Introduction
IG.com is a very popular site amongst traders and investors because it enables people to go long and short on thousands of different stocks through their spread betting and CFD platform.
It is obviously important to be armed with as much information as possible before entering a position, particularly for medium to longer term trades, and normally you would get this information from other dedicated sites, but the good news is that you can now get a lot of useful data without ever having to leave the site.
That’s because IG have partnered with TipRanks to offer proprietary Smart Score data for thousands of UK and US-listed stocks, as well as listed stocks from the Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain and Singapore exchanges.
A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Score from TipRanks
If you’re not already familiar with TipRanks, they basically compile a vast array of data for every company, both fundamental and technical, and their algorithm then assigns a score between 1 and 10 to each of these stocks based on this information.
8-10 = outperform
4-7 = neutral
1-3 = underperform
As you can see from the image above, the fundamental data includes a consensus of analyst ratings, recent hedge fund activity, insider trading activity, blogger sentiment, crowd wisdom, news sentiment, return on equity (ROE) and the current growth rate.
They also provide a snapshot of the technical trends of a stock, including the moving average trend and the current momentum of a stock.
The image above is NVIDIA’s Smart Score data, and as this has been one of Wall Street’s leading stocks in 2023, it is unsurprising that it currently has a score of 9 out of 10 with strong fundamentals across the board and strong technical momentum behind it.
It is only some possible profit taking from insiders and hedge funds that is preventing it from getting a perfect score of 10 out of 10.
Another Example – Pinduoduo
One stock currently on my watchlist that does have a 10/10 rating is Pinduoduo:
As I know from my own research, this Chinese company has excellent fundamentals, but this Smart Score data quickly tells us that the technical trend and momentum is also strong right now, and that hedge funds have been adding to their positions lately, which is a key driver of share price growth in the long run.
Of course you shouldn’t make trading decisions based on Smart Score alone, but this does seem to give you a really good snapshot of a company at any given time.
Final Thoughts
The point of this article was just to bring this tool to your attention because I know that many people like to use IG, and this Smart Score data should prove to be very useful for anyone who likes to trade stocks on this IG platform.
The only real drawback is that the data isn’t as comprehensive for UK stocks, particularly the small and mid-cap stocks, but for US stocks and large cap UK stocks, TipRanks’ Smart Score provides some invaluable insights.