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 trading breakouts tool.

In our 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 lets you build up to 3 backtests using data that’s delayed by one year. It’s mainly useful as a way to test out PyInvesting. The Premium plan offers unlimited backtests with real-time data.

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

Backtesting in PyInvesting

Backtesting is at the heart of PyInvesting. The platform offers 20 years’ worth of data for markets around the world including the US, Europe, and Asia. It also includes data for bonds, mutual funds, forex, commodities, and REITs.

There are five different backtesting tools in PyInvesting:

• Beginner
• Relative Strength
• Moving Average
• Strategic Allocation
• Fundamentals

The Beginner and Strategic Allocation tools are nearly identical and not very helpful. They let you backtest a strategy that only involves maintaining fixed allocations of a set of stocks. You can choose your rebalancing frequency, but that’s it.

The Relative Strength and Moving Average tools are also nearly identical, but they give you more ability to create a custom strategy. You can choose a universe of potential stocks to invest in, then define a strategy such that you only invest in stocks that are above their 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 rebalancing frequency (weekly, biweekly, monthly, or annually). If multiple stocks meet your strategy’s moving average criteria, you can define weighted fundamental parameters like 6-month returns, profit growth, and P/E ratio to determine which stocks should be added to your portfolio.

The Fundamentals backtesting tool allows you to create a strategy based on a wider set of fundamental parameters. You can define your strategy based on factors like dividend yield, P/E and P/S ratios, profit and revenue growth, debt, return on equity, and more. 

Backtest Results

Backtest results display your strategy’s total and annualized returns, volatility, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown. You can compare your strategy’s performance against any benchmark ticker. Visualizations allow you to see how your positions changed over time and what tickers contributed most to your performance.

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

Stock Screener

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

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

Customization and Layout

PyInvesting automatically saves 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 backtesting strategies.

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

PyInvesting Platform Differentiators

PyInvesting is one of the only platforms we’ve seen that offer 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 in addition to US stocks is another major benefit. Stock Rover only covers North American stocks, although fundamental stock screeners like FinViz and Uncle Stock also offer global market coverage.

While the capabilities PyInvesting offers are unique, the platform still has work to do to make itself more useful for active investors. The range of fundamental parameters that you can backtest on is limited. There’s no way to export your backtest data, making it difficult to optimize your strategy. The platform also leaves out basic technical indicators like RSI that could be useful for defining entry points for an active strategy.

What Type of Investor is PyInvesting Best For?

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

However, PyInvesting doesn’t offer the flexibility or optimization tools that you could get from building and testing strategies in Excel. Investors who want to dive into their data or build more complex strategies may be better served by using Stock Rover’s screening tools and Excel to run backtests manually.