Hacking Investment Research — The Best Free Sites to Research Stocks.
Can you study a company or an investment opportunity without paying thousands of dollars in subscription fees to various services?
The answer is, Yes.
InvestorDeck.com is taking early steps to host a library of tools and information for the benefit of investment community. In that spirit, we want to share some of the more useful stock and market research resources that are free and can be helpful to you in better understanding your investment opportunities. Most of the links in this note should take you directly to the respective page of the information you are trying to look up.
We hope you find this useful. If we have missed any new service of note (we surely must have) please let us know at hello@investordeck.com.
Deep Dive
SEC EDGAR — https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provides free access to more than 21 million filings. Any deep dive into a company is not complete without browsing the filings available on this free site.
This link https://searchwww.sec.gov/EDGARFSClient/jsp/EDGAR_MainAccess.jsp will help you further narrow your SEC filings search with relevant key words and parameters.
SEC Filings Analysis
Rank and Filed — http://www.rankandfiled.com
Contexxia — http://www.contexxia.com
Maris Jensen put together RankandFiled.com, a tremendous resource (now sold) that allows users to explore all key aspects of SEC filings for filings that includes companies, insiders, and investment companies. Some aspects of the service seem better maintained than others. But overall, still a great free resource for the average investor.
Contexxia provides users with the ability to track semantic changes in filings and find new content in those filings. You will need to create an account to access the free version of the site.
Quick Overviews + Screening tools
Yahoo Finance! — http://www.finance.yahoo.com
Fidelity — https://research2.fidelity.com/fidelity/screeners/commonstock/landing.asp
Yahoo Finance! used to have the easiest layout to quickly scan for news, relevant data and links to a company’s fundamentals. Though all that data and information is still there, it seems harder to get to and therefore, over time, this site has steadily receded as our go to free resource for company information. We do still like their screening tool, which covers stocks, mutual funds, and ETF’s. Overall, the quality of the data is still decent for an ad supported free service, you just need to work much harder to get it.
On Fidelity’s website you can build your own screens or work with pre-built screens. Fidelity is also generally a good source to get a quick overview on a stock or a sector. They pull data from various established research firms and there are a host of free tools available on their site.
Market Snapshot
Finviz — http://www.finviz.com
Finviz provides one of the best snapshots or visuals of the key moving stocks and sectors in the market during the trading day. They capture technical, fundamental, macro, and structural signals that can be quite useful for investors. We also like their screening tool and insider buying and selling page. Some of the ads they display interrupt the user experience, but there is a lot of good data here that is free to use.
Earnings Transcripts and Articles
Seeking Alpha — http://www.seekingalpha.com
Avondale Asset Management (Scott Krisiloff, @skrisiloff) — http://avondaleam.com/blog/
Seeking Alpha has provided a platform to a broader universe of retail and institutional investors to air their opinions on individual stocks and sectors. There may be a lot of noise here so it may or may not hurt you to skim through articles on individual stocks or sectors. We haven’t tried the Pro (paid) version of the service so we can’t comment on the quality of that content. They definitely have improved disclosure requirements for those posting content on the site. We think they are doing a great job with making earnings call transcripts available for easy review, and that is the primary reason we go to this site.
Scott Krisiloff from Avondale Asset Management puts up weekly reports from earnings transcripts and presentations. These reports contain note-worthy data/information from earnings calls and decks that highlight industry trends. This is one of the best ways to get caught up on current and emerging trends in the market.
Technical Analysis
StockCharts — http://www.stockcharts.com
StockConsultant — http://www.stockconsultant.com
If fundamental analysis tells you what to buy (or sell), technical analysis can help you decide when to buy (or sell). StockCharts is a great resource for the technical side of things, offering price charts with advanced charting options. Also, the site offers a lot of educational content related to analysis of financial charts. However, the content and tools need to be organized better and easier to find and navigate to.
StockConsultant is another useful resource for obtaining a quick view on the technical setup of a stock. They also have an excellent screener tool.
Earnings Estimates
EarningsWhispers — http://www.earningswhispers.com
Estimize — http://www.estimize.com
Fidelity — https://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch/landing.jhtml
EarningsWhispers has been around for almost two decades. This site has a lot of tools and data related to earnings analysis, including revisions, surprises, and growth. There is a lot of good free data here.
Estimize has created place for itself as an aggregator of crowdsourced earnings and economic estimates. You will have to create an account and contribute with your estimates to access the free parts of the service. Overall, quite useful to monitor earnings trends, future expectations, and benchmarking results.
Again, Fidelity is a good resource to get street consensus earnings expectations (and historical beat / miss) for any stock. They also have data on an individual company’s earnings performance relative to its sector.
Valuations
Aswath Damadoran — http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/
Aswath Damodaran’s website is a great resource for accessing ready-made financial models, an array of data sets, and useful valuation related material. Damodaran is a Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, and is widely known for his valuation related expertise. As a free resource, his website is a gift for any resource constrained investor. Users may have differing opinions on how much value one can extract from ready-made models etc., but we have applied his tools for quick and dirty analysis and always find it very useful.
Comparables Analysis
Google Finance — http://www.finance.google.com
Fidelity — https://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch/landing.jhtml
Running a comps analysis should be an integral part of your investment tool kit. Google Finance’s ‘Related companies’ link (is displayed in the stock page) pulls data from FactSet and gives you a wide range of comparable metrics for 10 tickers closest to your subject company.
Fidelity’s stock research page also has a ‘Compare’ link, where you can run comps on up to 4 comparables across 8 broad parameters.
Financial Statements Analysis
CalcBench — http://www.calcbench.com
Nasdaq — http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/company-financials.aspx
CalcBench and Nasdaq are great resources to get a comprehensive view into a company’s financials as reported. CalcBench leverages XBRL data on all US filers to do its job. A free account is required to access company financials (easy to do and worth the trouble). Paid subscribers can do a whole lot more with the tools these guys provide.
The Nasdaq link provided here lets you pull financials on up to 25 companies at a time and provides financial ratios going back four periods (annual and quarterly).
Sell Side Activity
Nasdaq — http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/stock-comparison
Yahoo Finance — https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/analysts?p=AAPL
There is really no service (free or paid) that accurately tracks all sell side stock coverage accurately. The sell side is also known to be biased towards long/buy recommendations. Nasdaq and Yahoo can provide users a directional assessment of sell side sentiment and projections on a ticker.
IPO’s, Secondaries, and Financings
Rank and Filed — http://rankandfiled.com/#/stream
Nasdaq — http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/
Rank and Filed provides a comprehensive look into all filings related to prospectuses and private placements. This type of data is helpful in understanding dilution related risks in a story. Nasdaq is a good resource to check on recent IPO filings, withdrawals, and upcoming IPOs.
Short Interest
Nasdaq — http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/short-interest.aspx
ShortSqueeze — http://shortsqueeze.com/
Nasdaq and ShortSqueeze should give you the big picture on the short interest associated with any stock. The Nasdaq link allows you to enter up to 25 tickers at one go. The free versions of these services probably don’t capture dark pool data.
Investor Presentation Archive
InvestorDeck — https://www.investordeck.com
At InvestorDeck.com, we are in the process of building a library of investor related material, which includes the latest investor presentations for all US listed companies. All our material is free to browse. We are also in the process of expanding our collection of market and industry presentations. If you have investment or investor related presentations, you can submit them by creating an account here https://investordeck.com/register.
