It can be difficult to find good and reliable and above all free information as a private investor. Not sure where to start? Alphastocks has a few free resources that you can use as a first step towards your investment research.
Why do research? Well, as successful investor Peter Lynch once said:
People will spend six months picking a home to buy, but only a couple of minutes picking stocks as investments.
A little research can make a difference. So if you’re not sure where to start, we’ve got some free tools to get you started today.
Glassdoor
Glassdoor, for those unfamiliar with it, is an anonymous employee rating platform. It provides insight into what it’s like to work at a company from the perspective of former employees and it collects data for five key areas:
- Overall workplace assessment
- Would you recommend the company to a friend?
- Appreciation CEO
- Salary
- Advantages
Glassdoor is a great starting point to get an overall picture of company culture; how they treat their staff, what they work on, and even an overall sense of employee motivation, rewards, and respect they have for the broader leadership team. There is one thing you need to know if you want to use Glassdoor, some reviews will be negative anyway. There’s usually a reason it’s a former employee, but overall it’s a reliable source and you can pick up recurring pros and cons.
App Store or Play Store
This is generally something for consumer-oriented companies. These companies can make good investments because they are usually easier to understand. After all, we are all consumers! With the digitization of products and services, many consumer-oriented brands will have an app available. To get an idea of ​​overall customer satisfaction, you can do a quick search. Many investors are familiar with the company Just Eat Takeaway, and the Dutch app; home delivery. If you are interested in investing in a company like this, use the app. Try it out. Is it easy to pay? Is there much choice? How is the customer service? Etc.
You can also look at the star rating. If it’s (very) low you may want to do some digging to see why it’s below par and you can do that by filtering the ratings from best to worst and see if there are any issues that keep popping up.
Conversely, if the company has nothing but great reviews, it could be a sign of a company that has a customer-centric strategy in place that allows them to acquire, but more importantly, retain customers in the long run. A little digging is needed to confirm that, but it’s a good starting point.
The company’s website
There is no better place to get the most accurate and current information than a company’s website. Here you will find all the following:
- The company’s quarterly results
- Profit Talks
- News about strategic partnerships/deals
- Changes in leadership
- The broader business model
- Products and services you may not even know about
interviews
Finally, interviews with CEOs can be a great way to gain insight into the leadership story, mission and values ​​behind a company. There is no dedicated site for CEO interviews, but in many cases you can get them for free on social platforms like YouTubeon news sites such as CNBC or through podcast applications such as Spotifyâ€
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