There is a lot of garbage out there clamoring for your dollars. This seems especially true in the area of trading. Everyone’s paid service will make you more money than the next. For every decent service there are 100 others that are completely useless. This is why it’s nice when you can find useful services that are provided absolutely free.
In “10 Ways to Build a Better Watch List” I described some steps you might take to find stocks to trade before the market opens. The following is a list of free resources that will help you through that process.
Briefing.com
Briefing.com is a resource that is widely used in the trading community. Their most well-known service is their live news ticker called “Briefing In Play.” Traders use this news service to generate trading ideas and make decisions before, during, and after market hours. This is a paid service, but here’s a little secret; it’s also available for free. In addition to the free version of “In Play,” Breifing.com also has a set of useful market-related calendars.
- Briefing.com’s Hourly In Play -Unlike the paid version, which runs live, this version only updates on the hour. It’s still a great place to scan for stocks that may be in play for the day.
- Briefing.com’s Calendars – Breifing.com’s free website also offers a variety of calendars including earnings, economic, IPO & Stock Split
Finviz.com
Finviz.com is insanely useful, easy to use, and free. Their home page is a clear snapshot of the market at a glance, and things only get better from there.
- Stock Screener – This is the best free scanner I have ever found. (If you know of one better, let me know) It allows you to scan for a combination of fundamental criteria & technical set-ups. The only gripe I have is that the only MAs available are SMA 20, 50 & 200.
- Heat Maps – The Finviz heat maps are a great visual resource for stocks that are having a hot (or cold) day, week, month, or year. They also have a Earnings Date heat map which heats up as earnings approach & a Short Float map that shows what stocks might be hot for a short squeeze.
- Stock Market News & Blogs – This page is a live running stream of news headlines from Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters and others. Alongside the news are the headlines from trustworthy blogs such as Traderfeed, Zero Hedge, and The Kirk Report.
Stocktwits.com
At Stocktwits.com, you can see what traders and investors are buzzing about in the market. It can be a great place to pick up trading ideas. The fundamental and technical analysis done by the community is often top notch. Stocktwits recently released a separate Stocktwits Desktop program which has a number of rich features for all your trading needs. Its most powerful features are:
- Ability to click on stocks to pull up news, tweets, a candle chart as well as charts analyzed by the community
- Stocktwits TV built into the desktop
- Tabbing feature that allows you to separate your information in any way you choose
- On-board web browser that opens links within the desktop
- It’s completely separate from Twitter. When Twitter is down, the Stocktwits community is still buzzing along on the Stocktwits Desktop.
The Stocktwits stream can be noisy at times, but once you hone in on and follow the pros, you really see the power of Stocktwits come through. You can download the Stocktwits Desktop for free here.
It is often true that you get what you pay for, but there are plenty of free resources if you look hard enough. The bottom line is that trading is a business and every expense affects your bottom line, so take what you can get for free when you find it.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you know of some useful free resources please share them with us below.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
u forgot to mention a little site i like to call CHARTSHARK.COM!!!
great free resource.
Haha. Thanks Phil!
Chartshark.com is chock full of free awesomeness, it’s true. I might be a little biased though.
Brett Steenbarger, the trading psychologist (who trades also) is focused on providing decision support for traders via his blog posts and twitters. He is correct in concluding that smaller-account-trader isolation (very few such traders work at prop houses) results in not having the advantages structured feedback can give a trader.
This valuable (and free) approach is explained in this recent blog post:
http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2009/09/getting-most-from-traderfeed-blog.html
His blog/twitters are required additions for a trader’s Newsreader.
I follow Dr. Steenbarger as well. He is definitely the man when it comes to trading psychology. And, as you said, he provides all his information and advice for free on his blog.
Great resource, Michelle. Thank you.
Thanks for the recondation of Finbiz stock screener. Do you have any setups you could share with me for the screener, I like to trade short term, a few days to a few weeks. Thank you, Benny.
Hi Benny,
Sorry about the delayed response. I have been a bit busy recently; not really paying attention to the blog.
I tend to flip through various settings. In general, my base settings are stocks that are >$10 with current volume >1 mil
I play with the Relative Volume settings to find stocks that are coming into unusual volume, I look at gap scans, 52 week high-low, etc. I set the view to “charts,” as you might imagine, and while I’m scanning, I look at these charts and try to spot familiar patterns, and get an small idea about how the stock tends to move.
This is all based on how I trade, and what I like to trade.
I can’t really suggest much beyond that though, because I don’t know you nearly as well as you know you. My best suggestion is to play around with the settings, record which stocks you found for which scan, determine your success rate with those stocks, and trace it back to the scan you used to find them. This will allow you to determine which scans find you the best stocks for your style of trading. It will minimize your effort, while increasing your success rate.