund managers, and more.
Earnings Whispers is trusted by hundreds of thousands of users, and over the years, has published more than 100,000 reported numbers from over 11,000 buy- and sell-side finance professionals. Earnings Whispers was born out of the necessity to find a solution for the problem of insufficient and inaccurate earnings information. At the time, most earnings data was distributed in the form of a “whisper.” Understandably, this led to the presence of information asymmetry and the real facts being skewed. The result – the investor fails to get a representative picture of the expected earnings of different companies.
Today, on its site, Earnings Whispers claims to be more reliable than the consensus earnings estimate, 71.8% of the time.
Earnings Whispers Features
The site has one key downside and one particular advantage.
The downside is that it has a really bad UI, which translates to very annoying UX. The site is slow, there is no section with transparent information about the costs, and while testing, I had many 404 errors when loading particular pages on the site. Hopefully, that will improve in the near future.
On the bright side, however, is that it brings the investor a plethora of amazing features, which, in fact, are the key platform differentiators.
Let’s go through the most popular functionalities to find out how Earnings Whispers can help you better navigate the earnings season.
Earnings Whispers Calendar
This is, perhaps, the most popular feature. The Earnings Whispers Calendar shows the confirmed or unconfirmed releases scheduled for each day of the month before the market opens. The releases are sorted by popularity and provide a summary of the estimated Earnings-Per-Share or Revenue, the expected growth, the possibilities for a surprise (to help you forecast whether the stock will go up or down), and more.
The Earnings Calendar is an excellent feature for traders who want to get a quick and summarized overview of Wall Street’s earnings announcement forecasts and shape their calendar views.
Top-Down
As its name suggests, the Top-Down feature provides a look at earnings from macroeconomists and technical traders’ perspective. This proves invaluable as it helps the investor get a fair representation of the market environment from every angle, including stock fundamentals and the technical side indications.
The Top-Down feature is comprised of two functionalities – the Heat Map and the Sentiment.
Heat Map
The Heat Map informs you about the price changes by sector for S&P 500 companies since the date of their last earnings release. It also shows a detailed view of earnings revisions since the last time it has issued a release.
But this is not all. The Heat Map also illustrates the reported year-over-year revenue growth, the earnings surprises, and the changes in the investor sentiment since the last quarterly release.
Sentiment
The site claims its investor sentiment database is the largest one when it comes to earnings estimates and releases. Over the years, the database has collected over 10m sentiment readings, released from over 900,000 investors.
Besides, Earnings Whispers’ users can get a current representation of the dominant sentiment within the major sectors, including Discretionary, Staples, Energy, Financials, Health Care, Industrials, Materials, Technology, and Utilities.
The site also has a Historical Sentiment feature, but unfortunately, it fails to load at the time of this writing.
Top-Down
Understandably, if Earnings Whispers has a Top-Down feature, it should also have a Bottom-Up one.
The Bottom-Up feature provides a glimpse of equity analysts’ views on corporate earnings.
The feature consists of three functionalities – Earnings Highlights, Earnings News, and Pivots. Collectively they provide a complete representation of the projected results of different instruments and expand on the views of the top Wall Street professionals to help users plan their next moves.
Investor Features
Earnings Whispers supports a diversified set of features intended to ease the way market participants navigate the earnings announcement season.
Among the most popular ones is The Whisper Report® – a weekly assessment of the current environment, combining top-down and bottom-up analysis. There are also short reports that bring you a list of stocks with favorable long-term earnings indicators.
Aside from the Whisper Report®, another very useful feature is the A+’s. It measures companies’ results and compares them against the forecasts of finance professionals, as well as individuals’ sentiments. That way, it signals which stocks are likely to outperform the market during the next 90 days.
Investors can also take advantage of Earnings Whispers’ recommendations of statistically favorable trading strategies, trending stocks suggestions, and earnings release summaries.
Trader Features
Earnings Whispers brings a plethora of useful features and helpful resources for the individual trader or the sophisticated trading firm, focused mostly on actionable strategies for short-term volatility and price movements surrounding corporate earnings releases.
Earnings Whisper Plays, for example, is an excellent tool for those looking for short-term trades suggestions based on the general consensus among market analysts, technical analysis signals, stocks reviews, ratings, and investor sentiment.
Another highly useful feature is the so-called +5’s. By using Earnings Whispers® Score, it picks the stocks that are most likely to return the Earnings Announcement Premium (EAP).
The Power Ratings feature takes care of the issue that not all earnings surprises affect stocks in a similar way. By analyzing the effect of the results mismatch, they filter the stocks most favorable for trading. The Breakouts feature also helps in that regard by identifying shares with favorable earnings statistics that indicate potential drifts into the upcoming earnings announcements.
Support Features
Earnings Whispers has developed an extensive support section to help users better navigate the platform and capitalize on its powerful functionalities. It includes useful documentation, research, and tips on how to use different indicators and interpret results.
It also has a Library section that users can explore to gain additional knowledge or insightful information regarding the platform, money management, and investments as a whole.
Earnings Whispers Costs
How much does Earnings Whispers cost?
A part of Earnings Whispers’ features is available to users for free, even without a mandatory sign-up.
The Investor and Trader services, however, are paid plans. To unlock the Investor features, you will have to subscribe to a paid account that will cost you $24.95 per month, or $249.95 with the annual plan. The trader plan starts with a 2-week free trial and traders get a 4 free Investor’s Business Daily IBD Digital weekly newsletters as a bonus. However, the pricing information is entirely hided for the trader subscription. The trader service pricing only gets revealed once you entered all your personal information, including your phone number and address. The monthly plan is $129.95, and the quarterly plan is $299.95.
This definitely doesn’t rank the solution among the cheapest platforms, but it indeed is the best in terms of value-for-money.
However, one thing worth noting is that Earnings Whispers’ site is stuffed with ads, which is very annoying for a serious audience like financial professionals and investors who seek straight-to-the point data and access to high-quality information without any distractions.
Who Is Earnings Whispers Service Best For?
The site has all the necessary tools to address the needs of long-term investors and retail traders. No matter whether you are looking to plan your short-term trades or long-term strategy, as well as if you are a professional money manager or just a boutique trading firm picking stocks, Earnings Whispers is among the platforms that will help you the most.
Even popular media and investment platforms like The Barron’s use the Earnings Whispers’ grading systems and earnings announcement features to get insights.
The platform is highly rated by leading financial media like the WSJ, Bloomberg, Forbes, and TheStreet.com, all of which speak positively about its earnings announcements features and quality of it reviews.
Earnings Whispers Review Summary
The bottom line of this review is that Earnings Whispers is an amazingly powerful solution that eases the life of short-term traders and long-term investors by bringing them access to an abundance of useful resources, shares reviews, and tools. It can prove invaluable in researching sentiment, ratings, expectations, eps estimates, or potential implications of earnings announcements.
It is worth noting, however, that the site’s poor UI is a significant disappointment. Many of the charts fail to load on various browsers, while some sections are really hard to find. If the site undergoes a redesign, it will surely rank as the undisputed source of earnings release information and forecasts.
However, until then, the main thing it can rely on is the quality of its information, which, if you aren’t a picky user, will be all that really matters.
Pros
- Free access to basic functionalities
- Monthly and yearly subscription option for investors
- Specialized in earnings data with 22 years of experience
Cons
- Slow website
- Intransparent regarding pricing information
Rating:
More Stock News App Reviews:
