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Good investment websites? Investment software?

fuzzybabybunny

fuzzybabybunny

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I've been reading a lot on investing and the stock market and figure that at 25 years old I'd better get my ass in gear.

I'm self employed, so no employer retirement account contributions. I put $5K into my IRA last year and need to look for other avenues of investment.

I like the idea of analyzing businesses to figure out if they are a good investment or not. That would mean picking a company and poring over financial statements, calculating things like cash on hand, ROA, ROI, and profit margin over five year histories and the like.

Is there an easier way to do this, like a website or application that tracks this data for you?

It's either this or invest in a mutual or index fund (as far as the equity part of my portfolio is concerned) but I'd rather be more active than this and learn to be my own investor.
 
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gurufocus.com is my primary site.

As for research, read annual reports. once you get through about 10 of them, you will start noticing that some are transparent and others are not. Some talk about the metrics that make them look awesome just to go to different metrics the following year.

I get real joy out of companies that talk about FCF. That is a good thing by the way.
 
Two books every budding investment analyst should read:
A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel
Security Analysis, Graham & Dodd

And no, there's no piece of software to tell you what to invest in. After you read Random Walk you'll understand why.
 
my roommate is one of the founders of trefis.com, it's a different take on analysis (relates it to products people use on a day to day basis). I can't speak for the website but I can say he's damn brilliant when it comes to stock analysis so I'm assuming it's good.
 
Out of curiosity, do you guys who follow the market tend to beat the returns on mutual funds?
 
Btw, I'm not looking for software to invest for me. I'm looking for something that will make aggregating financial statement data easier. Like something that downloads a company's financial statement and spits out calculated metrics like ROI, ROA, etc. Rather than doing this all by hand...
 
guyver01 said:
:hmm:

If he's that good at stock analysis.... why does he have a roommate?
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lol no one is perfect, he owns a small business and lives in down town Boston. I can't speak for him but I have two roommates and $40k in stocks, etc. Just because I want to pay less than half of what my own place would be doesn't mean I'm poor. Same for him.
 
Mike Gayner said:
Two books every budding investment analyst should read:
A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel
Security Analysis, Graham & Dodd

And no, there's no piece of software to tell you what to invest in. After you read Random Walk you'll understand why.
Click to expand...

Bolded - read that and Intelligent Investor, it's all you need, everything else is derived from this.

FBB - investing is a full time job. A few hours a week, even 12 hours a week, is not enough to invest well. Stick to index funds and saving money for a large rainy day fund - stash away 10k for rainy day funds and then do something simple for investments. I know people say dollar cost average, but when we're in a recession and stocks are cheap, if you're unemployed, you simply can't invest like normal, so a large rainy day fund becomes a necessity.
 
Also... software for investments won't do much good, IMO anyway. If it was that easy, people would be doing it. There is something to be said for purely quantitative work though, The little books that beats the market, is a living example.
 
AgaBoogaBoo said:
Also... software for investments won't do much good, IMO anyway. If it was that easy, people would be doing it. There is something to be said for purely quantitative work though, The little books that beats the market, is a living example.
Click to expand...

He's really just looking for screening software - I know there's some options for screening software, but the only one I use is Google Finance's one. It definitely doesn't have all the features you want though.
 
You can write a simple excel model based on the DuPont method to get all of those ratios quite easily. It won't really help you though. You'll just have a bunch more numbers about a company, but if you don't know what they mean or what they don't mean, then you might as well be looking at telephone numbers.

You could do a DCF model, which is what the big investment firms do, but you'll find that it's so sensitive to some parameters that you will have trouble getting something realistic unless you're really careful.

Basically, you can do it for fun, but you won't be any better off than just reading a report and guessing.

If you want to be a little more hands on, then see if you can find some reports on companies from the investment firms like Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse etc. They'll tell you what they think the companies are worth and will recommend a buy/sell rating based on what the stock currently trades at. Make your picks based on those.

There are many firms with computer screening algorithms which constantly pick out potential winners. These firms then employ many tens of analysts who comb this list and refine it down to a few picks. The analysts then bring these picks to mangers who then whittle it down to 3-5 companies to recommend to senior management to add to the portfolio each quarter. So, like 100 people work full time to research 3-5 companies every 3 months.
 
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