Is Stockopedia worth it?
A review written by someone who builds a competing product, which is either a reason to distrust it or a reason to expect the criticisms to be specific. Stockopedia beats my product on most feature counts. Here is what it does, what it costs, and who it actually suits.
What Stockopedia actually is
A stock research and screening platform aimed at UK private investors, built around a ranking system rather than a valuation one. Every company gets a QualityRank, a ValueRank and a MomentumRank scored 0 to 100, equally weighted into a combined StockRank. Those ranks have been published with live performance tracking since 2013, which is over a decade of evidence almost nobody else in the retail space can offer.
Underneath sit more than 500 defined ratios, over 350 screenable fields, six years of history plus three years of broker forecasts, and coverage of somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 securities across the UK, US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Data comes from Refinitiv and S&P Global Market Intelligence, with director dealings from Smart Insider.
What it does better than almost anything else
Screening depth
350-plus screenable fields is a different order of magnitude from a broker's screener. You can build genuinely specific screens — and more importantly, backtest them, which is the feature most competitors simply do not have.
The accounting quality checks
Piotroski F-Score, a sector-adjusted Altman Z-Score and the Beneish M-Score come as standard. These are the tests that catch financial distress and earnings manipulation, and they are tedious to calculate by hand.
A full technical package
Ichimoku, Bollinger bands, MACD, RSI, ADX, stochastics, parabolic SAR, ATR trailing stops and more. Their own pricing page sells this as timing entry and exit, and it is a serious implementation rather than a token chart.
Forecast data
Three years of broker estimates, plus “rolling ratios” that weight this year's and next year's EPS forecasts by how far through the financial year a company is. That is a genuinely thoughtful piece of engineering.
The community
Around 15,000 subscribers and a Trustpilot rating of 4.7 from roughly 1,300 reviews. The user base skews toward methodical investors discussing process rather than tips, which is unusual and worth something on its own.
What it costs, and the number people forget
Pricing starts at £32 a month or £295 a year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Tiers are regional — the UK-only plan is the cheapest entry point, and adding Europe, the US or global coverage costs more. The trial runs 14 days and requires a card to start.
Here is the calculation most reviews skip. A subscription is not just a cash cost, it is a drag on your portfolio return, exactly like a fund management fee. At £295 a year:
| Portfolio | Annual fee as % of it |
|---|---|
| £10,000 | 2.95% |
| £20,000 | 1.48% |
| £50,000 | 0.59% |
| £100,000 | 0.30% |
| £250,000 | 0.12% |
On a £20,000 portfolio the subscription costs more than a typical index fund charges in total. That does not make it bad value — it makes it a tool that has to earn its fee through better decisions, and the smaller your portfolio the harder that is.
The honest limitations
It ranks, it does not value
This is the structural point. A ValueRank of 94 tells you a company looks cheap relative to the rest of the market. It does not tell you what the business is worth. Stockopedia publishes no fair value figure per company, so if you want a number in pounds to compare against the price, you need something else. See how intrinsic value is calculated.
RNS is end-of-day
Their news service aggregates Refinitiv and newswire content including RNS, but by their own help pages RNS arrives on an end-of-day archive basis published at 7pm, because real-time LSE licensing is prohibitively expensive. There are also no stock-specific RNS alerts — a user request for RNS filtering has sat on their ideas forum since 2011.
No real-time data
Fundamentals update several times a day and prices are delayed up to 15 minutes depending on the exchange. Fine for investors, not for anyone trading intraday.
A genuinely steep learning curve
500-plus ratios is only useful if you have a view on which ones matter. Reviewers consistently describe the ramp-up in weeks rather than days, and the most common failure mode is subscribing, exploring for a fortnight and letting it lapse.
So is it worth it?
Yes, if you screen systematically, want to build and backtest your own screens, value a decade of published rank performance as evidence, and have a portfolio large enough that £295 a year is a rounding error rather than a meaningful drag.
Probably not, if you hold ten companies you already understand and mainly want to know what each is worth. You would be paying for machinery you never use, and the one thing you actually want — a fair value figure — is the thing it does not produce.
Definitely not yet, if you cannot name three measures that would make you reject a company. A screener accelerates a method; it does not supply one. Start with reading a balance sheet and a free screener.
How Oak Growth compares
I'll be direct about the bias, then direct about the difference. Stockopedia beats Oak Growth on coverage, screening depth, backtesting, forecast data and accounting checks. If those are what you want, buy Stockopedia. What follows is the case for the other approach.
| Stockopedia | Oak Growth | |
|---|---|---|
| Fair value in £ | No — ranks only | Yes, DCF per company |
| Sort by margin of safety | Not possible | One click |
| Entry signal | 20+ indicators to read | MA red & yellow dots + RSI |
| Securities | 35,000–40,000 | ~1,000, curated |
| Screenable fields | 350+ | Core set |
| Backtesting | Yes | No |
| RNS | 7pm archive, unfiltered | Filtered to price-moving |
| ETF rankings | No | Yes |
| Price | £32/mo, one region | £18/mo, eight markets |
| Time to a decision | Weeks to learn | Minutes |
One click to the most undervalued companies
This is the difference that follows from everything else. Because Oak Growth calculates a discounted cash flow value for every company it covers, it can sort them by the gap between that value and the current price. One click and you are looking at the widest margins of safety across eight markets, ranked.
A ranking system structurally cannot do that. A ValueRank of 94 says a company screens cheap against its peers on a basket of multiples — it is a position in a queue, not a discount to a number. Without a fair value figure there is nothing to measure the price against, so “show me what is most undervalued” is a question the product cannot answer. That is not a criticism of Stockopedia's execution; it is what ranking means.
Two dots and RSI, not twenty indicators
Stockopedia's technical package is comprehensive — Ichimoku, Bollinger, MACD, ADX, stochastics, parabolic SAR, Donchian, ATR trailing stops and more. Comprehensive is the point, and also the cost: you have to know which ones matter, how they interact, and what to do when three of them disagree.
Oak Growth shows the two moving-average dots, red and yellow, and RSI. That is it, because in practice those are the only ones you really need — where the price sits against its trend, and whether it is stretched. Stockopedia has all three too; the difference is that it also has seventeen others competing for your attention, and no view on which to look at first.
Doing less here is the design, not a gap. Most people do not need twenty readings before deciding whether now is a reasonable moment or whether a share is still falling.
Curation instead of coverage
Forty thousand securities sounds like an advantage until you try to use it. Oak Growth covers roughly a thousand companies across eight markets, chosen rather than swept up, each scored on the four Buffett pillars — moat, management, economics and value. A smaller universe you can actually work through beats a larger one you filter blind.
Half the price, eight markets instead of one
£18 a month covers every market Oak Growth carries. Stockopedia starts at £32 for a single region and rises as you add more. On the fee-drag table above, that difference is worth roughly 0.9% a year on a £20,000 portfolio.
The fuller side-by-side, including where Stockopedia wins on features, is on the Stockopedia alternative page.
See the most undervalued companies in one click
Oak Growth values roughly 1,000 companies across eight markets, ranks them by margin of safety, and reduces entry timing to two moving-average dots and RSI. £18 a month, seven-day trial.
Explore Oak GrowthCommon questions
Is Stockopedia worth the money?
It depends on how you invest and how large your portfolio is. At £295 a year the subscription is roughly 1.5% of a £20,000 portfolio but only 0.3% of a £100,000 one. For systematic screeners with a decent-sized portfolio it earns its fee; for someone holding ten companies who mainly wants a valuation, it is machinery they will not use.
How much does Stockopedia cost?
Pricing starts at £32 a month or £295 a year, with tiers based on regional market access — UK-only is the cheapest, and adding Europe, the US or global coverage costs more. There is a 14-day trial requiring a card, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Does Stockopedia tell you what a share is worth?
No. It ranks companies against each other on Quality, Value and Momentum rather than publishing a discounted cash flow fair value. A high ValueRank means a company screens cheap relative to the market, not that it trades below a calculated intrinsic value.
Do the StockRanks actually work?
Stockopedia has published live performance for its ranks since 2013, which is more evidence than almost any competitor offers, and the long-run pattern has favoured high-ranked stocks. As with any factor system, performance varies considerably by period and by market, and past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
Also see: Stockopedia alternatives → · Best stock screener UK → · Simply Wall St alternatives →