Investment analysis tools: the five kinds

The five kinds, in the order you need them

1. Screeners — narrow thousands of companies to a shortlist, on rules you set.
2. Charting and scanning platforms — read price action and watch a shortlist in real time.
3. Backtesters — check whether a rule would have worked before you risk anything on it.
4. Valuation models — estimate what a business is worth, as opposed to what it costs.
5. Portfolio trackers — measure what you actually own and what it has actually returned.

Most people start at 2, because charting platforms market the hardest, and only reach 5 years later — after discovering they never actually knew their own return. The order above is closer to the order that helps.

1. Screeners — turning 8,000 companies into 20

A screener applies filters to an entire market at once and returns the companies that pass. That is the whole idea: it is a sort, not a judgement, and it cannot tell you a company is good — only that it met the conditions you typed.

Screeners split by what they filter on. A fundamental screener works from filed accounts — earnings, debt, return on capital — and suits investors holding for years. A technical screener works from price and volume and suits traders holding for days or weeks. Mixing them up is why so many screens return nothing useful.

Free examples of each here: the value screener ranks US filers on Greenblatt’s magic formula and Piotroski’s F-score, straight from their SEC filings; the momentum screener ranks the same universe on relative strength and rebuilds monthly.

2. Charting and scanning platforms — the real-time layer

This is the category people picture when they hear “analysis software”: live charts, drawing tools, indicator libraries, and a scanner that re-runs continuously through the session rather than once a night. If you are making decisions intraday, nothing in the other four categories substitutes for it.

It is also the only category on this page where the good options are genuinely paid. Real-time exchange data costs money to license, so “free real-time” usually means delayed, sampled, or funded by selling your order flow somewhere else. TC2000 is the one we use and reviewed in full — its EasyScan engine is the fastest point-and-click scanner we have tried, and its plans start at $24.99/month. If you are comparing it against the obvious alternatives we have written TC2000 vs TradingView, TC2000 vs thinkorswim and TC2000 vs Finviz — the last is the one to read if you would rather start on a free tier. You can also download it and try the scanner without giving a credit card. We are a TC2000 affiliate, so treat that recommendation accordingly — the comparisons above say where it loses.

3. Backtesters — the one most people skip

A backtester runs a set of rules over historical prices and reports what would have happened. It is the only category that can tell you a strategy does not work, which is presumably why it is the least popular.

The thing to understand about this category is that a backtest is an upper bound, not a forecast. Every backtest is run by someone who already knows how the period ended, so the honest use is elimination — finding out that the famous signal you were about to trade lost to doing nothing. Our strategy backtester is free and needs no signup; the golden cross is a good first look, because the best-known buy signal in technical analysis underperforms buy-and-hold on most of what you point it at.

4. Valuation models — what it is worth, not what it costs

A valuation tool turns assumptions about a company’s future into a value per share, usually by discounting projected cash flows or earnings back to today. Unlike the first three categories, its output is not a measurement — it is your own opinion, arithmetic applied.

That is worth stating plainly because these tools look the most objective and are the least. Two careful people can put defensible inputs into the same model and come out 60% apart. The useful question is not “what is this worth” but “what would I have to believe for today’s price to make sense”, and that one has an answer. Free example: the intrinsic value calculator, with discounted cash flow and discounted EPS side by side.

5. Portfolio trackers — the one you end up needing

Everything above is about deciding what to buy. This category is about knowing what happened after you did: your real return after deposits and withdrawals, what you hold across accounts, and which decisions actually paid.

The reason it matters more than it sounds is that almost nobody knows their own return. A broker shows you profit on positions it currently holds, which flatters you by hiding everything you sold, and it has no idea about the account next door. Money-weighted return over your actual deposits is a different number, and usually a less comfortable one. Pulse is our own answer to that — import your broker’s export and it works out the honest figure. There is more on what it does if you want the detail first.

Which one should you actually get?

• Investing for years, choosing companies → a fundamental screener and a valuation model. You do not need real-time data, and paying for it is the most common wasted subscription in this hobby.
• Trading over days or weeks → a charting and scanning platform, plus a backtester to check the rules before you trade them.
• Buying index funds monthly → honestly, a tracker and nothing else. Try the monthly what-if calculator and see whether any of the rest would have changed your outcome.
• Already invested and not sure how it is going → a portfolio tracker, first, before buying anything else.

If you would rather compare specific products than categories, our round-up of ten investment tools names them, and the tools we built are all free to use without an account.