Investor savvy -- and some fun -- on the Web
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ROB CARRICK
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
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I X-rayed my registered retirement savings plan this week and here's what I found.
Like many, I'm a little heavy on Canadian content and should probably pump up my international exposure. The average dividend yield of my stocks is 3.91 per cent -- not bad. My mutual funds have an average management expense ratio of a bit over 2 per cent, and the total amount of fund fees I'm paying right now is $1,188.73.
All this and more I learned using the Portfolio X-Ray feature on the Morningstar Canada website, one of seven very cool on-line investing tools that are highlighted in this edition of the Portfolio Strategy column. Each of these tools is free, and each will either help you be a better investor or at least waste a little of your time in amusing fashion.
No. 1: The Portfolio X-Ray
From: Morningstar Canada, the mutual fund analysis people
Address: morningstar.ca
Conventional portfolio trackers focus on telling you how much you've made or lost; the Portfolio X-Ray does that, but adds all kinds of fascinating extras on how well you're diversified geographically, sectorally and by style (growth versus value; large versus small stocks), how much you're paying in fees and expenses and what the key ratios are for your stocks. Coloured charts and maps make the information easy to absorb.
Typing the names of all your funds and stocks into this portfolio analyzer is time consuming, but the detailed report you'll get in the end makes the effort well worthwhile. The only downside is that there doesn't seem to be a way to add individual bonds to your portfolio, only bond funds.
No. 2: Risk alerts for stocks
From: Reuters, the news and market data people
Address: investor.reuters.com
Look out for Nova Chemicals and Aber Diamond -- according to Reuters, they were dicey bets earlier this week. Every day, the "Stocks" area of the Reuters site offers a list of dozens of stocks that run a significant risk of a price decline. Click on a particular stock and you'll find a pass or fail grade in six different areas: analyst ratings downgrades, estimate revisions, short selling, institutional selling, relative price deterioration and price momentum.
These six tests are then combined into a single risk rating of low, medium or high. Nova and Aber received high risk ratings, with Nova failing six of six tests and Aber five of six. Wondering what to make of this information? Helpful tutorials explain how to interpret the data.
The risk alerts offered by Reuters complement the free risk ratings available on a site that has been mentioned several times in this space, RiskGrades (riskgrades.com). RiskGrades has a full database of Canadians stocks, but Reuters offers risk alerts only for Canadian stocks listed on U.S. exchanges.
No. 3: The mother of all
investing website directories
From: Harry Domash, publisher of a U.S. investing newsletter and contributor to the MSN Money website.
Address: winninginvesting.com (click on "best investing sites")
You won't find many better directories of top on-line investing resources and the reason is that Mr. Domash doesn't just throw a mass of links at you and leave you to find out what each site has to offer. Instead, he lists sites by category and offers opinionated comments about what makes them worth using.
You'll find a lot of familiar sites included on the list, including Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com), MSN Money (moneycentral.msn.com) and CBS Marketwatch (marketwatch.com), but it's a near certainty you'll see something new that you might never have found on your own. Example: there are links to stock analysis by Standard & Poor's that regularly appear in BusinessWeek magazine, and to a gallery of historical stock charts on the StockCharts.com website that show you, for example, what the Dow Jones industrial average has done since 1900. There's a U.S. focus to the sites you'll find here, but many of them include Canadian stocks in their databases.
No. 4: Next-generation
stock charts
From: Google, the Internet search engine people
Address: finance.google.com
Ever try to figure out where a stock was trading at on a particular date in the past? You can get a very rough estimate by looking at a stock chart, or you can muck around with the historical quotes available on BigCharts.com and Yahoo Finance. A new and better alternative is to use the charts on the recently launched Google Finance site.
To find a quote for a stock on a specific date, just call up a chart and run your cursor along the line depicting the price trend until the date you want is displayed, along with the closing price and volume. For longer-term charts, weekly pricing and volumes are available.
Google adds a little extra value to its charts by marking the dates on which a company has issued recent news announcements. If investors reacted to the news and pushed the share price up or down, you'll see this on the chart.
No. 5: Stock screening
for the Canadian market
From: Globeinvestor.com, which is part of the same corporate family as The Globe and Mail.
Address: globeinvestor.com
Tools for screening U.S. stocks are pretty easy to find on the Internet, but there hasn't been much of value for Canadian investors. Recently, though, globeinvestor.com introduced an improved version of its stock filter that's as good as it gets for the Canadian market (it also covers the U.S. markets).
You can use this filter in simple mode to find, for example, all the exchange-traded funds listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Or, you can do a more complex search using criteria such as dividend yield, price/earnings ratio, market capitalization, revenue and profit. You can set a minimum and maximum value for each of these criteria, which allows you to do things such as searching for stocks with dividend yields between 2 and 5 per cent.
If you're looking for the best free U.S. market screeners, try the links on the Winning Investing website.
No. 6: Keeping up
with analyst stock ratings
From: Newratings.com, a New York-based provider of data to retail and institutional investors.
Address: newratings.com
Most investing websites lump the opinions of analysts following a particular stock together in what's known as a consensus rating. Newratings.com is where you go when you want more detail than that. The homepage keeps a running tally of the day's analyst rating announcements for U.S., Canadian and European stocks, along with a very brief explanation of the thinking behind the opinion.
If you're curious about a particular stock, just type the name or symbol into a search box and you'll get a list of recent ratings. You won't find a huge selection of brokerage firms represented on newratings.com (especially for Canadian stocks), but there's enough variety to make the site worth using.
No. 7: Tracking the odds
that a stock will rise in price
From: Stockbook.com, a website offered by the U.S. money manager and newsletter writer Pat O'Neil
Address: stockbook.com/stockodds
Remember how the risk alerts from Reuters suggested that the share price of Nova Chemicals was in a precarious spot?
The Stockbook website seconded this view by saying late in the week that the odds of Nova shares rising were 29 per cent. According to the Stockbook rating system, this means Nova is "risky and not likely to move up soon."
Stockbook calculates its odds on a daily basis by looking at such variables as a stock's short-term price trends, its price strength relative to the market and overall market condition.
You can look up individual stocks (not TSX-listed shares), or you can peruse a daily hot list of stocks with the highest odds for price appreciation. Sure it's gimmicky, but it's also fun.