Ask HN: What resources do you use to pick stocks to invest in?

[vrk7bp]

Curious to hear what resources (sites, apps, APIs, etc) HN users use when researching stocks they are interested in purchasing.

I've only recently started to invest more actively, and find myself making decisions based on what friends are talking about, news articles, and Wikipedia (to gain an understanding of what the company is actually working on/building). This is along with more typical resources like Yahoo Finance just to see the daily price and graphs.

[troydavis]

The only right answer is “As a retail investor, I’m not picking individual stocks.”

Accept that I don’t have, you don’t have, and with a very few exceptions, an individual for whom this isn’t an all-consuming more-than-full-time occupation basically will never have, proprietary knowledge (an “edge”) that’s not already priced in.

Spend an hour reading Matt Levine, then subscribe and read his new posts for a few months. Start with this one:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-09/retail-vo...

While reasonable people can debate index funds vs. actively-managed funds, essentially all thoughtful market participants have realized that the days when hobbyist investors could add alpha have passed.

If you’re asking for good sites to investigate ETFs, Yahoo Finance is, miraculously, still great.

[vrk7bp]

Thanks for the Matt Levine pointer, I read through a couple of articles and learned a lot. Will definitely subscribe!

Although I generally agree with the notion that retail/hobby investors likely won't be able to "strike gold" with some novel investing algorithm or philosophy, I don't believe that should discourage said investors from picking stocks. I think it comes down more to the mindset of the investor...

It would be wrong for the hobby investor to rely on their stock picks as a main source of revenue (or as the focus of their retirement portfolios) without making it a 60+ hour full-time job. However if you have some funds that you can "afford to lose" and are interested in learning more about how markets, industries, and companies work, I think investing in individual stocks is one of the more interesting ways to learn. To me I see investing in individual stocks as a sort of forcing function for me to test different hypotheses on how companies and industries will grow and change, while also staying up to date on what is happening in the world :)

If an individual has the luxury of having some funds they can safely put in the stock market, and have an interest in experimenting/playing around in the market, then I would definitely think that its at least worth trying out.

[petra]

What about an edge for someone with deep technology knowledge ?

[tobylane]

You're competing against PHD rocket scientists employed by people who buy data centres milliseconds away from exchanges.

[sandman757]

I first started investing in crypto in college then ETFs for my 401(k). For crypto I used Coinbase and GDAX for trading and https://www.worldcoinindex.com/ to see how various cryptocurrencies were doing. I used /r/ethtrader/ and /r/ethereum for news on ethereum. For ETFs I compared their 5-yr, 3-yr, 1-yr, and 3-mo performance percents. I started looking into individual stocks, and I've mostly used Morningstar, but it's pretty overwhelming and hard to compare stocks and know what to invest in using all that data. I also don't know how they rank stocks. Am I supposed to just trust them? Feels wrong. I don't have a good strategy on how to invest in stocks wisely, so it kinda discourages me.

[sharadov]

Seeking Alpha is good. Get a subscription to WSJ, which will inform you of larger marketplace trends and make you a better investor in the long term.

[meric]

Quarterly reports.