Briefing.com Review – My Thoughts on this News Streamer

Briefing.com Introduction

Briefing.com has established itself as one of the premiere subscription trading news services for day traders who want to quickly be alerted to actionable news stories without sifting through the sum total of stock news generated every day. Although Briefing.com stories are integrated into the news feeds of numerous brokerages, the standalone service itself provides significantly more substantial live stock analysis thanks to its team of dedicated financial analysts. The headlines provided by Briefing.com can provide most of the live research that intra-day and short-term traders need in order to trade on news ahead of mass movements in the market.

Briefing.com Pricing Options

Briefing.com offers three tiers of service – Briefing In Play, Briefing In Play Plus, and Briefing Trader – each of which are available to try free for 30 days.

The Briefing In Play package is primarily aimed at providing actionable headlines to traders and can be used for live research, but comes with few analysis features. The basic service costs $65 per month or $480 for an annual subscription.

The Briefing in Play Plus package adds several tools for generating new stock ideas and analyzing stocks and options strategies. This service is particularly useful for providing the in-depth analysis required by swing traders and costs $90 per month or $720 annually.

The Briefing Trader service provides proprietary trading signals on top of the headlines, along with real-time analysis from Briefing.com’s financial analysts. The service costs $300 per month or $3300 annually.

Briefing.com Features

Charts/Technical Indicators

Briefing.com is not intended as a charting service, so technical charts are few and far between on the news feed. However, the headlines will call out technical movements in stocks that are identified from other charting and technical analysis services.

News

The Live In Play feed, which is updated in real-time throughout the day, is the backbone of Briefing.com. The feed contains a constantly updating list of headlines, which can be customized to show all securities that Briefing.com is covering or to only show headlines relating to stocks within a user-defined portfolio. The feed lists headlines according to stock ticker symbols, which makes it fast and easy to identify the stories that are relevant to your trading. The feed can also be filtered according to different types of news stories, such as broker research, earnings reports, IPO news, options action, technical analysis, and more. Briefing.com also offers a Dual Live In Play feed, which splits the screen to display two customizable news feeds side-by-side.

Calendars

Another useful section of the Briefing.com platform is the calendar view, which displays major financial events in an easy and customizable format for either a single day or a specific future week. The calendar is capable of showing upcoming earnings reports, IPOs, earnings guidance, and analyst upgrades and downgrades, among other events. Individual events can be expanded to reveal detailed information about the recent history of a security as it pertains to the upcoming financial event. Briefing.com also allows traders to keep their own calendar to which events from the overall calendar can be added for quick reference later.

Alerts

Alerts appear in the main news feeds on occasion when securities breach key technical support and resistance levels. For users on the Trader subscription service, the platform will also highlight alerts aimed at swing traders to track long and short positions that can potentially be played by traders. I like setting alerts for some of the stocks I follow from Motley Fool’s stock picks or from my own research.

Watch Lists

Briefing.com allows traders to establish multiple portfolios, which can essentially serve as watchlists since the Live in Play feed can be filtered to show only headlines related to stocks within these portfolios.

Customization and Saved Layouts

Briefing.com is a browser-based service, which allows for significant customizability in layouts. The Live In Play feed is shown as a single or dual (split-screen) window by default, although any news feed window can be popped out into a new window or tab. In addition, Briefing.com offers a “Dashboard” visualization that includes a news feed, highlights hits against a saved portfolio, and a feed of in-depth analysis stories.

In addition, up to four custom workspaces can be created and saved from a selection of standard formats.

Compatible Brokers

Many online brokers offer news from Briefing.com in their news streams either for free or as a discounted service. However, the analysis feeds in the Plus and Trader subscriptions services are not available outside of Briefing.com.

Briefing.com Platform Differentiators

The Live In Play feed is the heart of Briefing.com and excels at providing actionable news, rather than simply dumping all financial news that comes across the internet into your feed. This makes it easy to use the service to identify potential trades quickly, without having to sift through numerous filters and headlines. The service is also very useful for providing analysis on movements in the market to help explain why a stock price collapsed or ballooned suddenly. While the browser-based interface is not fancy, the system runs quickly and smoothly and the viewing panels are designed for maximum efficiency for the time-strapped day trader.

What Type of Trader is Briefing.com Best for?

Briefing.com is best for intra-day traders and swing traders who are looking for live headlines and news analysis to help them identify potential trades. However, longer-term investors can also benefit from Briefing.com’s analysis features and from the fact that the service tends to surface only actionable trades within the Live In Play feed. Overall, the service can be a useful tool in the belt of most traders who are looking to act on news, rather than react to changes in the market after news breaks widely.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Live In Play feed is curated to feature only actionable news and headlines
• Calendars quickly highlight financial events and detail history (e.g. earnings reports and guidance)
• News feeds can be filtered according to multiple custom portfolios
• Efficient, easy to navigate browser interface with up to four saved workspaces
• Free 30-day trial period for all three subscription levels

Cons

• No ability to filter Live In Play feed according to stock fundamentals (e.g. market cap)
• Service can be pricey for traders who primarily want a clean financial news stream