Proper active investing requires a deep understanding of a company paired with a thorough fundamental analysis in order to determine if a stock is worth the investment or not.
It is important to research the financials of a company based on fundamental data and metrics. Performing an in-depth analysis of the numbers on the financial statements and reading the annual letters of the business might be just a few steps that need to be taken in order to get a deep understanding of a stock and its underlying business.
Nowadays, it has certainly become easier for investors to get access to all the necessary information about a publicly-traded company. This article lists a few of the best online resources that may helpfully assist you in your stock analysis.
Finviz
Finviz.com is mostly known as one of the greatest stock screeners and is used by investors and traders to quickly find stocks that are suited to their individual requirements and preferences. Outside its stock screener, it does provide some key financial numbers as well as metrics about each stock but lacks a bit of historical financial data.
One of the most useful features of Finviz for investors includes its highly visualized heat maps, which can be used to get a great overview of the general performance of all major companies trading in the stock markets across the world and especially within the United States. These heat maps can be configured with many fundamental metrics such as the P/E ratio, P/B ratio, Dividend Yield and more.
Therefore, Finviz can mostly be used to find potential stock picks for both investors and traders and due to the great visualized features, it also provides a quick and insightful outline of the current market situations.
Morningstar
As opposed to Finviz, www.morningstar.com is a research platform with its main focus exclusively lying on fundamental data. It doesn’t provide any technical visualization and is therefore perfectly made for investors who are solely looking for the fundamentals of a company based on tons of financial data.
The free version of Morningstar offers investors a lot of insightful financials of each stock with mostly data from the past 10 years in addition to key ratios regarding the growth, cash flow, profitability and financial health of the company.
That being said, the financial statements of the company are also included in Morningstar with the restriction that only premium users can access the financial statements from the past 10 years. Otherwise, investors can only access the financial statements of a business from the past 5 years.
Accordingly, Morningstar may be one of the first go-to resource platforms for many investors to obtain a load of the most important fundamental financials of the analyzed company.
Macrotrends
While all of these listed financial resources can be used without any costs, macrotrends.net is arguably the best free fundamental research site. The astonishing part of Macrotrends is the amount of financial data it provides, despite the fact that it’s a completely free-to-use platform.
Macrotrends is packed with an easy-to-use stock screener, which is configurable with the most important fundamental metrics and a lot of charts that are mostly based on economic factors. It further includes a fundamental stock research platform providing very informative charts of each company ranging from revenue to multiple kinds of ratios such as the current ratio, debt/equity, and the price-to-free cash flow ratio.
Additionally, Macrotrends even provides financial statements of companies with data from the past 10 years. It would be difficult to find access to this amount of data anywhere else without facing any cost.
The simple design and user interface may arguably not be the best looking but it still serves its purpose without any complications or problems. It is definitely easy to understand the site’s structure and navigate throughout the platform.
As a result, Macrotrends offers investors full access to a well-build research platform with a capable stock screener and tons of historical data.
Seeking Alpha
In contrast to the research platforms mentioned above, seekingalpha.com is more like a community platform, where millions of experienced investors and professionals share their own insights about mostly stocks and financial markets at a deep level of understanding.
They also provide some advanced financial tools and expert insights that can be used as a feature of the paid subscription. Seeking Alpha is considered to target the more advanced audience with a heavy focus on analytical analysis from individual investors.
Seeking Alpha is definitely one of the best and biggest places to obtain different views and opinions of experienced investors and professionals within the investing field. It is thus a good source for financial news and articles based on an individualized perspective of investing.
Investor Relations of the Company
That being said, the last resource to mention for investors to look perform stock research is simply the investor relations section of each analyzed company. The investor relations is the department of each publicly traded company that provides all information regarding the business that is necessary to the investor.
Nowadays, you can access the investor relations of a company on their official website. There you will most likely be able to get all annual reports, shareholder letters, financial statements, 10K reports and more.
This source of information should probably be the most important to all investors that are looking forward to seeking a potential investment in a company.
Conclusion
There are certainly several other great financial resources out there that were not mentioned here. It is completely up to the investor where to obtain the necessary financial information from for their stock analysis. There is not one single true way of analyzing a stock. While some investors may primarily base their analysis on the dividend aspect of a stock, others might be rather seeking for strong free cash flow.
Nevertheless, knowing where to find the necessary data of a company is crucial for any profound stock analysis.
Note that all of the resources mentioned above can be used for free and that it’s up to the investor to decide if the paid subscription models of these resources may be necessary for their use.
