Based in Detroit, Michigan, Benzinga Pro is a financial media outlet that offers real-time investment news and actionable trading ideas to active investors.
The investment service was launched in 2010 by Jason Raznick and has grown into a high-speed newswire attracting about 25 million readers.
Instead of giving you financial advice, the platform offers capital market news and a combination of investment tools to enable everyday traders to uncover investment opportunities and make informed decisions.
So, is Benzinga Pro worth it?
In this Benzinga Pro review, I delve into how the platform works, its features, Benzinga Pro cost, pros & cons, and more.
How Does Benzinga Pro Work?
Benzinga Pro is a browser-based application that runs on all devices, but accessing it from a PC provides the best experience.
The platform is a subscription investment service and offers 3 plans to accommodate different user needs and budgets.
The plans you choose comes down to the features you want to access, your investment style/preferences, and your budget.
For starters, you can start with the free plan, which only offers the bare minimum features, and upgrade to the paid Basic or Essential plans as your trading experiences level up
In case you need help, you can reach out to their customer support via phone, live chat, or email.
Benzinga Pro Core Features
Alerts
Benzinga carries the day with its customizable, real-time market news alert system.
You can choose to have your alerts delivered via desktop pop-ups, email notifications, or sound alerts so that you won’t miss out on key headlines or the biggest news of the day.
Alerts are fully customizable by tools and workspaces, allowing you to customize by newsfeed, watchlists, or signals and set different sounds for the different categories.
Thus, you can stay on top of the market without the need to stay glued to your devices.
Newsfeed
Stock market news can sway stock prices significantly, hence a vital part of the active trader’s strategy.
Benzinga offers a fast, reliable, and customizable newsfeed to let you stay on top of the latest news/headlines, know what news is driving the stock market, and make smart trading decisions.
You can customize and filter your feed by source, price, categories, screener, watchlists, volume, market cap, and more to stream news that’s relevant to your investing strategy.
Important to the Benzinga newsfeed are the price sentiment engine and the Why Is It Moving (WIIM) feature.
The former helps you know the impact news will likely have on stock price and in which direction, while the latter provides a quick and concise way to understand why a stock is moving.
Related: Stay informed with your trades with these best investment newsletters.
Benzinga Pro Calendar
The Benzinga Pro Calendar is a great tool to help you keep track of tickers, event data, and important stock dates in one place.
It’s packed with more than 12 event calendars, including analyst ratings, dividends, earnings, conference calls, IPOs, SEC filings, economics, splits, unusual options activity, retail sales, guidance, mergers & acquisitions, and secondary offerings.
Each calendar has filters relating to that specific event to enable you to find exactly what you want.
Stock Scanner
Benzinga Pro Scanner lets you filter for stocks in real-time with news and data updates. You can filter stocks by price, volume, short interest, relative volume, float, market cap, outstanding shares, and more.
If you want a slower-moving environment, you can choose refresh rates of 10, 30, and 60 seconds or create a static list by choosing no refresh.
You can also opt for preset filters based on winning strategies, including:
- 5-minute movers
- Mid-cap movers from open
- Real-time after-hours gainers
- Overall gainers.
All these can further be customized with price and volume filters to align with your strategy.
Stock Screener
The Benzinga Pro stock screener enables you to search and filter stocks using a variety of fundamental and technical metrics so that you can find a list of stocks that match your trading techniques.
You can filter stocks by float, volume, price change, VWAP, margins, simple moving average, insider/institutional ownership, and more.
Once you have found your stock list, you can freeze it, choose a refresh rate, or export it to a CSV file.
Signals
The Benzinga signals tool helps you keep tabs on the market by alerting you to price and volume-related events, and other unusual market activity.
You can set different types of signals, including price spikes, opening gaps, halt/resume, options activity, highs/lows, and block trades.
All these come with filters to help you further fine-tune your signals by average volume, watchlist, price change, market cap, share float, shares outstanding, price/earning ratio, and other variables.
You can choose to get your signal by sound alerts, synthesized voice, or browser/desktop notifications.
Related: Learn about the top stock advisor websites in Canada.
Watchlist
Benzinga watchlist is fully customizable, and you can create as many watchlists as you want.
They enable you to keep track of stocks and potential trade ideas, monitor your position, and get a quick snapshot of how stocks in your list, or a particular industry, are performing.
Your watchlist integrates with other Benzinga tools like newsfeed, alerts, calendar, and signals to enable you to filter by watchlist and create a dedicated news feed or set alerts relevant to the stocks you are monitoring.
Options
Benzinga Pro Unusual Options Activity data is an add-on that costs $27.97 per month, but it’s billed alongside your Benzinga subscription.
This service gives you access to Unusual Options Activity Signals that alert you to large block trades or sweeps executed near the bid.
It also comes with a Calendar for Unusual Options Activity History to enable you to search by date and look for historical options data.
Audio Squawk
Audio Squawk is a tool that offers real-time audio news broadcasts of market-moving updates from Benzinga’s newsdesk so that you won’t miss key headlines even when off the screen.
The audio Livestream runs from 6 am to 6 pm, bringing you squawk alerts on breaking news, volume spikes, earnings reports, analyst ratings, economic releases, and more.
Chat Room
Benzinga chatrooms enable you to interact and trade with the Benzinga Pro Community. You can ask/answer questions, give/find trading ideas, share news/developing stories, and more.
Currently, the platform offers 7 chatrooms to meet different traders’ needs, including
- Benzinga Pro Lounge,
- Benzinga TV,
- Benzinga Pro Day Trading,
- Benzinga Crypto,
- Benzinga Bootcamp
- Benzinga Community Support
- Benzinga Pro Options
Movers
Movers is a tool that brings you a list of daily market gainers and losers in real time and why they are moving.
You can filter the list by sector, price, market cap, and period, and then access charts, financials, and essential data for further analysis.
Trading Mentorship
Benzinga Pro offers a trading course from Nic Chahine, a successful options trader, helping you to learn how to trade with the best. It goes for $347/mo or $281/mon if paid annually.
The trading Mentorship & Education course also includes:
- Daily trade picks
- Daily live trading with Nic from 9 am-4 pm
- Access to the options inner circle chat room
- Regular market overview to match Nic’s winning trading strategy
- Unusual Options Activity
- Sunday charting lesson with over 100 companies
- Bonus videos throughout the week
How Much Does Benzinga Pro Cost?
Benzinga Pro offers 3 subscription plans, including Free, Basic, and Essential. The screenshot below shows how much each Benzinga Pro plan costs, along with the included features.
As you can see, the free plan comes with the bare minimum of features, and if you want to unlock more features, you would need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Paid plans come with a 14-day Benzinga Pro free trial to allow you to test the platform’s features and functionality before committing.
If unsatisfied, you can cancel your subscription within the initial purchase period and reach out to their customer support for a refund.
When you sign up using our exclusive link and promo code SAVVY35, you get 35% off the regular price. Further discounts of up to 69% are available, depending on your chosen term.
Pros and Cons of Benzinga
Pros
- Offers real-time news about the market, industry sectors, and individual stocks
- Fully customizable investment tools to fit your investment needs and techniques
- Chat rooms to interact with other traders, learn and share trading ideas
- Audio alerts and a squawk box to keep you updated off-screen
- 3 subscription plans to accommodate different traders’ needs
- Offers customer support via phone, live chat, and email
Cons
- No broker integrations to trade directly from the Benzinga platform
- Supports only stocks and options
- No advanced charting
- The free version may not be helpful for active traders
- No mobile apps
Is Benzinga Pro Worth It?
Benzinga Pro is a great platform for active traders looking to leverage real-time news and information to uncover short-term trading opportunities for quick returns.
However, it’s not a good option for long-term, buy-and-hold investors who pay no attention to day-to-day market news or everyday price volatility.
If you are a fundamentally driven value investor, you are better off with the Benzinga Pro alternatives discussed below.
Benziga Pro Alternatives
If Benzinga Pro doesn’t work for you, you can look into the following Benzinga alternatives.
Motley Fool Stock Advisor Canada
Motley Fool Stock Advisor Canada is a top Benzinga Pro alternative for long-term, buy-and-hold investors. It’s reputed for delivering market-beating returns, and nearly doubling the S&P/TSX Index over the last 9 years.
Their investment services include:
- Expert stock recommendations
- Monthly new stock picks from legendary investors
- Dozens of stock reports and investment articles
Currently, they have a 66% discount off the regular price, giving you a full year of access for only $99 (only $1.90 per week), backed with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Stocktrades Premium
Stocktrades Premium is an investment platform in Canada that works as a great investing service for long-term and value-focused investors.
So if you are looking to buy and hold fundamentally sound companies for the long term instead of momentum trading, Stocktrades can be a great Benzinga alternative.
The founders, Dan and Mat, help you build a core portfolio of Canada and US foundational stocks with a 5+ year investment thesis.
Over the years, their average picks have delivered a 41.7% return more than the TSX index.
Currently, the platform is helping over 2,000 members transform their portfolios. You can join them here and get a 30% discount off the regular price.
Seeking Alpha Premium
Seeking Alpha is a great Benzinga alternative reputed as a value investing service for stock research. The platform works well for long-term and swing investors who pay attention to company fundamentals.
You get:
- Comprehensive research reports and company analysis
- Profitable investment ideas hand-picked by experts
- 4-6 investing ideas sent daily via email
- Smart screening and filtering tools
- Weekly market digests
- Access to a professional investing community to share ideas
A seeking Alpha Pro subscription goes for $69.99/mo or $41.99/mo if paid annually and comes with a 14-day free trial to test the platform’s features and functionality.
FAQs
Yes, Benzinga Pro is a great platform for day trading. The platform was created to empower active traders like day and swing traders with real-time market news and trading tools they need to maximize returns.
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor Canada, Stocktrades Premium, and Seeking Alpha Pro are some of the best Benzinga Pro alternatives for long-term, value investors.
While Benzinga Pro offers browser-based mobile accessibility, it doesn’t offer a specific mobile app.
Benzinga Pro free trial is 14 days long and allows you to test the platform features and functionality before committing to a monthly or annual subscription.
Benzinga Pro offers several features, including a newsfeed, event calendar, watchlist, stock scanner & screener, signals, chatrooms, audio squawk, top movers list, alerts, options, and a trading mentorship program.
