Best Financial Analytics Tools

Financial analytics software helps financial services professionals visualize and extract insights from financial data. These solutions are vital tools for financial professionals, particularly those who manage investment portfolios on behalf of clients. Financial analytics tools typically include robust reporting functionality, analytics dashboards, data visualization features, the ability to ingest data from multiple sources, data tagging capabilities, and investment attribution features. At their core, financial analytics services are used to evaluate data and build investment strategies. Financial analytics solutions differ from financial analysis software, which is software designed for internal finance teams responsible for budget management, cash flow, producing financial statements, managing balance sheets, and general financial management of industry-agnostic businesses. 

For example, a financial analyst at a hedge fund is looking to parse historical market data to help a client make the soundest investment in a specific sector. They would use financial analytics tools to help digest the relevant data, manipulate it, visualize it, and analyze it. With the product of the analysis, the financial analyst can provide their client with recommendations on what investments to make. After the investment, the analyst or portfolio manager can utilize the financial analytics platforms to produce reports on investment performance and track gains and losses within specific segments. 

The following are some core features of financial analytics software that can help users:

• Data ingestion: These tools ingest data from a variety of data sources. The data will include market prices, the percentage change in price over various periods, trading volume, and more. The data a given solution ingests and the data sources it uses help traders make better investment decisions and get better at forecasting. These solutions can act as a replacement for Excel documents, which traders have historically used quite heavily. 
• Reporting: Financial analytics software produces reports based on investment analysis and market data. These reports can help users shape future investment strategies. Some solutions include strategy-specific tools where users can test specific scenarios to see how they might play out with different market inputs. Users can produce forecast reports using financial analytics services. 
• Data tagging: Financial analytics platforms allow users to create tags for and attribute those tags to specific types of data, helping users keep track of them. Data tagging can be used to organize and manipulate data as a given trader wants, allowing the business to automate portions of the process of dealing with historical investment data later on. 
• Data visualization: These financial analytics platforms can produce visualizations of real-time and historical data. Most solutions contain pre-built visualization types for users to choose from. If available, users can make use of pattern recognition tools to automate previously manual parts of the process and produce custom visualizations within a financial analytics tool. 
• Dashboards: These financial analytics software contain dashboards for users to have a single-pane view of a specific investment type or portfolio. From this dashboard, users can check on the profitability of specific investments. Users can analyze cash flow management within specific publicly traded companies as part of the inputs for their investment strategy if significant positive cash flow is an important indicator for future success for a particular trading strategy. 

The following are the benefits of using the best financial analytics tools.

• Improved investment performance: Financial analytics software can help investment funds and investors improve profitability and introduce more stability to their investment performance. 
• Real-time portfolio analysis: Traders use financial analytics solutions to automate portions of their workflows related to portfolio management. Users can streamline a great deal of the grunt work when it comes to analysis, allowing them to get better at financial planning for their customers and focus on improving their decision making. 
• Data-driven insights: Financial analytics platforms provide data-driven insights that can help businesses make informed decisions.
• Identifying cost-saving opportunities: By analyzing spending patterns and identifying inefficiencies, businesses can reduce costs.
• Enhanced forecasting: By analyzing historical data and current trends, businesses can make more accurate predictions about future performance.