There are a bunch of online paid services that give you access to historical financial data, charts and stock analysis. I have often found that buying those services is probably not the best use of our money, which should rather be put in the market. Especially for the little guys like me who only invest less than $2k at once. In this post, I’m going to discuss the best free options for researching stocks.
- Google Finance: This is the best service for quickly looking at charts, earnings calendar and even a bit of historical financial data. I think the Related Companies section is awesome for figuring out the competitor firms in the space. But the best feature has to be Portfolio/Watchlist. Here you can add your transaction details and really keep track of the whole portfolio. This even supports multiple geographies and google takes care of the conversion for you to give a unified look if you want. Additionally, I use it to maintain multiple sector-wise/strategy-wise watchlists that I can glance quickly at the end of the day to get and idea of where the marker moved. Google Finance is easily the tool that I use the most.
- Guru Focus: There is a paid version, however the free version does a decent job for most of my needs. Once, I want to dig deep into the financials of a company I switch over to Guru Focus. It has a 10Y summary of financial statements that I find the most useful. I would often look into the Dividend section for my Value buys as well. Along with the yield and dividend growth, it also tells me about the buy-back rate which is great. Guru Focus has overall the most comprehensive list of financial ratios available for free. Peter Lynch chart is also free!
- Trading View: This is probably the least famous options in this list. This is mainly used for advanced charting. I use it less for generating buying/selling signals (like the traders do), but rather look at overbough/oversold levels for the stocks and basic support/resistance analysis. I used to be a hardcore technical analyst, but I have since learned to use the power of combining technical analysis for buying fundamentally solid companies.
- Seeking Alpha: It is foolish to buy stocks on somebody else’s recommendations. That said, reading a lot about stocks that are in your radar never hurts. There are multiple viewpoints being discussed. If you have a viewpoint, you might get some validation or a reason to challenge yourself on your conviction. It is important to keep the thinking process going and developing and I find SeekingAlpha to be an excellent platform for that, at least better than following news articles.
- FinViz: FinViz has the best free stock screener out there. Period.
There. You have it. 5 best online (free) resources to research on stocks. There are some strong contenders who couldn’t make it to the list, but worthy of a mention.
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