Best Tools for Investing: Finding and Researching Stocks, and Managing Investments

Investing without the right tools is like trying to navigate without Google Maps. You’ll get somewhere, just not where you want to go. These tools for investing help you find the right stocks, organize your portfolio and ensure that you’re on your way to financial success — all while making investing as simple as possible.

Contents: Tools for Investing

1. Tools for Investing: The Right Investing App
2. Tools for Investing Research
3. Tools to Find Investments
4. Tools to Automate Investing

Tools For Investing: The Right Investing App

Yes, you probably have an investing app already, but do you have the right one?

Time to ditch your old brokerage and sign up for one of the modern investing apps of 2021. Unlike your outdated investing app provided by large banks, these newer platforms provide a better user experience with features that helps investors invest better.

Some of our favorite include M1 Finance, eToro and Public. On top of the benefits (i.e. zero commission, fractional investing, etc.) provided by many of the traditional stockbrokers, these apps include features like:

• Automated investing automatically invests in stocks/ETFs based on pre-defined criteria (provided by M1 Finance).
• Copy Trading lets you see the investments of top traders and gives you the option of automatically investing alongside them (provided by eToro).
• Social investing combines social media + investing and lets you interact with other investors on the platform for ideas and discussions (provided by Public).

See our full Investing For Beginners Guide for all features and help decide which one of these investing apps is right for you.

Research The Best Investment Tools

This is different from your investing brokerage. While your trading apps are used to place trades, they often lack the necessary tools for investing research.

Atom is an investing tool that helps investors analyze companies and manage their investments. Analyzing a company’s financial statements is a critical part of the research process. Atom helps simplify this process by consolidating a company’s financials with both a web app and phone app.

Atom Application Features:

• Connect your brokerage apps and manage all your investments in one place — visualize your returns, fees and holdings
• Price target updates and analyst commentary
• Consolidates financial statements and summarizes important metrics (i.e. profitability, growth, etc)
• Stock screener to discover investments

Price: Free with premium options

Try Atom’s Investing Tool.

Seeking Alpha (SA) is one of the largest user-generated investment communities that consolidates company analysis, news and financial data — with thousands of research articles submitted by its community members.

SA is a great site to use as a starting point to learn about a company, but there are several pros and cons to using the site.

• The benefits: Lots of content available on its site — it is the go-to site for both professional and DIY investors to show their research to the public
• The downsides: The amount of content makes it hard to differentiate which articles are good and bad. The information submitted by the articles is not verified and most people can post content so it’s up to the reader to confirm the data

Price: Free with premium options — users have access to recently submitted articles but older articles require a subscription.

Best Tools to Find Investments

Finviz is a stock screener tool for investing which lets investors discover stocks through filters. Finviz also has a tab to show whether insiders (i.e. management team, major shareholders, etc.) are buying/selling its stock.

Price: Free

Example: An investor can filter investments based on the following criteria:

• Greater than $2b market cap
• Over 20% sales growth in the past 5 years
• Based in the United States
• In the technology sector

This will produce the following results on July 29, 2021:

Try Finviz’s Tools for Investing

Podcasts are a great tool to find new investment ideas. Some of our favorites include:

• Yet Another Value Podcast — hosted by Andrew Walker, portfolio manager at Rangeley Capital Podcast.
• Value Hive — hosted by Brandon Beylo of Macro Ops.
• We Study Billionaires — hosted by Preston Pysh and Stig Brodersen of The Investor’s Podcast Network.
• Invest Like the Best — hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy of Colossus.

The Average Joe is our free 3x-weekly investment newsletter covering the latest market trends, stocks and news. Our mission is to simplify the stock market — by concisely delivering our content without the jargon.

Price: Free

Subscribe to our Investment Newsletter

Best Tools to Automate Investing

Investing is all about making your life easier, and as an investor, it’s often better to automate our investing or hand it over to professionals.

When it comes to automation, M1 Finance has some of the best automation investing tools out there. Its investing app offers a feature that automatically invests your money and rebalances your portfolio.

• How Does It Work? Set your target allocation and whenever you deposit/withdraw money, M1’s algorithm will allocate your money throughout your portfolio’s different stock/assets. 
  

Investors can also open a checking account with M1, which provides even more automation. You can set rules like “auto-invest any amount I have over $25,” — which links between your investing and checking account.

Try M1’s Automation Tool For Investing

But sometimes, it’s better to let professionals manage a portion of your money.

Titan is a financial investment firm that manages your investments on your behalf. Think of Titan as the hedge fund available to everyday investors — providing institutional-quality investment management that was typically only available to the ultra-wealthy.

• Track record: 22.4% annual return between Feb 2018 and Jun 2021 (compared to an average return of 16.8% in the S&P 500 (~market average)
• Stats: Titan manages over $500 million for 25,000+ clients.
• Fee: $5/month on a portfolio of under $10,000 and 1% annual fee for those above $10,000.

Try Titan’s Tool for Investing

With the right tools for investing, it’s time dive into the tactics in finding great investments and building lasting portfolios:

• Learn how to pick stocks for long-term investment — by understanding the qualities to look for in a strong company.
• Learn how to invest $100k: The Millennial/Gen-Z Edition — the guide that positions your portfolio with stocks, ETFs, crypto and real estate.