PyInvesting Review – What You Need to Know

PyInvesting is a backtesting platform designed to help active investors build their strategies and find potential opportunities. It offers a unique set of backtesting tools along with a stock screener and a trading breakout tool.

In this PyInvesting review, we'll take a closer look at this platform to help you decide if it's the best service for improving your profitability.

PyInvesting Pricing Options

PyInvesting has a free Starter plan and a Premium plan that costs $19.90 per month.

The Starter plan allows you to create up to 3 backtests using 1 year of delayed data. It is mainly useful as a way to test PyInvesting. The Premium plan offers unlimited backtests with real-time data.

You can also try the Premium plan for free for 30 days.

Backtesting at PyInvesting

Backtesting is at the heart of PyInvesting. The platform provides 20 years' worth of data for markets around the world including the US, Europe and Asia. It also includes data on bonds, mutual funds, foreign currencies, commodities, and real estate investment trusts.

There are five different backtesting tools at PyInvesting:

• junior
• Relative strength
• Moving average
• Strategic customization
• The basics

The starter and strategic customization tools are almost identical and not very useful. It allows you to backtest a strategy that only involves maintaining fixed allocations to a group of stocks. You can choose your rebalancing frequency, but that's it.

The Relative Strength and Moving Average tools are also almost identical, but give you greater ability to create a custom strategy. You can choose a wide range of potential stocks to invest in, and then select a strategy so that you only invest in stocks that are above the X-day moving average (simple or exponential). PyInvesting recommends using a 200-day moving average to focus your strategy on momentum stocks.

You can choose the maximum number of stocks allowed in your portfolio and the frequency of rebalancing (weekly, biweekly, monthly, or annually). If multiple stocks meet your strategy's moving average criteria, you can select fundamental weighted parameters such as 6-month returns, earnings growth, and P/E ratio to determine which stocks to add to your portfolio.

The fundamentals backtesting tool allows you to create a strategy based on a broader set of fundamental parameters. You can determine your strategy based on factors such as earnings yield, P/S and P/E ratios, earnings and revenue growth, debt, return on equity, and more.

Backtest results

The backtest results display your strategy's total annual returns, volatility, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown. You can compare the performance of your strategy with any benchmark indicator. Visuals allow you to see how your positions have changed over time and which indicators have contributed most to your performance.

However, there is no way to see all the trades your strategy has made or export the data to Excel for more in-depth analysis. Therefore, it is difficult to optimize your strategy using PyInvesting.

Stock sorting

PyInvesting offers a very limited stock screener that lets you filter stocks by market, dividend yield, earnings and revenue growth, and Wall Street analyst target price.

The screener is useful because you can use it to select your universe of ticker symbols for a new backtest. However, it is not very effective as a standalone stock screener.

Customization and planning

PyInvesting automatically saves the backtests you create to your account. If you have a Premium subscription, you can turn on email alerts to be notified when a stock enters or leaves your portfolio for one of your backtest strategies.

Backtests on PyInvesting typically take up to five minutes to run. We found the site to crash occasionally, but it was generally usable with some patience.

Differentiation tools in the PyInvesting platform

PyInvesting is one of the only platforms we've seen that offers fundamentals-focused backtesting for active investors. Even Stock Rover, which is one of the best fundamental stock research and screening tools available, lacks backtesting capabilities.

The fact that PyInvesting covers global markets as well as US stocks is another major benefit. Stock Rover only covers North American stocks, although basic stock screeners like FinViz and Uncle Stock also provide global market coverage.

While the capabilities offered by PyInvesting are unique, the platform still has a lot of work to do to make it more useful for active investors. The range of basic parameters on which you can perform testing is limited. There is no way to export your backtest data, which makes it difficult to optimize your strategy. The platform also ignores fundamental technical indicators such as the Relative Strength Index (RSI) which can be useful for identifying entry points for an active strategy.

What type of investor is best for PyInvesting?

PyInvesting is best for active investors who want a way to test fundamentals-based strategies. It is a powerful tool for building and testing a long-term momentum strategy or a strategy based on valuation and profitability metrics. It is suitable for investors interested in global markets as well as investors who want to focus on US stocks.

However, PyInvesting does not provide the flexibility or optimization tools that you can get from building and testing strategies in Excel. Investors who want to dig deeper into their data or create more complex strategies can be better served by using Stock Rover and Excel screening tools to run backtests manually.