Twenty years ago the first place to start research a stock was to get a copy of the S&P “tearsheet” and contact the company to get sent a pile of printed materials to go over.
These days everyone starts online because it’s fast and easy. However for public information to be enlightening one must make a bit more of an effort to gather from the most linked and trafficked sources of information.
While some focus too hard on cultivating non-public sources of information a skilled use of public information is critical for getting the basics done before making a greater investment in developing or purchasing proprietary information.
Learning these will make you more effective in generating the initial research story around a company and/or industry.
The Company Website: Of course this is where lots of people get many of the basics out of the way. This is a good place to review the company positioning statement (About) and then look through the management team, board of directors, products and also recent news releases.
The next level is to review past events if the company has them online. Prior presentations from investor conferences are one of the most valuable to look at but not every company includes them. It’s often worth looking at the last quarterly report and listening to that call to get a sense of how management talks about their business. The Q&A is often the most useful part.
Lastly before leaving the company website if there is a developer or partner program available and I plan to follow a company I join that. The more you can get into the community around the company the more public sources of information you will get.
Google: Googling the company name won’t get you much farther than the website but adding terms like “[product name] reviews” or “alternatives” or “problems” might turn up articles that are more obscure and full of information. Being creative with Google is a good way to unearth less commonly-known information about the company. The same searching technique can be used on sites like Twitter.
Google Finance: Along with Yahoo Finance and other sites this is the perfect place to get stock history, basic financial information, upcoming investor events, news releases and some sense of the comparable companies in the group. Although Google Finance is not great with links (for some reason) sometimes links to good articles are found here.
Market Organizations: Although many of these links can be found at Google Finance the SEC in the US provides online filings and more detailed information about shares traded, shares sold short and so on may be found here and on sites like the NASDAQ.
Seeking Alpha: Although this is a retail-oriented investor site there are sometimes useful posts here. In addition they also publish transcripts of prior company quarterly earnings calls that can be faster than listening to them. It’s best to go to the site and enter in the ticker to search.
Local Newspapers: In many cases local newspapers (online or offline) spill much more ink on local companies. So look at where the company is based and search those news sites in particular to get more detailed stories. They often have more content on the management than national sources.
Industry Research: Most industry research (like from Gartner Group or Forrester) is not available to the public. However there is a useful and simple trick here. First go to those sites and search for the research. If there is a good research report go back and Google the title. Often one of the companies in the report will pay the research firm so that they can put it up on their website and make it available for free to people that register. For example a good report from Forrester covering online video platforms was useful for a recent report on Brightcove and available for free at one of the other online video platform sites.
Job Listings: Many analysts routinely use job listings for clues about what companies are working on. The same can be done using the Google patent filings search. Job listings help identify company hiring plans and by doing a search on the company products one can see if end-user companies are specifying these products in their own hiring plans. We have found SimplyHired to be one of the best and easiest to search.
Glassdoor: This is a service that starts to move into a more proprietary space but it is still a very open and public way to get some interesting information on a company. By signing up and contributing information to Glassdoor about companies you have worked for and/or interviewed with, you can then get information that others have shared. Level of content varies a great deal but there are sometimes some good nuggets in there.
Retail Brokers: If you have a brokerage account some of them furnish some decent Wall Street research at no charge. For example E*Trade provides Credit Suisse reports. Many others do something similar. It’s the fastest way to peel the onion of consensus estimates.
This provides a reasonable starting point for any company analysis. A fairly decent picture can be put together based on these sources before sending one email or making one phone call. The next level is focused mostly on proprietary sources be they paid for (like Capital IQ, or The Information Pro) or developed by resourceful, applied effort.
If there are good public or semi-public sources we missed please leave us some feedback and we will make revisions to this from time to time.
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