As of Oct 4, 2026
Stockyard is a $7–$30/month platform that automates your own investing rules. IBD Digital ($44.95/month) and MarketSurge ($149.95/month) deliver CAN SLIM ratings, lists, and charting.
IBD gives you William O'Neil's system - CAN SLIM - with house ratings, curated lists, and charting, across a family of products.
Stockyard gives you strategy automation - Smartfolios. Use the pre-built Smartfolio strategies or build, backtest, and automate your own system.
| Feature | Stockyard | IBD / MarketSurge |
|---|---|---|
| Core idea | Automated strategies: use pre-built or define your own strategy as rules in Smartfolios; the platform backtests and runs it daily, alerting you when needed | Adopt the CAN SLIM system; use IBD's ratings and lists, manually |
| Stock rankings | Every fundamental metric percentile-ranked separately - against the whole market, then within your sector or screen. You see each ingredient. Smartfolios and Discoveries can use these rankings in stock discovery and selection | EPS, RS, and other ratings, plus a single Composite Rating (1–99) per stock |
| Stock Recommendations | Strategy-specific signals instead of house ratings: the same stock can trigger a buy signal in your growth Smartfolio and none in your value Smartfolio - a signal means your rules were met, not that Stockyard rates the stock a Buy. No market calls | No per-stock Buy/Sell/Hold rating; instead, house buy/sell calls - Leaderboard's staff-picked Leaders (buy points, buy ranges, Cut List) and SwingTrader's trade alerts with buy zones, profit goals, and stop losses - the same calls for every subscriber |
| Sectors | Proprietary 60+ sector taxonomy by revenue contribution (pure-play, core, diversified, emerging); companies can sit in several sectors at once. Enables thematic strategies such as pureplays in specific technologies | 197 industry groups, label-based |
| Screening | Discovery: filter 5,000+ stocks on fundamentals, results percentile-ranked against the market and within your sector or screen; saved and pre-built searches | Screener built around IBD ratings and 70+ data points, plus curated lists (IBD 50, Growth 250) |
| Strategy Monitoring | Smartfolios checks your strategy rules daily against every earnings report and price move, and alerts you | Stock lists and data for you to check manually; alerts on stocks you watch |
| Watchlists | Your own picks, with automated buy/sell signals based on selected technicals, earnings alerts, and performance ranking of watchlists against rules-based Smartfolios | Watchlists with alerts when a stock enters a buy zone or flashes sell signals |
| Backtesting | Your own rules, backtested on 10+ years of point-in-time data | No backtesting of your own rule set |
| Chart patterns | Indicator-based triggers (breakouts, crossovers, RSI) and market enablers for market timing | AI pattern recognition for CAN SLIM formations (cup-with-handle, flat base, etc.) |
| AI assistant | Syd: explains any stock's numbers in plain English, and builds Smartfolios and searches from a plain-English description | No conversational assistant; human product coaches instead |
| Content | Informational blogs: strategy studies and methodology | A large editorial operation: news, lists (IBD 50, Growth 250), education, community |
| Investment clubs | Built-in - shared tools, club Smartfolios, 25% off for 2+ members | Not offered |
| Ads | None | investors.com carries advertising |
| Product structure | One product, three tiers | A product family: IBD Digital, MarketSurge, Leaderboard, SwingTrader, IBD Live, and more |
| Price | Free tier; Individual $7/mo; Pro $30/mo. Every new account gets 30 days of full Pro access, then continues on the tier you choose, including Free. | From $44.95/month to $149.95/month. Special offers and discounts may apply. |
| Executes trades | No - research and monitoring only | No - research only |
The Composite Rating. One number per stock is convenient, and nothing in Stockyard matches its glanceability. Our disagreement: a blended score hides its ingredients. When a stock's earnings are excellent, and its price action is weak, a composite smooths that into a number you can't take apart. Stockyard shows each metric's percentile separately, so the trade-off is visible. If you love the single number, you'll miss it here.
CAN SLIM pattern recognition. MarketSurge automatically identifies chart formations - cup-with-handle, flat bases - as they form. Stockyard's technical signals are indicator-based (breakouts, crossovers, relative strength), not formation recognition. Committed CAN SLIM chartists will find MarketSurge's charting deeper.
Scale and community. IBD has decades of editorial content, education, and a large user community, built on 35+ years of CAN SLIM research. Stockyard is a new platform (launched in 2026, currently in beta) with a small blog and a founder-led team. If the library and the crowd matter to you, they have it and we don't - yet.
Orientation to today. IBD is built around the current day: today's ratings, today's lists, today's market. If your routine is a daily session with fresh lists, IBD serves it well.
Automation - It watches, so you don't have to. IBD hands you excellent data and expects you to keep checking it. A Smartfolio automates and runs your rules against 5,000+ stocks every day - every earnings report as it lands, every price move - and tells you when a stock qualifies or a sell rule fires. Most platforms are built to help you look things up. Stockyard is built to watch for you.
Your percentiles, not house ratings. IBD's ratings are IBD's: fixed methodology, their weights, their thresholds. In Stockyard you set the tests - say, revenue and EPS growth in the top quintile for four straight quarters, within pure-play companies in one sector - and rankings re-compute inside the universe you defined. The rules are yours, and every number behind them is visible.
Sectors by revenue, not labels. A conglomerate with a small quantum-computing division is not a quantum-computing stock. Stockyard's 60+ sector taxonomy classifies companies by how much revenue each business actually contributes, so a pure-play screen returns companies that genuinely make their money there.
Backtest before you trust. Every Smartfolio is backtested automatically on point-in-time data - the numbers as investors actually saw them at the time, not today's restated figures. You can see how your rules would have performed, including the drawdowns, before committing a dollar.
Price and simplicity. IBD is priced from $44.95/month to $149.95/month (www.investors.com). Special offers and discounts may apply. Multiple IBD products mean stacking subscriptions. Stockyard is one product with three tiers: Free, Individual ($7/month) or Pro ($30/month), no ads, cancel anytime.
IBD's offer is a method: follow CAN SLIM, use our ratings, read our lists. It's a good method with a long history, and for investors who want to be told what's strong today, it's the benchmark. Stockyard's offer is automation: state your method as rules, test it honestly, and let the machine enforce it every day - including the days you'd rather not look. We don't publish buy lists or blended scores, because the point is your strategy, executed with discipline - not ours.
Stay with IBD if you trade CAN SLIM actively, live in the charts, and use the editorial flow daily. Try Stockyard if you respect the rigor but are tired of the manual work, clutter, the ads, the stacked subscriptions - and of being the one who has to remember to check everything.
For investors whose main job is monitoring strategies and screening fundamentals, yes. For active CAN SLIM chart traders who rely on formation recognition, MarketSurge remains the more specialized tool.
No, deliberately. Stockyard shows the percentile rank of every metric separately - revenue growth, earnings growth, margins, price strength - against the market and against each stock's peers. You see the ingredients instead of a blend.
Much of its growth core, yes: strong current and annual earnings and revenue growth as percentile tests, price-strength and breakout triggers, and a market-direction gate (for example, requiring the S&P 500 to clear an RSI threshold before any buys fire). What Stockyard won't do is recognize chart formations for you - the patterns are yours to judge.
Stockyard: one product, three tiers: Free, Individual ($7/month) and Pro ($30/month) without ads, with 25% off for investment clubs. IBD products range from $44.95/month to $149.95/month (See IBD Pricing)
IBD, MarketSurge, CAN SLIM, Leaderboard and SwingTrader are trademarks of Investor's Business Daily, LLC; Stockyard is not affiliated. Information from public sources as of Oct 4, 2026.
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