5 Websites I use as a Value Investor

[Music] Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! In this video, uh, coming at you from my computer today because a common question that I get from a lot of you guys is what websites am I going to to kind of source all my information and what you know websites am I using frequently in my investing workflow. So I thought today I'd make a quick video about that because, in all honesty, I don't use too many websites besides, you know, going on to the company's investor relations page and whatnot.

But anyway, I thought I'd summarize my top five investing websites that I use in my investing workflow. Probably the one that I go to these days most frequently is this first one here called QuickFS. So I don't know if you guys have heard of QuickFS; I think I've mentioned it in a couple of videos. It's totally a free website; you do have to make an account, but it's a free account, and once you're in, you get access to all this stuff.

So this is a really helpful website for kind of getting up to speed on the companies that you're looking at. It's very much set out for, you know, the value investing kind of strategy that I like to follow which is really handy. So this is the—so here you can see you're looking at Alphabet, so Google, and this is their overview page. Immediately, you can see some numbers that we're actually really interested in.

So you can see the 10-year median returns for return on invested capital. So, of course, we like to see that 10 to 15, so this immediately gives us a good indication that Google’s return on invested capital— their management team's doing a good job. But it also gives us three out of the four moat numbers that we like to look at from that Phil Town investing approach.

We like to see a long history of uninterrupted growth in four key metrics: revenue, free cash flow, earnings per share, and also equity. So they’ve got the revenue, and the free cash flow, and the earnings per share, but they don’t have the equity. But you can work that out manually if you just head over to the balance sheet tab, scroll down, and find the shareholders' equity from 10 years ago to where it is now, and then just do a simple growth rate calculator.

But yeah, as you can see, this is a website that I refer to a lot just because it has a lot of information just straight up ready for you. So you can see here if you look at Google, yes, the management team's doing a good job, yes, they’ve probably got some sort of competitive advantage just by the fact that they’re increasing their revenue, free cash flow, earnings per share at over—like at least 10 percent every single year.

Then you can have a look; you see their revenue and their margins coming down here, and their earnings per share growth is put out in this table. Here you get return on assets, return on equity, and return on invested capital. The other reason that I like this—this is one of the few websites where you can just straight up get 10 years' worth of data.

Remember, such a core part of the strategy that I follow is looking at long-term trends in the growth of companies, whether it be revenue, whether it be free cash flow or whatever. And you can actually do that on this website because it gives you 10 years of numbers. So you can have a look at the income statement if you want to look at 10 years of revenue, or you want to look at 10 years of earnings per share data. Or you can flick over to the balance sheet if you’re looking at, well, how’s their cash position changed over time? You know their total current assets versus their total current liabilities.

You can have a look at how their short-term debt or their long-term debt changed over time. Um, and it's really nice just having 10 years of numbers right in front of your face because you can just look from year to year and you get a general sense of how that company is moving.

You can have a look at the equity as well, or you can turn over to the—free, sorry—the free cash flow, the cash flow statement. That was one thing that you actually can't look at from this view is the free cash flow. I really wish that was a function in this table, but it's just not. So the free cash flow is, of course, the cash from operations minus the property, plant, and equipment, so you do have to do that by yourself.

But it’s not that hard at the end of the day. And look, you can see how their cash—their operating cash flow has grown over time. How has their capital expenditures grown or shrunk over time? Um, and you can have a look down, you know, net issuance of common stock if they’ve been issuing stock, buying it back, net issuance of debt—have they been taking on debt or paying back debt over time?

And you can kind of just get a really good feel for the company quite quickly just by looking at this one website, QuickFS. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it gets you up to speed quite quickly.

Anyway, moving on, the second website I wanted to talk to you guys about—and this is probably a website that I go to before I go to QuickFS—is HyperCharts. So here I've already loaded up Alphabet, so I’ve already loaded up Google again, but we can just go back to the um, the start page now. Yes, this website doesn’t have every single stock under the sun; however, if you’re investing similarly to me and you have kind of a similar circle of competence to me, then it'll cover most of the stocks that you’re probably interested in.

For example, you see Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Tencent, Alibaba, Facebook, Tesla, Berkshire, you know, so many—Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Visa—you know, it’s even got Bitcoin, MasterCard, you know, so many—Disney, PayPal, so on and so forth. So it’s got a lot of stocks that I would say most of you guys are probably going to be interested in.

Like, have a look at this long list of stocks—there are a lot; it’s not all of them, but there are a lot of stocks on there. Now, when I use HyperCharts, what I’m really doing is I am trying to get a quick snapshot of whether I might be interested in this company. QuickFS I go into a little bit more depth, but when I’m using HyperCharts, I just love it because it’s all graphs.

So, yeah, it’s all graphs, so you can just look at how things have trended over time, and that’s what I’m trying to—that’s what I’m trying to use this website for, is to identify trends. So you can have a look with Alphabet, trend in revenue—revenue over time, it's going up and to the right, that’s what we want to see.

Then you can have a look at, you know, revenue and operating income. So you can single these out. So as you can see, revenue is going up over time, gross profit, uh, yeah, that's going up over time. And then, when it comes to operating income, that’s going up over time, but it is a little bit choppier.

We can scroll down, have a look at their net income—clearly that's rising over time, although again, it’s a little bit choppy. You have a look at their margins—really nice graph of their different margins which is great. Operating expenses, you can get a feel for, "Okay, so yeah, the operating expenses are going up over time."

And then you can have a look at, you know, revenue growth over time—okay, interesting. It’s kind of been on the decline in terms of percentage growth every year. Operating cash flow, you can see up and to the right—cash up and to the right. So this is really a handy website because if something—a red flag will definitely stick out to you.

Like if you see the operating cash flow going down and to the right, then you know that, “Okay, maybe I’m not going to be very interested in this company; it seems to be on the slide.” But I definitely really like messing around with HyperCharts, and you can—if you want to, you don’t obviously have to.

A lot of this information is free, but if you want to, there are premium features which give you extra charts. In fact, if I have a look over at the premium page, it gives you financial forecasts; it can actually give you private financials. So if you’ve got your own company, you want to make your own company’s charts, then you can do that.

It gives you historical price charts; you know, you can compare two different companies on the same page. You can also sync the earnings calendar to your phone, which is handy, or you can get earnings by email. So there are a lot of little hidden features here and there. If you want to try the premium, I actually do have an affiliate agreement with HyperCharts. So if you’re interested in signing up for the premium subscription, then I would highly—I would appreciate it very much if you guys checked out the link down—it’s in the description below. Because full disclosure, it won’t make the price any more expensive for you, but HyperCharts, they'll chuck a couple of bucks my way for directing you over to them.

But anyway, I definitely do use HyperCharts; I just run the free version and it does help me get up to speed with stocks very quickly.

Now here’s the third one: if you follow that kind of Rule One Phil Town strategy, which my strategy is very similar to, then one website that you can use is the Rule One Toolbox. Now this is a paid subscription; I think you get one month free, but after that, it is a paid subscription. However, this is really handy, especially if you’ve read Phil Town's books and you kind of follow that strategy.

It gives you all the numbers in the same spot. So what you can do is you can say type in, you know, Facebook. There we go, and we can go to Facebook’s page, and it is a bit of a clunky website. It is a little bit dated; however, the numbers are still here. So you can go over to Rule One numbers and then have a look at this; we talk about a moat.

You've got your four different moat numbers there, and you can see—over 10 years, not quite Facebook because it hasn't been public for 10 years—but you see seven years, five years, three years, one year. It actually gives you a rating as well; I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the rating; just do your own kind of analysis from what you see in front of you.

Then you see, you know, management numbers, return on equity, return on invested capital, and the debt. Obviously, Facebook is just one of those freak instances where they’ve just got no debt, so obviously that gets a 100 rating because it’s going to take them zero years of their earnings to pay back their debt.

But you can see, like over the past seven, five, three, and one year, look at that return on invested capital—very, very strong for Facebook. It's also got heaps more information down here in this table. You can scroll down even further if you want to look at the debt ratios or the capital ratios, price multiples, etc.

So this is one where, you know, if you wanted everything summarized in one place, then this is your go-to. However, it will cost you money. You can do a pretty decent job, however, just from those other free websites. But that's the third website that I would recommend. I don’t actually use their margin of safety calculator; I do all of my valuation stuff manually, but that’s just me. I mean, up to you.

Then moving on, the fourth and the fifth websites that I actually use quite a bit are not actually to do with the investing strategy that I follow so much, but they’re actually to do with following the world’s best investors. So a lot of people ask me how do you kind of follow what stocks you might want to be looking into. A big part of that—like obviously, I keep it within my circle of competence, but a big part of what I’m interested in investing in comes down to looking at, well, what are the big dogs buying and selling?

You know, that gives you a hint as to what you might want to look at. It doesn’t mean you should buy the stocks that they’re buying, but it gives you a hint that, “Okay, five super investors that I follow are buying this one stock; maybe I should research, get up to speed on what that stock’s all about.”

So the first website that I look at for that is called Data Roma. This is the one I’ve been using for a long time because they track 69 super investors, including people like, you know, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Seth Klarman, people like Michael Burry, all of these people, Bill Ackman, etc. You can find their portfolios in here somewhere.

The other reason that I also like this website is because it puts all these super investors' 13Fs together and it gives you the information on what are the top 10 most owned stocks by the super investors. Okay, super—69 super investors—the top 10 most owned stocks are Facebook, Google, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Microsoft. That gives you a hint that, “Okay, maybe some of these companies you might want to look into.”

Then it shows you, for example, in the last quarter, Q3 2020, what were the top 10 buys? So you can have a look: Wells Fargo, Intel, Bank of America, Facebook, Micron. So you can start to comb through and go, “Oh, actually, that’s interesting. Bank of America was heavily bought by these super investors; I really like Bank of America. Maybe I should go in, do my valuation research on the company a little bit more, and see if that’s something that I would be interested in exploring.”

So this is the fourth website that I use quite frequently. When all the 13Fs come out, I am hovering on this site and just going through because we can just pull up, you know, a random—let's try and find one that you guys will know about. Let’s try and find Warren Buffett—where is he—where is he? Warren Buffett, there he is!

So you can pull him up, and you can see his whole portfolio of 49 stocks, and you can see what he did recently. He reduced 3.7 in Apple, added 9 in Bank of America, reduced 46 in Wells Fargo. You can see what percentage each stock is in in his portfolio, how many shares he's got, um, the reported price; you can see the value of the positions.

So, really handy website; I definitely recommend just spending half an hour just bumming around on Data Roma, and you probably quite enjoy yourself.

Now moving on to the fifth website that I wanted to talk about—and this is actually one that I've not been using for very long because I didn’t know it existed. This is actually a website that was recommended to me by Investing with Tom—shout out if you're watching—and this is Ticker.com.

And this is—see, the thing about Data Roma is that it's only compiling the 13Fs, so that’s a security—an SEC Securities and Exchange Commission—a U.S. form, okay? However, a lot of these super investors have a lot of international investments, investments overseas in different companies, so this one actually tries to get all the information on all of their investments, not just what's going on over in the United States.

So you can make a free account, and what you can see is—look, this is the—this is the terminal. This is the home screen, and you can see Berkshire Hathaway, um, you know, probably investments—so Monash, probably Scion Asset Management; that’s Michael Burry! You can have a look at Baron Capital Management. There are so many big names in here that you can just—and you just click on any of them.

So I'm actually going to go into Michael Burry's because this shows you what I’m talking about, why this website is a little bit different from Data Roma. So you can see his portfolio right here; however, if you have a look over to filing type, you can see 13F, 13F, 13F, but there are also some other ones.

So some from Japan, some from elsewhere around the world. Now this is where I was saying that this website comes into its own. If we go back to Data Roma and we actually go back to the home page and we find Michael Burry, then if we click on his portfolio and we go in, we can see, “Okay, look at the top three positions: GameStop, Facebook, and Discovery.”

But if we go over to Ticker.com, the terminal, we can see it’s GameStop, then hang on, it’s Ortech, and then Facebook, and then Discovery is number four. So yes, that’s because Ortech would not show up on the 13F filing. In fact, that’s come from some other source. And when you actually research it, this is Michael Burry's second biggest position—Ortech is a South Korean auto manufacturer making things to like ambulances and emergency medical service stuff.

And so you can see that. Or actually, while Data Roma did miss it because this is purely 13Fs, a company like Ticker.com actually—and they try and get the full story, the full picture. So this is a—this is a website that I’ve only just started using, so I’m not an expert with it yet, but it’s one that I’ll definitely be using much more into the future because it gives you a much better understanding.

Like if you go from the 13F, Monash Properties' portfolio has two stocks in it; however, if you come over here, then you can see many, many more. You can see many more.

So on the 13F, as you can see over here on the right-hand side, it only shows Micron and Sarotaj Growth Properties, but there are all these other ones as well. But overall, guys, that is—that's the video for today: five websites that I commonly use as a value investor. They help me greatly during my workflow. A lot of my workflow with investing is still quite manual, and I like it like that because it makes me really understand what I’m doing by doing it myself.

However, these websites are particularly good for little shortcuts here and there and just to quickly get up to speed or to find things that maybe you should be looking at.

So anyway, guys, that's it for this video. Hope you enjoyed it! Leave a like on the video if you found it useful; I’d really appreciate it. And, uh, yeah, we’re doing pretty well with the old new money advent calendar, so I’m enjoying it. I hope you guys are too! Shout out to you guys if you’ve watched every single video so far, and sure enough, thanks for watching, guys! If you’re interested in my investing strategy, check out Profitful links down in the description below.

But with that said, I’ll see you guys. [Music] Tomorrow. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] You.