Posts Tagged ‘finance’
My Investing Tools
Everyone has their own collection of “tools” that they use to analyze the markets. Here is a list of some of my favorites and why I use them.
Google Finance is obviously a de-facto go-to for quick information about stocks and the markets. The front page can display multiple stock portfolios which I can keep an eye on and the graph at the top of the page is a quick overview of the direction the markets are taking.
This is probably a website that many of you have not heard of. It is however a very useful tool. As soon as you type in a ticker it’ll plot for you 6 charts as shown above. The charts include a 90 day price history, put/call open interest, open interest configuration, buy/sell/hold ratings, volatility index, and short interest. There is enormous benefits in this tool if you’re looking to get a feel for the trend of a stock without doing too much in-depth analysis.
3. Morningstar’s Market Barometer & Yield Curve
Yet another tool that many have probably not heard about. The Morningstar barometer lets you gauge very quickly the movements of the types of stocks in the market. The cube displayed in the picture above shows that the every size market cap for all stocks from value to growth gained over 1.25% today. It also shows that this is slightly lower than the same baskets 3 years ago, much lower than these baskets 1 year and 3 months ago, and that large cap stocks have been hurt much less in the last month and last week than the medium and small cap stocks.
The bottom picture is another tool offered by Morningstar. The prices of the energy commodities is clearly listed and easy to read and underneath that the treasury yield graph compares the yields 1 year ago with yields today.
The benefit of these tools is to quickly observe several important facts about the market. I use the barometer when investigating investor sentiment. Are investors flooding to value stocks or growth stocks? Has growth become favorable again? etc
4. Seeking Alpha’s Wall Street Breakfast
The Wall Street Breakfast is an email that I receive every morning. It contains many of the developments of the day before as well as an economic calendar of what could move the markets today.
As you can see, today the Asian markets were affected by the previous day in the western markets and that the US markets are poised to open higher. There are a few key numbers released today that could adversely affect that though such as the preliminary GDP numbers. When you get these emails you can click on any of the events on the calendar and see the actual numbers. What I haven’t shown you above is the analysis of the previous days events. One of them is the Citibank bailout.
I find this email very useful to gauge what to watch for during the day. The information not shown here is also important because that is the same information that professionals who are investors receive through their evening news and invest upon today.
5. AOL Money
I know this might seem redundant when I have already placed Google Finance as my #1 tool, but AOL money has a feature in its graph which I have not seen displayed on other sites without having to create something custom – a seasonal chart.
This is a chart of Citigroup (C) as a seasonal chart on AOL Money. As you can see it is clean and the colors make the chart easy to read. The chart displays the performance of the stock for the past 5 years for the full year. I find this very useful when analyzing whether a stock is seasonal. How many of you know the release patterns of software companies and gaming companies and would probably like to see how this affects their stock prices. How many of you would like to know how the Christmas season reflects on the stocks of retailers? This graph can show it to you.
6. Stockcharts
There is nothing I like more than a detailed customizable candle chart and Stockcharts.com offers it. You can customize the size of the chart, the indicators, whether to overlay volume, etc, etc. It also has a Java module which allows you to annotate charts, draw your own trend lines and more.
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There are quite a few more tools which I employ on occasion which I will blog about later but try out those first 6 and see for yourself how useful they are, I promise that you won’t be disappointed.
