Boost your investment analysis with these 5 essential research tools
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Doing investment research can be a daunting task at first. Especially when you don't know exactly where or how to start.
Having a tool kit that enables you to conduct quick, superficial as well as deep research will get you ready to kick-start your research of unveiling the most undervalued companies.
However, not everyone knows about those tools when starting out.
Researching companies will become a breeze with these tools.
My research tool belt consists of the following tools:
- TIKR
- Barron's
- Value Investors Club
- Seeking Alpha
- Companies Market Cap
Let's dive in:
TIKR - The ultimate investment research platform
I have one main platform that I consult for most of the data on companies: TIKR.com.
If you don't have a $20'000 annual budget to spend on a research tool, TIKR delivers unbeatable performance for the fraction of the price. All the data is based on S&P Capital IQ, which is the gold standard for financial data of companies.
On TIKR, you have access to data ranging from
- Market Overview,
- Historical company financials up to 20 years, like income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, all kinds of ratios, business segment data, company valuation, analyst estimates, transcripts, filings and ownership structure,
- Holdings of investing gurus, like Warren Buffett or Ray Dalio,
- and a global stock screener, with over 65'000 different companies.
The aggregation of all this information will save you countless hours of fetching everything from different sources.
I love the fact that all the fillings and transcripts are readily available for me to click through.
Finally, the functionality of exporting any information via copy-paste leaves no wishes open.
Cost: Free (in the most basic tier)
Barron's - The publication for investment news and background info
Charlie Munger, who died 99 this week, attributed some of his investing success to reading Barron's.
"I read Barron’s for 50 years. In 50 years I found one investment opportunity in Barron’s out of which I made about $80 million with almost no risk" - Charlie Munger
Although he only acted on one idea, Barron's is a great resource to stay on top of the market and get exposed to in-depth articles about various companies and industries.
Besides using Barron's for inspiration and investment idea generation, I like to search the website for companies I'm researching. This way, you will get more background information about your research subject.
Cost: $4.99 per month
Value Investors Club: High-quality investment research
Value Investors Club (or VIC) is a community of seasoned value investors who submit their two best investment ideas to the platform every month.
It's a great place to - again - find new investment ideas or research companies you are currently looking at.
To be able to publish your research on the platform, you need to submit a research paper of your best idea. However, it's been said, that the application success rate is lower than when applying to Harvard. 😅
Caveat: If you just sign up as a regular member, the latest investment research articles will only unlock 45 days after their initial publication.
I most often use Value Investors Club to cross-check my own research against the write-ups of other value investors.
Cost: Free
Seeking Alpha: Research articles
Another well known investment research platform. Here, everyone can publish their insights and analyses to a broad audience.
Seeking Alpha provides a plethora of research articles. Some from professional money managers, some from investment research enthusiasts.
There is also a stock screener, a functionality to track your own ideas or your portfolio, see market data and the latest financial news.
Cost: Free
Companies Market Cap: Charts of historical market caps
As value investors, we are not so much concerned about the movements of stock prices than looking at the overall price of a company. One way to do this is looking at the market cap - the total capitalisation of the shares of a publicly traded company.
On companiesmarketcap.com you can retrieve the historical market caps of almost 8'000 companies. It's a great tool to quickly get an idea how the market cap changed over time.
You can also rank companies for example by earnings, revenue, employees, P/E ratio and dividend yield.
Which opens up another avenue for idea generation.
Cost: Free
Of course, there are other tools and platforms that deliver similar services and value, but I have found these five tools to be the most effective to use for my investment research.
Do you have a favourite tool that is missing on this list? Send me a DM on LinkedIn, so I can check it out.
That's it for today.
Happy researching.