THE FAVORITE RESEARCH WEBSITES EDITION
26 APRIL 2012
What Are Your Favorite Investment Research Websites?
Wall Streeters have a term they use for the process of researching a company before making an investment. It's called "doing your due diligence," and the phrase dates to market reforms enacted after the 1929 Wall Street crash. The United States Securities Act of 1933 included a reference to brokers exercising "due diligence" by investigating a company and disclosing any discoveries before offering that companies' stock to the public. The term came to refer to any process of investigation in the business world, and particularly within the world of finance.
Today, investors are often cautioned to perform their due diligence before buying a stock. The Internet has made it easy to gather lots of relevant information about a company — though the quantity of information can drown you if you're not careful! Fortunately, StockCentral's Research Links tool is an easy way to access a wealth of information about any public company. Even better, the websites selected for inclusion here are tuned to the StockCentral/Toolkit 6/BetterInvesting orthodoxy of searching out high-quality undervalued stocks.
The stock research websites here can help you to perform industry comparisons, discern industry and insider ownership trends, read SEC filings, view current and historical price quotes and charts, learn current company news, and research analyst estimates, all from a single webpage! To make it easy, enter a ticker symbol once at the start and you can link directly to the relevant pages for the company you're studying on Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, Zacks, Reuters, and other sites.
In addition, we provide a table of historical stock splits and dividends (with ex-dividend dates) at the top of the Research Links page.
Are we missing your favorite website on the page? What other sites do you use to analyze and research a stock?
StockCentral Stock to Study: MWI Veterinary Supply
MWI Veterinary Supply (MWIV) is a midsized company that's one of the nation's largest distributors of veterinary products. Over the past decade, the company has grown sales and earnings in excess of 20% per year on average. Margins are stable, indicating that management is doing a good job of managing costs. As a result, Take Stock gives the company a current quality rating of 7.9, well above the desirable target range of 6.7 or better. This high-quality index qualifies the company for inclusion on the Roster of Quality Companies.
Using StockCentral's Take Stock tool, you can quickly analyze MWIV (or any other stock). If you prefer, you can use Take Stock's Judgment Wizard to tweak the default values used in determining your opinion of the company's most likely future progess.
What do you think about MWI Veterinary Supply's prospects? Once you've done your study in Toolkit 6 or Take Stock, head over to StockCentral's MWIV forum to discuss the stock and your findings.
Incorporating Analysts' EPS Estimates in Your Toolkit 6 Stock Studies
Projecting the likely future growth of revenues and earnings per share is key to completing a Stock Selection Guide. Besides allowing for the review of historical growth trends, Toolkit 6 also lets you incorporate analysts' estimates of EPS and sales growth in your stock studies.
From the Visual Analysis screen, click the Analysts Est. icon and enter the fiscal year estimates for up to the next five fiscal years. These can be found on a number of financial websites — click the Internet button on the Analysts' Estimates window to quickly jump to many sites such as Nasdaq.com or Yahoo! Finance that publish this data.
Once you've entered the figures into Toolkit 6, you'll see the plotted points on your stock study graph, giving you invaluable information that can help you in projecting a company's reasonable growth in the next five years.
Read more.
The Best Little Convention in Texas
Sign up now to attend BINC 2012 and choose from classes from 10 different learning tracks presented by some of our top educators. You won’t want to miss dynamic presentations by Jim Thomas, Christi Powell, Allen Holdsworth, Pat Donnelly, Hugh McManus and Jim Crabill, to name but a few.
BINC 2012 Educational Track Highlights:
The Beginners Track provides a closed-class opportunity to complete the beginning curriculum in a personal, supportive environment.
The Intermediate Judgment Track is a series of classes designed to sharpen judgment skills beyond the beginner level.
The Stock Quality Track is for those people for whom the goal is to improve their ability to select quality stocks.
The Stock Valuation Track is for those who seek to buy and sell at better prices.
The Portfolio Track moves beyond single stock selection using the SSG to analyzing the portfolio as a whole.
The Club Management Track is for club members who seek to optimize their club experience.
The Case Study Track is for you if your goal is to discuss some interesting stock ideas in an informal or panel discussion environment.
The Tools Track is a track which focuses more on how to use various software tools than the methodology.
The Personal Finance and Mutual Funds Track offers classes for those who are interested in different investment vehicles that may fit within their portfolio.
The Options Track provides a full review of options from basic understanding to strategic judgments including tools used for evaluating options.
Through June 30, 2012, a Spring Special registration price is available for $400 for members and $300 for chapter volunteers. This is a $50 savings over the full registration price!
In addition, chapter volunteers have a number of chapter training offerings from which to choose:
— Report from the Commission on Chapters
— Jumpstarting Your Chapter’s Email Communications
— Social Media and Your Chapter
— And many more!
BINC is also well known for its wide variety of learning experiences, including:
— Keynote presentation by Mike Tian, a Morningstar senior equity analyst and equities strategist as well as the editor of the Morningstar Opportunistic Investor, a newsletter service that focuses on companies with growing economic moats
— Corporate presentations
— Corporate booth Expo
— Tools-orientated seminars using the BetterInvesting Online Tools & Toolkit 6 as well as new tools
— Computer lab
— Town hall meetings with BetterInvesting CEO Kamie Zaracki
Funds raised at BINC go to help chapters by allowing the BetterInvesting Volunteer Advisory Board to visit chapters and conduct director conferences.
Register today! You won't be disappointed. Join us to celebrate 61 years of BetterInvesting and improve your investment knowledge. For additional information and registration details visit http://www.betterinvesting.org/biconvention.