The self-directed investor's 2026 stack

Investors layer by job, not by category

A self-directed European investor in 2026, managing €15K to €250K across a couple of brokers, will pay for somewhere between two and five different financial tools. The interesting thing is not which tools. It is that almost none of them overlap. Investors do not pick one tool per category — they layer tools per job: the broker is one job, tracking is another, screening is another, research is another, tax reporting is another, journaling is another. The result is a stack — sometimes two trackers, two research surfaces, and a notebook for everything else.

What follows is an honest tool-by-tool reading of seven platforms most often found in that stack in 2026, plus a description of the genuine workflow gaps the combination still leaves open. The pricing figures are May 2026.

Koyfin — institutional data at retail price

What it's best at. A Bloomberg-shaped financial data terminal with 10 years of financials, forward estimates, 500+ chartable metrics, customisable dashboards, and a screener that runs across global equities and ETFs. The Kitces 2025 AdvisorTech Study ranked it first for investment research and analytics in its category.¹

What it doesn't do. No mobile app — desktop-web only. No backtesting at any tier; strategy testing has to live in another tool. No agentic AI assistant. No investment journal, no thesis tracking, no rule-based monitoring. No public API — the Capital IQ vendor agreement blocks it. CSV download is supported for table data, but financials, estimates, and growth-rate columns are blocked from export.²

Pricing 2026. Free tier with 2 years of financials and 2 watchlists. Plus $39/mo. Premium/Pro $79/mo. Advisor tiers from $209/mo. Annual billing saves up to 30%.

Geographic strength. Global, but US data is deepest. G2 reviews specifically flag thinner European and UK coverage relative to the US.³

Natural user. The self-directed investor who already knows what they are researching, wants raw institutional data, and is comfortable with a Bloomberg-style learning curve.

Sharesight — multi-broker tracking with tax

What it's best at. Automatic trade ingestion from 200+ global brokers via trade-confirmation-email forwarding plus direct API connections, with full corporate-action handling (dividends, splits, mergers, DRIPs) and currency-aware tax reports. 250,000+ securities across 50+ exchanges and 100+ currencies.⁴

What it doesn't do. No equity research. No screening. The cryptocurrency catalogue is limited. Option strategies and short positions are not tracked. DRIP auto-tracking is limited to ASX and NZX; other markets require manual entry.

The biggest constraint. Sharesight's polished, jurisdiction-specific tax reports are available for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and the US — and nowhere else.⁵ Continental European investors get generic capital-gains and dividend summaries, not tax-authority-ready reports. A French or Spanish investor running a multi-broker UCITS portfolio gets the cleanest tracking experience available — and still has to do tax work manually.

Pricing 2026 (EU site). Free for 10 holdings, 1 portfolio. Starter €7/mo (30 holdings). Standard €17/mo (unlimited holdings, 4 portfolios). Premium €23/mo (10 portfolios). Annual billing on the paid tiers.⁶

Natural user. The multi-broker, multi-currency investor in AU, NZ, UK, US, or Canada who wants tax-ready reporting — or the continental European who needs global tracking and accepts manual local tax work.

Simply Wall St — visual analysis at every market

What it's best at. The Snowflake — a five-axis visual (value, future growth, past performance, financial health, dividends) plus auto-generated narrative reports for 120,000+ stocks across 90+ markets, sourced from S&P Global. A five-second read on any listed stock anywhere.⁷

What it doesn't do. No multi-broker portfolio tracking with tax reports. No journal or formal thesis tracking. The screener is intentionally limited (3 saved screeners on Premium, 10 on Unlimited). No mutual funds, bonds, fixed-income, or crypto. The scoring template is industry-agnostic — the same six checks run against a bank and a software company, which is documented honestly in the open model but not always read that way by users.

Pricing 2026. Annual billing only. Premium ~$120/yr. Unlimited ~$180/yr.

Geographic strength. Broadest in this set — every major exchange plus dozens of smaller markets.

Natural user. The long-term fundamental investor who wants a visual scan across many candidates and AI-written narratives, not someone building a DCF from first principles. More on Simply Wall St's Snowflake methodology — and how to read it without overweighting the headline visual — in the previous essay, a field guide to AI stock scores.

Getquin — the DACH neo-broker companion

What it's best at. Fastest neo-broker onboarding in Europe. A populated portfolio in five minutes via deep, stable Trade Republic and Scalable Capital API integrations, paired with a real social investment community of European retail investors.⁸

What it doesn't do. The most-requested feature among Premium users is detailed tax reporting for any jurisdiction — 47% have asked for it.⁹ There is no CSV import; users must share broker credentials via Open Banking or third-party APIs. Portfolio analytics beyond basic performance charts are limited. No screener, no DCF, no thesis journal, no rule-based alerts. Multi-currency support is weaker than the global peers.

Pricing 2026. Free tier covers most use cases. Pro at roughly €4.99/mo or €49.99/year unlocks unlimited transactions, time-weighted returns, dividend forecasting, benchmarking, and removes ads.

Geographic strength. DACH-first (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), with growing traction in the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland by 2026.

Privacy note. The social model means the user's portfolio is partially visible to the community by default. The free-to-premium drift — features available at signup that gradually require Pro — is a known pattern. Trustpilot reviews flag occasional data mismatches and slow customer support.

Parqet — German Steuer-aware tracking

What it's best at. Parqet X-Ray — granular allocation analysis that drills through ETFs to show actual stock-level exposure across the full portfolio — combined with a Tax Dashboard built specifically for German Steuer requirements, including a Vorabpauschale CSV export that no other tool in this set produces.¹⁰

What it doesn't do. No equity research or screening. Limited support for non-German brokers. No real estate, collectibles, or alternative assets. No AI thesis monitoring or formal investment journal. The free tier is restrictive.

Pricing 2026 (official page). Basic €0. Plus €11.99/mo with 3 months free on annual billing. Investor €29.99/mo. 14-day free trial.¹¹

Privacy note. Hosted in Germany. The company explicitly states it does not finance itself through personal data — a real factor for the privacy-aware DACH investor and a meaningful contrast with engagement-driven peers.

Stock Rover — US fundamentals depth

What it's best at. 700+ metrics, 140+ pre-built screeners, correlation analysis, dividend income forecasts, rebalancing logic, and Monte Carlo simulations on US and Canadian listings.

What it doesn't do. No European or Asian exchange coverage. Stock Rover has confirmed it will only add additional exchanges “when there is a large demand for a given exchange to make it economically feasible.”¹² For most European investors holding UCITS ETFs or LSE/Xetra/Euronext stocks, this is the deal-breaker — even though the depth on US data is genuinely strong.

Pricing 2026. Free dashboard/news only. Essentials $7.99/mo. Premium $17.99/mo. Premium Plus $27.99/mo.

Alpha Spread — DCF as a sanity check

What it's best at. Auto-generated DCF models on tens of thousands of global tickers, with three scenarios (base, worst, best), sensitivity analysis, and relative valuation comparisons. Covers global exchanges including European listings.

What it doesn't do. No portfolio tracking, no broker import, no tax reports, no journal. As of May 2026, the company has publicly acknowledged that its fair-value calculation has been “fundamentally broken” — tweaking assumptions in different orders produces different fair values — and is being rebuilt from the ground up. The AI Assistant, the company adds, does not always perform as reliably as it should.¹³

Pricing 2026. Free tier with 3 reports per week. Premium $12/mo annual. Unlimited $20/mo annual.

The typical 2026 stack

There is no single canonical stack. From community discussion and product reviews, three patterns recur.

The pattern is consistent across all three. One tracker (chosen by broker compatibility). One or two research surfaces (chosen by depth of strategy). One manual layer that handles tax reconciliation.

Five gaps the stack still leaves open

Across the seven tools above and the three common stacks, five categories of work are systematically poorly served.

1. 1. Continental European tax reporting. Sharesight covers AU, NZ, CA, UK, US — and nothing else. Parqet handles Germany well, but only for German brokers. Getquin lacks detailed tax reports for any jurisdiction beyond raw exports. A French, Spanish, or Italian investor with a multi-broker UCITS portfolio has no tool that produces a tax-authority-ready report.
2. 2. Investment journaling and thesis tracking. Simply Wall St's Narratives are the closest — community/AI-generated theses with fair values — but they are not the user's private structured reasoning. None of Koyfin, Sharesight, Parqet, Getquin, or Alpha Spread offers structured thesis capture with falsification criteria. Most sophisticated investors run this in Notion, Obsidian, or Apple Notes.
3. 3. Rule-based monitoring and alerting. Simply Wall St has fair-value alerts and screener alerts. Koyfin has price-alert primitives. Trackers offer dividend and price email alerts. Nothing in the European stack lets the user say “alert me when my satellite position exceeds 8% of the portfolio” or “alert me when an earnings date falls within 48 hours.”
4. 4. Rebalancing context. Stock Rover has rebalancing logic but excludes European exchanges. Trackers display drift but do not name specific UCITS ETF actions to bring the portfolio back inside its bands.
5. 5. AI research synthesis. Koyfin has no agentic AI assistant. Simply Wall St's AI generates narratives, not user-driven research. Alpha Spread's AI is — by the company's own acknowledgement — unreliable. Sharesight's only AI is a trade-file importer.

What's hard about gluing them together

A few practical frictions show up regardless of which tools are combined.

No common identifier discipline. ISIN is the European standard, but Stock Rover, Koyfin, and Alpha Spread are ticker-first. When a European reconciles a UCITS ETF position across tools, FX and listing-venue mismatches are the rule.

The biggest EU broker is the worst integrated. Trade Republic is the single largest broker by user count in Germany. Sharesight supports it only via trade-confirmation email forwarding, not via API. The best global tracker cannot cleanly consume from the most popular EU neo-broker.

Credential-sharing risk. Getquin and Parqet rely on Open Banking and third-party API aggregators. The privacy-conscious investor either trusts them or falls back to manual CSV and Portfolio Performance.

Closed APIs. Koyfin has no public API. Sharesight's API is consumer-oriented, not export-friendly. Alpha Spread's API is capped and starts at $150/mo. Users cannot build their own monitoring or journaling layer on top of any of them.

Tax data trapped in PDFs. Broker tax reports in most EU jurisdictions are PDF-only and require manual extraction. Parqet partially solves this for German brokers; nobody solves it for the multi-country case.

The gap an AI research workspace would fill

The categorical gap above is consistent across the European stack. Trackers track, screeners screen, valuation tools value. The middle layers — structured research synthesis, thesis journaling, rule-based monitoring with reasoning, rebalancing context — are filled by spreadsheets, Notion notes, and discipline. They are the workflow that determines whether the stack is actually useful for managing a portfolio versus just looking at it.

That gap is what Acutic is being built around. Five named analyst agents per instrument (quality, valuation, technical setup, news, risk), a structured journal that captures thesis at entry, a rules engine that watches every threshold the user has set for themselves, and an evaluation layer that reviews decisions at 7, 30, 90, 180, and 365-day windows. It is not a tracker — Sharesight, Getquin, and Parqet do that better. It is not a screener — Koyfin and Stock Rover do that better. It is the connective tissue the European stack does not yet have.

See the methodology page for how the analyst agents are constructed, the AI transparency page for model and limit disclosures, and the two preceding essays — a field guide to AI stock scores and what changes for AI investing tools on 2 August 2026 — for the methodology and compliance posture that frame the workspace.

Notes

1. ¹Kitces 2025 AdvisorTech Study, as cited on Koyfin's blog — koyfin.com / Bloomberg terminal alternatives.
2. ²Koyfin FAQ on data download — koyfin.com / help / FAQ.
3. ³Koyfin user reviews — g2.com / koyfin.
4. ⁴Sharesight supported brokers — sharesight.com / supported brokers.
5. ⁵Sharesight tax-report jurisdictions, as documented in third-party review — mycapitally.com / Sharesight review.
6. ⁶Sharesight pricing (EU site) — sharesight.com / eu / pricing.
7. ⁷Simply Wall St Snowflake explainer — support.simplywall.st / Snowflake.
8. ⁸Getquin product overview — matchmybroker.com / Getquin review.
9. ⁹Getquin user-demand statistic (47% Premium users requesting tax features) — donkycapital.com / Getquin alternatives.
10. ¹⁰Parqet Tax Dashboard announcement — parqet.com / blog / tax dashboard.
11. ¹¹Parqet pricing — parqet.com / pricing.
12. ¹²Stock Rover exchange coverage statement — stockrover.com / support / exchanges.
13. ¹³Alpha Spread known-issue disclosure — findmymoat.com / Alpha Spread review.

Two essays that pair with this one: the previous field guide to AI stock scores covers the methodology side; the regulatory primer on the EU AI Act and AI investing tools covers the compliance side. Request early access.

Acutic provides investment research and educational content. It is not investment advice. Acutic operates as a non-personalised investment research and analysis service under MAR Art. 20 / § 85 WpHG. Past performance does not predict future results.