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Whether you're a stock-screener or a big-picture sector player, there are no end of websites and software packages to help you find shares according to your favoured approach. If, like most people, you combine stock-picking techniques, it makes sense to look for a product that will allow you to analyse shares in a number of different ways.
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Below, we review what's on offer to the private investor and what each site or software package does best, starting with our own website.
www.investorschronicle.co.uk Type the name or ticker of a share into the 'QUOTES & DATA' box on the right hand side of this page, and you will arrive at a central data page for that share. From there, you have several research options. You can look at the company's accounts (from the past five years), directors' dealings, analyst forecasts, consensus ratings, official news, charts and Riskgrades.
One further click will take you to a list of news stories, tips, commentary and articles that the ic has published on that company over the past five years or so, including the latest ic view). You can then investigate the promises that a company was making back then and see how good it is at delivering on them. There is also a stock screener that lets you specify minimum and maximum values for nearly 30 investment criteria and apply that search to market segments or FTSE sectors.
All tools, archives and services are free to subscribers of the investors chronicle magazine or you can buy an online-only subscription for £85 a year.
www.advfn.com For people who have already got to grips with the basic functions of a stock screener, ADVFN's sophisticated package takes screening to a higher level, making it of particular interest to investors with an interest in technical analysis. Many of the dozens of screening criteria refer to technical analysis triggers such as distance of the share price from its 52-week high or upwards and downwards momentum.
The site has little analysis of the investment merits of particular shares, focusing instead on stock-picking tools and price feeds.
Depending on the tools and market data you want, there are 12 different subscription levels, rising in cost to £154 a month for all the bells, whistles and live price feeds.
ShareScopeThis software package offers an intriguing mixture of stock research techniques. For example, you can build a stock screen that incorporates fundamental criteria (such as return on assets or operating profit margins) with technical criteria (volume, moving averages, relative strength) and overlay those with analytical filters. You can filter for stocks that enjoy positive recommendations from City analysts and are currently rated good value or a buy by investors chronicle. Analysts' forecasts extend to three years for UK stocks.
The directors' dealings data includes major shareholders' dealings, enabling a user to follow the kind of approach used by Dominic Connolly (see 'Follow the Smart Money').
There is also a full charting package and you can annotate price charts with key dates, directors dealings and Investors Chronicle's views (to see where we have moved the market and where we called it wrong).
For investors wanting a 10-year view, the basic package also includes earnings-per-share data on UK stocks going back to 1992.
Three levels of subscription start at £14 per month, rising to £84.95 per month for full real-time data. There is also a one-off membership fee of £79.95.
eSignalOn the spectrum that begins with leisurely investing and ends with frantic day trading, eSignal's main software product, TrendSignal, sits firmly towards the rapid trading end. Rather than helping you analyse companies, the software focuses on charts. Any chart will do - it could be the banking sector, a telecom stock, the euro-sterling exchange rate or gold. TrendSignal will take that chart and scour it for clues of developing trends. They don't have to be persistent, just long enough to trade off.
The cost of the software starts at £1,067 a year (plus a one-off fee of £237) for end-of-day data, rising to £2,087 a year (plus a £337 joining fee) for live data. Both pricing levels entitle you to free upgrades and ongoing support, while the live data version comes with what eSignal calls "unlimited access to training and tutoring".
UpdataSimilar in ambition to eSignal and ShareScope, Updata's products harness financial data and charting software to allow you to identify trading ideas using your own personal computer. Its tools will be of most interest to technical analysts and include point-and-figure charting and Indexia's proprietary indicators (developed by Jeremy du Plessis).
The two packages aimed at private investors are Updata Technical Analyst and Updata TA Trader. The former comes in a real-time data version, which includes a back-testing feature that lets you test whether your own indicators would have made you money using historical data. The TA Trader package adds news streams, fundamental data and market maps. Prices start at £299 a year for the end-of-day Technical Analyst product, rising to £899 a year for the full TA Trader software with live share price data.
www.hemscott.net To research the past 10 years' worth of earnings, dividends and returns on capital for a UK share, you will need access to a specialist financial website or software package. That's because free-to-register sites only give away five years' data and that is not long enough to establish whether there's a rock-solid trend in a company's results.
This is where Hemscott comes in. At the moment, it is one of the few places where investors can research companies' performances over 10 years (see also ShareScope). Still, the data does not come cheap. Access to Hemscott's full company accounts service costs £399 a year.
www.selftrade.co.uk For anyone wanting a quick way into researching sectors and the economy, SelfTrade's website offers several useful features. The first is its at-a-glance sector page, which ranks every FTSE sector by performance. A click on any one of the sector headings will tell you its constituents, and one further click brings you that company's chart, news or analyst forecasts.
SelfTrade's news section splits stories into handy categories of market, company, regulatory or economic news. You can even split the regulatory news feed (RNS) into more useful categories of trading updates, results, dividends and Rule 8 disclosures. For the full use of these services, you have to be a registered client of this online stockbroker.
www.tdwaterhouse.co.uk As an inducement to sign up, TD Waterhouse offers its clients access to a well-designed set of research tools, at the heart of which is its 'company map', From one page, investors can access most of the data that a fundamentals-based stock researcher would want, including one-click links to five years' worth of company accounts, investment ratios, directors dealings, basic charts and analyst forecasts.
www.stockbrokers.barclays.co.uk Along with SelfTrade and TD Waterhouse, Barclays' website attracts clients by providing free stock market research. It offers economic news and research from Barclays' own analysts, performance tables, a stock selector, research on company brands and a full set of information on funds.
The interactive charting package can either be a great source of trading ideas or a wonderfully entertaining waste of time - depending on your character. It lets you play around for hours mapping company results, newspaper share tips, analyst upgrades and directors dealings onto a share-price chart, looking for that elusive pattern that will tell you where the shares are going next.
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© The Financial Times Limited 2008. All rights reserved. "Investors Chronicle", "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times Limited. No part of these web pages may be reproduced or transmitted to or stored in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the editor.
Warning: Do remember, particularly if you are new to stock market investment that the prices of shares and other investments can fall sharply. You may not get back the money you originally invested. The material here is for general information only and is not intended to be relied upon for individual investment decisions. Take independent advice before making such decisions. This site is aimed at UK residents only. To read more please see our Important Warning
-IC-1.5.4a-prod - 31/10/2008 13:11:34 - carlos.princz
