There are many tools investors use to pick stocks. In this post, we’ll explore best stock analysis tools.
great stock analysis tools
Screener
Screener is a tool that helps you filter stocks based on certain criteria.
For example, let’s say you want a few stocks that belong to the banking sector, have a market cap of greater than Rs 50,000 cr, and have a PE ratio of less than 30.
You can go to a stock screener and put in these conditions. The stocks that match will be displayed.
These are just a few examples. There are many filters in screeners — most stock investing platforms offer stock screeners.
Many investors also use screeners to look for new investment ideas.
stock analysis tools free
Stocks graphs
Whether you are a long-term inventor or a short-term trader, you will end up spending time looking at and analysing graphs of the stocks.
Graphs are the starting point of research for many.
Say there's a sudden rise on xyz date. You can then go and check why that happened.
Likewise, you can check how the stock price behaves on important dates like the dividend date, quarterly results date, etc.
This can help you understand how resilient a stock price is to certain events, which events affect that stock more, etc.
Example, when the markets were crashing in 2020, FMCG sector stocks were shooting up unlike other stocks.
Balance sheet
This is one of the most important tools available to investors.
It contains every public information about a company including income, expenditure, and borrowing.
It also contains other important details relevant to a given industry like number of bank accounts in case of banks, number of users in case of telecom operators, and so on.
Every detail contained in the balance sheet is authentic and audited. Stating incorrect figures in this is illegal.
This sheet can be downloaded from the company's website as well as the exchange website.
Investors make themselves very familiar with reading balance sheets.
News
Many people discover stocks simply because they hear about them in the news because of some positive or negative events.
Some stocks become extremely popular in this manner and get much higher attention.
This can only be a way of coming across the name of a stock.
Investors would still need to dig deeper into the balance sheet of the stock to understand it better before investing.
Do note, there are many good and bad stocks that don’t get featured on the news simply because there isn’t enough public interest in them.
Relying only on the news to discover stocks is a bad strategy.
Psychological tools.
Many times, we lose sight of the larger picture when we’re too engrossed in one kind of activity.
Investors can make use of various mental models to look for and choose good stocks.
Commonly used mental models are: first principles thinking, circle of competence, inversion, etc. Do search them online and read more about them.
While picking stocks, it is easy for an investor to make errors because of psychological biases.
Similarly, investors must make active efforts to combat their own biases.
Common psychological biases affecting investors are hindsight bias, confirmation bias, recency bias, etc.
There are many tools investors can use. The ones discussed in this course so far are just a few examples.
