The Complete List of My Financial Research Tools

I personally like to dig for 3 factors that could possibly re-rate a stock over time: growth catalysts, acceleration patterns and BUY signals that can be found in each companies quarterly earnings, company/industry/macro news or things like 13F institutional activity.

To research a given company I use an array of tools to help me deep dive into all these factors and uncover insights that help me make a decision, I’m writing this article today for anyone interested to learn more about these tools that I use so frequently and fondly.

Here’s the list and what each tool does in no specific order.

1. OpenInsider

This is a great free tool that tracks and aggregates form 4 filings of insider buying/selling activities for all publicly traded companies.

Those insiders include:

• CEO, CFO, COO & other senior executives
• Board members / directors
• 10%+ beneficial shareholders

Tracking insider activity especially open market buying is one of the strongest signal of conviction one can find for a company, imagine a CEO or Director using their own hard earned cash to buy more stock when they don’t have to.

Here’s a live screenshot of some of today’s open buying to give you a sense of how it works.

You can access the tool through this link openinsider.com

I check it every week for screen for new opportunities, and after seeing the screen today I’m very tempted to learn more about AAT and what could’ve potentially triggered a $3.7M open market buy… aren’t you ?

2. UnusualWhales

I have a lot of love for this one. It is responsible for more of my successful options trades than I care to admit, and I check it every single day to scan for Unusual Options Activity (UOA), which shows patterns of higher than usual buying or selling of PUTS or CALLS at specific strike prices and on specific expiry dates.

I pay for the premium version on this one and it has earned the subscription cost many times over. When unusually large options activity hits a ticker right before a catalyst, Unusual Whales catches it, and that footprint is often a great first hint that someone knows something that has not priced in yet.

I like to look at the Bullish & Bearish option flows where I sort by Premium paid, IO or volumes on the day to find the most interesting prospects to research.

Here is what some of the screens look like today.

NVDA this is confirmed accumulation. On the same day we have 4 separate NVDA call lines, all of them green (bought at ask), all with OI rising, and huge premium paid.

WULF - This is also very interesting and could be worth looking into. $337K premium is considered modest, but look: green (bought), OI +1,560 (+42%), Chg +67%, and 102% IV. Almost double open interest on the day with a small-cap ($14.82) with triple-digit IV, I’d consider that strong accumulation as a signal for someone betting there is a move happening soon.

Link to the tool through mobile app or via unusualwhales.com

3. Quartr

A genuinely beautiful free app that puts earnings calls, investor presentations, and transcripts in one place for you to listen to and search through at your own convenience. I use their mobile app extensively for earnings calls especially the Q&A where all the really good stuff is uncovered.

It has a great AI feature that helps you search transcripts for specific key words or summarize full transcripts, and it also pulls press releases for the companies I follow faster than anything else I can think of.

Here’s what is looks like on the inside from when I was listening to one of my favorite stock’s Q2 earnings call Q&A .

Their desktop site is here, but I only use the App personally quartr.com

4. FinViz

My morning ritual tool, pretty easy to navigate and can quickly & seamlessly tell you everything you need to know about Futures, sector heat maps, screeners, and technical data, all in one place. If you have read any of my Before the Open posts on blossom, a lot of that data came from FinViz.

Here’s the Futures screener that I check every night before market open and a sectors screener that helps me understand money flows and daily sector performance.

If we read through it we see it’s looking pretty good for precious metals on the Futures front and on the single day performance of the XLB materials sector.

Overall pretty Green Day for most sectors and congratulations to everyone LONG orange juice.. hahaha :D

Check out this great tool and all it’s free wonderful features right here: finviz.com

5. Portfolio Visualizer

This is where I check whether an idea actually held up, or whether it just sounds clever.

I use it a lot for backtesting, correlation analysis, factor exposure, all of it. When I want to know how two assets really move against each other I test it here first.

My posts on ETF correlation were built using this tool and here is a screen of how I do it.

This here would suggest that VTI & VOO are essentially the same thing, so those owning both might want to do more research. As you can see it also shows as ETF like GLD has very low correlation to equities.

I would invite you to check the correlation within stocks & ETFs in your portfolio and test out how diversified it actually is.

You can access this tool right here: portfoliovisualizer.com

6. WhaleWisdom

It tracks 13F filings that tell me where institutional money is investing through tracking 13F filings every quarter. When I want to know what hedge funds like Driehaus, Hood River, or Renaissance are holding, what they accumulated, new positions they opened or fully exited, this is where I go.

It is how I found a lot of my favorite small caps early on including ONDS, BBOT, RVMD and ATAI, as I look for clusters of institutional money going after the same positions. I run a deep dive every quarter to track the moves of 10-15 hedge funds and what they’re buying… here’s a small preview (full list for another day)

The catch with 13Fs is the lag, they land 45 days after quarter end, so you are always looking at a slightly old snapshot, but these funds that consistently find winners leave a trail, and following that trail has been very good for me.

This is what the tool actually looks like showing Berkshire Hathaway as an example.

Access this tool here whalewisdom.com

7. Seeking Alpha

Now this one I lean on constantly cause it has an amazing user interface and it is pretty simple to use and get to the data you need quickly and that’s also why I subscribe to the premium version.

For this one the best features are the screener dashboards, earnings calendars, analyst histories (pretty robust), this is where the sector ETF performance data in my rotation posts comes from.

You can see here for your self how the screeners look, these are 3 different ones covering MAG7 (I built that one as a demo for the article), Top ETFs by price performance and a screener for rumored M&A targets. (that’s pretty cool don’t you think??.. well that is one of tens of different pre-made screeners you can view or create your own)

You can access the tool here: seekingalpha.com

THE HOLY GRAIL: SEC EDGAR

Now all the tools above are how I get the signals and form the ideas I find interesting enough to research, BUT nothing is confirmed until I’ve cross-checked everything and tested fundamentals through the official filings submitted to the SEC.

Nothing beats pulling the official numbers straight off the balance sheet, reading how a company describes its own segments, its own risks, and its own year over year progress in its own words.

Most of my posts, as a lot of you might know, come from data points I traced back to a primary filing, a 10-Q, an 8-K, a 13F, etc.

Here is what a filing document would look like from Q2 filing of one of my favorite holdings .

You can access all filings for any public company right here: Sec.gov

Well there you have it, this was pretty much everything I frequently use as I research for new positions or ideas. I really hope you find value in some of these tools.

If you found this useful I invite you to subscribe to my Substack.

This is not financial advice.