Tools of the Modern Day Investing Process

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In this day and age, information has become a commodity. You can do an end-to-end research and analysis of a company by sitting in the comfort of your home. So in a way, several websites have become a necessary addition to an investor’s toolkit. Here are a few investing websites I use (Most of them are free).

The most obvious one. The ease of virtually maintaining your real portfolio of investments is unmatched by any other website out there. The stream of business news provided by the site is also quite decent. The MoneyControl App (Android, iOS) is also equally handy. The negative is the MC Community’s viral message boards. You will find all sorts of poorly moderated content like links to promotional sites, random buy/sell calls and so on.

Screens were suggested to be part of an investor’s thought process since a long time. Even the famous book, ‘The Intelligent Investor’ by Benjamin Graham consisted of chapters where the ace investor/teacher suggested the use of numerical filters to avoid questionable stocks. The other useful feature of the website is that it allows you to download the financial information pertaining to the stock for the past decade or so (Free of cost—for now). Their ‘Gold’ scheme allows you to do even more! The site is user-friendly and should add immense value to your investing process.

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This site is similar to MoneyControl and Screener, but only for financial data analysis. However, the user interface is way more organized. I’ve also noticed that RateStar has more accurate information than both Screener and MoneyControl. The drawback here is that you cannot download any of the data (Unlike Screener). It’s more of a ‘quickfix’ analysis tool. The App is also available for mobile phones (Android).

MarketsMojo is great for portfolio analytics. Need to keep track of your dividends? Capital Gains Taxes to be paid? IRR on your investments? MM has got you covered. The site also has a ‘Company CV’ section for each stock, listing down simplified information about the business, raw materials and finished products. The site majorly sells itself on the concept of ‘Mojo Stocks’, where stocks are auto-picked to form a portfolio based on consistent financial performance, valuation and size (Essentially, like an automated Screener). But I don’t believe in automating the investing process, so you may want to take this part with a pinch of salt. Mobile phone users can use the App instead (Android, iOS).

ValuePickr makes the process of company-specific research a hundred times easier. You will join an active community of like-minded investors set to the job of discussing the business, activities and the valuation of several companies. Investment self-help and expert commentary threads also add to the site’s already golden value proposition. However, the forum guidelines are strict and any non-value-additive string of conversations will be moderated promptly.

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Tijori is a nifty little site that provides you with rare information such as a company’s Market Share, Revenue Mix, Product Break-up, Direct Competitors and so on.

Y! Finance is very good at storing historical price data of stocks, including dividends, splits and bonuses. I turn to Y! Finance every time I require historical stock price or index level data.

This website is actually developed by a frequent user of the site ValuePickr mentioned above. Phreakonomics provides you export/import data for major commodities, BSE Notifier (Screener also has this feature), Shareholding Analysis and a simple Technical Analysis tool. If you want to get a snapshot of the trading economy, this is your place.

My favorite underdog! Although the website offers much more in terms of financial terms’ definition and useful calculators, I use it primarily for the ‘Buffet’s Value Formula’ calculator. It’s a quick DCF calculator. It helps you imbibe the concept of a Discounted Cash Flow in your head and of course, it’s quite useful to perform back-of-the-envelope DCF valuations.

How useful do you think these websites are for your investing process? Do you use any other website that’s not listed here, which helps you in your investing process? Let me know in the comments!

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