10 free or cheap sites to do better financial analysis

Help yourself get an edge in the information age

Feb 10

You've heard it all before: "Data is the new oil." Therefore, it is important to have access to the best financial databases and analysis tools you can get your hands on. Also, it is one of the three edges you can have as an investor, read more about it in this previous article.

Usually, a financial service such as Factset, Refinitiv, or Bloomberg costs upwards of $25,000 a year! You need a good return on investment to make up for that. But, luckily you can find lots of free or affordable financial sites out there. Below I list what I think are the 10 best financial tools to use for better financial analysis; no worries, links are provided at the bottom.

Börsdata focuses on fundamental and technical analysis of foremost nordic companies but has expanded its geographical reach to include the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, and Japan. It is very affordable and has a free version, their premium version price goes from €10-€59.

Depending on which version you have you get access to different datasets and features.

For example:

A screener where you can create watchlists and filter, export to CSV and Excel, the most common ratios, ratios for nordic and global companies, and mini charts.
Report data and ratios stretching 10 to 20 years.
PDF report from the latest report and up to 10 years of history.
Company export of nordic and global companies up to 20 years of history.
Strategies on nordic and global equities such as Magic Formula, F-Score, Graham, Net-Nets, Canslim, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and a few others.
API services for Excel and plugins to build your own models. (This is a lot of fun for an Excel ninja like me)
Ownership and insider data from Holdings.
Have teamed up with Quartr and have the conference calls available on the platform.

On top of all this, it is 10 times more user-friendly than Bloomberg and Factset.

Quartr allows investors to listen to conference calls as easily as if they were a song on Spotify. They have at the moment over 6500+ companies on their platform, where you can access these companies’ earnings reports, annual general meetings, and capital market days, including slide decks, transcripts, earnings reports PDFs, press releases, and much more.

Some functions I find very useful.

Estimates for the next report and actuals compared to the estimates as soon as the report is released.
Financials and estimates for three years forward. (from S&P Global)
Trading multiples and forward multiples.
Revenue splits. (for example, for Paradox Interactive ($PDX) revenue per platform and per geographical area)
A discovery page helps to discover new companies an investor could be interested in.
Live calls directly in the app. Instead, you need to search out every conference call by yourself.
Transcript search. Search for anything in all transcripts or one single one for keywords. Below you can see my search for AI in Alphabet´s Q4 conf call, and AI was mentioned 23 times.
Reports and capital markets presentations. All you need in one place.

The app is incredibly user-friendly. For example, you can skip from the boring management presentation to the Q&A right away.

On top of that, the company is from Sweden!

Finviz has many functions on its website. Such as company pages with financial data, KPIs and ratios, and a news feed. A general news feed, a screener, maps that easily visualize, groups based on different sectors to see how they move in relation to each other, a portfolio to keep track of your holdings, insider information, and many more functions.

I would put forth the screener as the best function on the side, it is easy to use and have a lot of variables to choose from. Both on financial data, insider, technical data, and so on.

Tikr has three levels of which one is free and the two other costs $15 and $30 a month. I will say the free level is delivering high value to investors, the two subscriptions are for the heavy users who want to have access to estimates more than 2 years forward. The Tikr Terminal is very focused on the company page and estimates, while it also has call transcripts, public filings, and ownership.

Finbox is very slick and focused on generating new ideas and monitoring companies through watchlists. The ideas function has a lot of premade strategies such as Founder Lead Companies List, Warren Buffet’s Portfolio, and Dividend Champions. Very useful when investors are trying to find new ideas to research.

Koyfin is very similar to Finbox and Tikr, but has much more aggregated data. I usually use its analytics function to look at value versus growth and so on to get an understanding of the bigger picture of the markets. It is also very useful to have your own dashboards as you can set up different ones. I have one for the watchlist and one for macro. If you don’t want to set up your own dashboard, you have many preset dashboards under the market dashboard, and they have very high quality.

Rocket financial is simple and just a search form where you put in which company you want to look at. Despite its simplicity, it gives a good overview of the financials, charts, news+filings, ownership, insiders, and transactions. Lookswise is a bit simpler than the others, but I think it can suit many who want to have a simple page to use when looking up a company.

Whalewisdom is, just as it sounds like, wisdom about the whales, aka hedge funds and other institutions. It collects their filings on how the portfolio looks and what has changed. It has an option for a free account, and it kinda provides you with what you want; the subscriptions cost $300 and $500 a year. Then you get the website with no ads, API access, excel add-in, and other functions. Meanwhile, with the free option can look up what big investors such as Warren Buffet have bought and sold since the last quarter. It can give valuable insights about companies to own and may give a sign to do more research as a big investor leaves the shares.

I lump together Yahoo Finance and Google Finance as they are so similar. Both sites can give a fast overview of a company, an explanation of what the company does, and a good newsfeed, and as it is not stapled on Swedish net broker’s sites share price in pre-market and after-market. To add to this, Google has very handy formulas in Google sheets to provide data automatically.

Aswath Damodaran’s website

The dean of valuations has a lot of resources on his website, which is useful for everybody. Take a look! I update my own Excel models with data from his website; kind of a tradition to do it when a new year starts. Don’t miss out!

Links

Aswath Damodaran’s website