The Best Tools for the Job

The right tool in the right hands can accomplish anything.

Mar 26, 2023

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe – Abraham Lincoln

Since making our first analysis close to 2 years ago, we have published more than 100 issues. We watched our readers grow from a few hundred in 2021 to nearly 38,000 investors from around the world today. We have spent 1000s of hours researching ideas and collecting and analyzing data. A lot of you have reached out to us about the tools and data sources we use. We have compiled here all the best tools and resources we have found. Just bookmark this page as we will be updating it regularly.

None of these are paid endorsements and we receive no affiliate commissions – Every single link in this list is based on our own experience using the product. Most of them are free and some of them are paid. We hope you find this useful.

Data Sources

Yahoo Finance (free) — This is the best free financial API. We have used the yfinance library to get price data of stock tickers.
Polygon (freemium) — For live stock market data, Polygon is the best. The API is robust, simple to use, and supports intraday data, as well as OTC tickers.
Alpha Vantage (freemium) — Historical data for stocks is better formatted here and it provides both fundamental and macroeconomic data.
CoinGecko API (paid) — The most comprehensive cryptocurrency API with aggregated historical data across 317 different exchanges related to price, market capital, and trading volume.
Open Insider (free) — Tracks all the stock transactions made by insiders in public companies.
IPOScoop (freemium) — Tracks both the short and long-term performance of all the U.S. IPOs.
Capitol Trades (free) — The easy way to keep up to date with the stocks traded by Congress. If you are looking for more, all the Senator, former Senator, and candidate financial disclosure reports since 2012 are available at efdsearch.senate.gov.
Barclay Hedge (paid) — Provides comprehensive data related to Hedge Funds and alternative investments.
SPIVA® U.S. Scorecard (Free) — Every year, S&P Global benchmarks the performance of active fund managers against passive – and every year, we get more proof that passive is the way to go.
roic.ai (Free) — Comprehensive summary of companies in one place with financials going back up to 30 years.
ETFdb (freemium) — Complete list of all ETFs classified by asset classes, industries, issuers, and investment styles.

Portfolio Analysis

Portfolio Visualizer (free) — Portfolio Visualizer makes it super easy to do backtests and they have data going back up to 1971 – It’s free and you can create, backtest, and share portfolios like this.
Composer (free) — Composer is a great tool to quickly create and backtest dynamic investing strategies.
Lazy Portfolio ETF (Free) — Contains a collection of portfolios that require minimal maintenance and backtests going back up to 30 years.
ETFreplay (Free) - Research, analysis, and backtesting website for Exchange Traded Funds.

Newsletters/Blogs

Breaking the Market (Free) — This is one of our favorite blogs, written by Matt Hollerbach. Matt dives deep into the topics of Geometric Rebalancing and portfolio allocation. Matt also manages a portfolio and open-sources his portfolio performance. It’s a great learning resource!
Ecoinometrics (Paid) — Presents a long-term perspective about how digital assets are shaping financial markets with the help of really interesting infographics.
Doomberg (Paid) — “The stuff you don’t know you don’t know keeps shrinking” – Perfectly captures what Doomberg is all about. If you are always questioning the status quo, Doomberg is a must-read.
Of Dollars And Data (Free) — Nick Maggiulli has the unique ability to present the data in a clear manner, while not making it sensational or clickbaity.
Mr. Money Mustache (Free) — This is a fantastic witty blog by Pete Adeney who retired at 30 by making some smart financial decisions. His motto of “Work is better when you don’t need the money” is something we related very much to.
Collab Fund (Free) — Morgan Housel has some of the best stories in Finance.
Saber Notes (Free) — Something we would rate a solid 10! John has an in-depth view of investing and the stock market.
Tker (Free) — Sam focuses on the big picture and long-term investing.
Musings on the market (Free) — A newsletter by the legendary valuation professor Aswath Damodaran.
Neckar (Paid) — Learnings from the best investors on the planet.
Dirty Bubble Media (Free) — Commentary on the various bubbles of our time. Was key in bringing down FTX.
Matt Levine (Free) — The GOAT. Undoubtedly, the wittiest and most market-savvy person to follow to keep up to date with Wall Street.
Liberty’s Highlights (Paid) — Great investing ideas can come from anywhere – what matters is whether they work or not.
Moontower Meta (Free) — Kris spent 20+ years trading options, starting out at Susquehanna (SIG). He writes about options, volatility, investing, learning, and more.

Short-Sellers

Hindenburg Research (Free) — The most famous activist short seller on the market. These guys are the ones that released the reports on Nikola (Which caused the stock to drop by 40% and the SEC to open an inquiry into Nikola) and Clover Health.
J Capital Research (Free) — Although they focus mainly on Chinese markets, they have issued short reports for multiple companies listed in the US as well.
Muddy Waters Research (Free) — They produce reports on business, accounting, and fundamental fraud in companies. They mainly focus on the Chinese market.
The Bear Cave (Paid) — This one is the most interesting one among the bunch. Bear Cave is exposing bad companies twice a month. What distinguishes Bear Cave from all the others (Other than its accessibility to retail investors) is that Edwin Dorsey, who issues these reports, does not take positions against the companies and instead makes money solely from paid subscriptions. Also, Edwin was the inspiration for our list.

Institutional Research

JP Morgan Weekly Market Recap (Free) — Key performance metrics and changes in the market.
Goldman Sachs Insights (Free) — High-quality investment ideas and insights.
Blackrock Investment Institute (Free) — Proprietary research reports on the global economy, markets, geopolitics, and long-term asset allocation.
Goldman Sachs Individual Portfolio Strategy (Free) — Great place to visualize portfolio risks and track historical asset class performance.
Morgan Stanley Ideas (Free) — Exactly as it sounds – ideas from one of the top investment banks.
JP Morgan Minds of Market (Free) — Insights from global macro strategists on portfolio allocation.
Spark Line Capital (Free) — Monthly deep dive by an investment management firm focused on finding alpha.

Miscellaneous

Similarweb (Freemium) — To check how much traffic any website is getting. Great for competitor analysis as well.
Google Trends (Free) — Analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search
Datawrapper (Freemium) — To create stunning visualizations. Most of our charts are made using this tool.
Uncle Stock (Freemium) — One of the most powerful screeners we have come across. It has a steep learning curve, though.
Finviz (Freemium) — A great stock screener that’s good enough for most of us.
Social Blade (Freemium) — Track the social media growth of your favorite companies or influencers.
Libgen (Free) — Incredible tool that can help you download all fiction/non-fiction books and scientific papers for free. We usually buy from the author if we end up liking the book :)
Wayback Machine (Free) — An archive for the entire internet – Find saved copies of pages that no longer exist and earlier versions of web pages here.
Google Scholar (Free) — Simple way to search all existing published research. This in combination with Libgen (7) is incredibly powerful.

Did we miss any? Which one would you like us to add to the list?

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