Free Websites to Help Analyze Stocks by July Wirawan

The internet is a very useful source of information to analyze stocks. Many websites make available a great deal of data about companies for free. The information is in fact too much and confusing enough to choose which source is a good one. For beginners, you can start with the following websites.

These are all free sites and should give you pretty much all the skeleton information to help you do better analysis on your stocks.

1. finance.google.com. What I like about google finance is:

* Snapshot of a company's historical stock price (on first page). You just drag the bar at the bottom of the chart to the left to see the historical chart. It's very easy and fast. You can also see right on the chart some corporate events, such as dividend payment or stock split.

* Discussion forum (on first page). This is not meant to confuse you as what they say may contradict each other, but rather to give you a feel of what people think about a particular company.

2. moneycentral.msn.com. What I like about this site is:

* Rating. You just need to type in the ticker symbol, and a rating will pop up. The rating is a scale between 0 - 10 with 10 being the best. The rating shows the likelihood of a stock to outperform or underperform the market in the next six months.

* Institutional ownership. The higher the number, the better as it shows the degree of interest by big institutional investors on a particular stock.

* Research wizard. It shows you the highlights of a company's fundamental, historical price performance versus its industry, valuation and stock price target in the next 12 months, and comparison with any other company in terms of financial health, price performance, etc.

* Earnings estimates and more importantly earnings trend. The trend shows you how the analysts' earnings estimates have changed in the last 90 days and thus tell you whether a company is getting in or out of favor.

* Financials. Here you can find the last five years and last five quarters of balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow numbers.

3. form4oracle.com. This website is very informative if you look for the history of insider trading on a particular company. All kinds of insider activities such as purchases, sales, option exercises, grants are presented chronologically.

4. briefing.com. A lot of information on this website is available to its subscribers for some fees. But some other information is provided for free. The free information mostly focuses on companies' past earnings announcements, and analysts' recommendations, which I still find very useful and quite complete compared to the other websites. For big and highly liquid companies, this information could go as far back as ten years.

5. stockcharts.com. Here you can retrieve a chart in various different forms (such as line, bar, candlestick), and various different time frames (such as year-to-date, one-month, one-year, three-years, or any time frame you specify). You can also add on some technical indicators such as moving average, MACD, RSI, ADX, and many other indicators.

About the Author

The author was an equity analyst, an investment banker, and a private banker for 15 years before becoming a full time trader, which she enjoys doing very much now. She has such a strong passion in stock trading and would like to share her experience and knowledge with others. Please check out her other articles at http://stock-trading-for-beginners.com.