Last Updated on 09/03/2022 by Deepak Singla
Investing is what brings you joy and money. But not knowing anything about it you become a gambler who starts to play online Blackjack in Canada with no rules. To avoid risk, you must analyze the market first. Market analysis starts with the study of the general economic situation: monetary policy evaluation, control of public statements of the FED chairman and other politicians, about the interests of certain companies, sectors, countries.
News Platforms
These platforms let you access as much information about recent news you need:
- Finviz – News section (free functionality is sufficient) – a multifunctional resource, one of the functions is the prompt publication of news.
- Financial Times (paid, $38 monthly) is a well-known American media with an objective review and commentary on world events.
Regarding news, it is important to keep an eye on: corporate news (stock buybacks, index inclusion), quarterly report results, lawsuits, insider deals, dividend approvals.
Search Engines
If you only know the name of the company and want more basic information about it, such as the ticker, stock price, business capitalization, stock price. A regular Google search will work for you. The query should look like this: company name + “stocks.”
Besides the built-in functionality with basic information about the company, this search query will provide relevant links to the official website of the company with a section “for investors”, where you can find useful information “from the horse’s mouth.
FINVIZ Stock Screener
Let’s go back to Finviz and go to the Screener section. There are a huge number of criteria to filter stocks here. The main filters that can be applied are: capitalization (company valuation) over $2 billion, quote from $5, liquidity (trading volume) from 500,000 shares per day. This will leave the most interesting companies that meet the criteria of many American hedge funds.
Further we sort the companies according to the necessary criteria: from dividend yield and sector, to economic multipliers and technical analysis indicators.
Studying Company Reports
Market Watch is an excellent resource for timely information not only on macroeconomic statistics, in the “expectation-reality” format of important figures, such as unemployment and inflation rates. But this tool is especially valuable for publishing quarterly reports on all liquid companies.
It’s important to look through the reports yourself to find those situations when the market overreacted to a small negative in the reports and quotes fell sharply, and it seemed to us quite expected fact.
Besides last quarter’s results, the reports publish “guidance” – management’s forecasts for the next period, plans to increase production or expand markets.
Having analyzed several reports of companies from the same sector, we are likely to know how competitors report and we can buy (or sell) them profitably before the report.
Analyst Opinions
To get the final confirmation of your hypotheses about the prospects of a particular company, you can use the resource tipranks, which collects target estimates for companies and consensus on the type of sell-hold-buy.
It’s most effective to take into account estimates provided by analysts whose forecasts have a good rating (available in the paid version for $30 a month), but the free functionality is also sufficient to understand the weighted average estimate of a company.
