Finding And Comparing Stocks And Funds

Stockanalysis.com and Tradingview.com have robust and free screeners for identifying appropriate investment opportunities.

Stockanalysis.com is more user-friendly. It includes a stock screener, stock comparison tool and an ETF screener, among other things. Tradingview.com is focused more on stocks and technical data.

Both sites allow you to create watch lists. Adding prospective stocks to a watch list before you buy is a great, no-risk way to improve your investing skills. You can try out different sets of investing parameters and add the resulting picks to watch lists for observation. If your picks are too volatile or too conservative over time, tweak the parameters and try again.

Remember to evaluate your watch list stocks relative to their peer companies and the overall stock market. After all, any value change—positive or negative—can be good or bad, depending on what’s happening in the industry, economy and financial markets.

Researching Dividend Stocks

Stock dividend data, particularly yields, can be skewed when companies make irregular payouts or change their dividend amount. The best dividend data providers share actual dividend payment histories, so you can calculate yield yourself.

Marketbeat.com is a good resource for dividend investors. The site appears to exclude special or non-recurring dividends from the yield calculation. Not all sites follow this practice, but this approach provides a more realistic yield value. You can and should double-check dividend yield so your income expectations are appropriate. If the company pays a consistent dividend, simply annualize the most recent regular payment and divide that amount by the stock price.

Marketbeat also publishes a company’s dividend growth record in years and its annualized three-year dividend growth rate. This data focus on dividend growth is somewhat unique.

Imitating World’s Best Investors

Want to know what’s in the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) stock portfolio? Or what Bridgewater Associates is betting on right now? You can find this information on the SEC’s website, but Whale Wisdom’s reports are far easier to digest.

For every portfolio, Whale Wisdom publishes shares held, market value, portfolio weighting and whether the number of shares held changed in the prior quarter. You can also drill down into specific stocks for some basic metrics, including market cap, P/E ratio, operating cash flow growth and more.

Watching Corporate Earnings And Insider Trades

The SEC provides free, searchable public access to official company filings via its EDGAR database. You can look up quarterly and annual reports, insider trades, executive compensation, proxy statements for shareholder meetings and more. You can also find registration statements, shareholder reports and proxy statements for mutual funds.

You can use SEC filings to verify corporate earnings and ownership information you find elsewhere online. These filings that may support your research:

1. 10-K. The 10-K includes audited annual statements and management comments on the year’s performance. It may also have execution compensation information.
2. 10-Q. The 10-Q includes quarterly unaudited financial statements.
3. DEF 14A. If executive compensation is not within the annual report, it will be in the definitive proxy statement.
4. Forms 3, 4 and 5. Forms 3, 4 and 5 report insider transactions.
5. 13F-HR. Institutional investors use the 13F Holdings Report to report their equity investments quarterly.

You can search for filings by company name. There is a separate search form for mutual fund and ETF information.

Investment Tools That Work For You

The right resources can make investment research easy and fun. And when those right resources are free, you can spend time exploring features and expanding your investing know-how without feeling rushed. You will develop your own forecasting, screening and researching methods—and these six investing tools make for a great starting point.