Tools

Here are the tools I use to track and analyze stocks.  Some of these I use daily while others are only for a specific purpose.  If you know of others please leave a comment.

Stock Price & News Tracking
The most frequently used tool for me is my Yahoo Portfolio.  You can create a portfolio here on finance.yahoo.com for free and it's the best tracking tool I have found for watching prices, volume, and news through the day.  You just have to create a yahoo account.  I have this page open all day every day in the background at work.  I check probably 50 times a day while the market is open.  Just a quick open and refresh to see if any of my stocks are spiking and if there's any news.  Here's what mine looks like.  What I'm looking at always is price, price change in %, volume, and news.  At the bottom of the portfolio yahoo does a pretty good job of curating all press releases that are filed at the major news sites (Business Wire, Globe News Wire, etc).  I have one portfolio for my holdings which has about 50 stocks and then I have a few other portfolios for groupings of stocks that various people have recommended to me.  It's a way of keeping a list of things to check out in the future.  This doesn't catch every single press release because some companies will file on their own website or with OTC Markets but it catches all the major outlets.  

I wake up before market open (that's 6:30am here on the west coast) every day and one of the first things I do is refresh my yahoo finance portfolio.  I'm looking for any premarket volume or news.  I also check it after market close to see if anything is moving.  


Filings by email
The best way to track SEC and OTC Markets filings is with a free account at conferencecalltranscripts.org. This tool was developed by Saj Karson and is indispensable.  It's just the best and I couldn't live without it.  Saj let's you create an account and track up to around 50 stocks for free.  Above that you have to pay a small monthly fee.  All you do is enter the stocks you want and then any time one of those companies files something with either the SEC or OTC Markets it sends you an email.  This is how I keep up with all my company filings.  It will also email you if the company files a press release with OTC Markets or if a new conference call transcript is available.  

**update Oct 2020**
An outstanding feature recently added by Saj will send you an email any time your stock puts out a press release through one of the major news sites: prnewsire, globenewswire, businesswire, accesswire, or newswireCA.

You can also enter in web pages and it'll email you when that page changes.  This is how I track filings for companies that file only on their own website, like IOMT.  This feature sometimes sends extra alerts when nothing visual has changed due to some code in the background.  Still great.

Another thing I do every morning when I wake up is check my email for any filings or press releases.  

Bid/Ask
There are always a handful of stocks I'm thinking about buying.  Always.  These stocks I follow constantly, checking the bid and ask.  For this I use Fidelity.  Most brokerages will give you the same info and I use Fidelity just because that's what I have and I like the interface.  What I'm watching is the bid price, bid size, ask price, and ask size.  Sometimes you see a block of stock available for a price you like and this gives you the chance to snatch it up.  This shows whatever is the highest bid and lowest ask.  

One issue is it does not always show the small volume bid/asks.  I don't know the exact cutoff but for example if there's a bid for 50k shares of some stock at $1 and also a bid for 20 shares at $1.10 it would only show the 50k @ $1 because 20 is not enough.  

For example in the screenshot below showing someone wants to buy $289k shares of HCGS at $0.006 and the lowest offer to sell is 40k shares at $0.0086.  



There are sites you can pay for a level 2 subscription which will show all bids and asks out there.  I have never paid for this so I don't know much about it.  OTC Markets does provide level 2 quote trees for some stocks so I will check there from time to time.  I think they only do it for stocks on a certain tier.  For example see below.  The MPID is the market maker.  Each entry here is some person offering to buy or sell a certain number of shares at a certain price: 


Charts
I look at charts all the time and for that I have a few sources.  My favorite is the iHub app on my phone.  It has the best looking charts to me.



I also use BigCharts on my laptop for very long range charts.  Ihub only goes back 3 years on the phone app.  BigCharts will go back decades but sometimes gets screwed up by splits or name changes and in those cases I use Fidelity.  I watch charts all day, every day.


Sometimes the BigCharts chart isn't correct with splits or other things and in that case I'll open it up in Fidelity.  Always seems to be right there.  

Filings Research
For fundamental research I go straight to otcmarkets.  Most stocks I look at are traded OTC.  I own some that are SEC reporting and for those you can go straight to the SEC site, but most of my stuff is through otcmarkets and they have SEC reporting stocks as well so I just go there.  

On otcmarkets I usually go straight to the Disclosure tab to look at filings but sometimes I'll use their Financials tab for a look at the last few years of numbers.  Problem is the financials tab doesn't show some things like shares outstanding.  

Financials Long Term
The only free site I know of right now that shows long term financials is Roic.ai.  It's really great and they go back decades.  Unfortunately they do not provide data for all OTC stocks (such as MRCR, HYDI) but it's great for SEC reporting.  




Conference Calls
The best site to read conference call transcripts is TIKR.  You can sign up for a free account and read all the transcripts your heart desires.  


Recent Transactions
One really nice thing for super illiquid stocks is to see recent transactions.  The iHub app I mentioned above for charts also will show you all transactions from that day.  I look at this pretty frequently during the day as I'm watching trades on all my stocks.  If something has been sold in a big chunk you can see it.  


The TMXMoney site will show you the most recent 25 transactions.  For example here's IOMT:


Insider Transactions
OpenInsider.com is an amazing free site that tracks all things insider buys.  You can search by ticker or insider name.  You can screen.  


J3 Information Services Group is another great free site that shows all recent transactions.  You can easily click the link to open the filing and read about the transaction.  




Web Archive
The Web Archive stores versions of websites online.  It can be useful if you want to know how a company site used to look or if you're wondering when a company changed some aspect of their site. There are also companies out there, like AGTT, that post press releases but remove them so you can use this to look back in time.  

State Law and Incorporations
If you want to look up state laws or search for business entities here are some links.  You can google around and find other states


--Dan
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3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the list of tools you use. I'm still in the learning curve of investing and I embrace all the help and advice I can find. Dave B.

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  2. Thanks for sharing Dan. I was wondering how do you keep track of your portfolio? Like you I have been spread across multiple brokerages because of trading restrictions on dark stocks and I do not know how to best track my CAGR and compare it to indexed returns. Do you use a tool or have a custom spreadsheet you'd be comfortable sharing? Thanks

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    Replies
    1. In Schwab I can view all my accounts. It aggregates the Schwab accounts natively and also allows me to add non-schwab accounts. So I added in my Fidelity account and now it totals up my positions.

      As for the CAGR tracking what I do is use a custom google sheet. I talked about what formulas I use at the end of this post: http://www.nonamestocks.com/2020/04/noname-annual-performance-2019-2020.html

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