Looking for a potentially profitable investment can be, at times, rather daunting task not unlike a little treasure hunt. One needs to look under enough rocks to discover a stock which may fulfill his investment requirements and bring in the potential rewards.

So I thought it could be helpful if I list here some free online tools I normally use for scrutinizing the 1,600 or so Australian and 7,000 or so US shares.

Australian markets

• Australian Stock Screener is a free online stock scanner which I found very helpful over the time. It was the first stock scanner for ASX I discovered while back and I keep using it until these days.
  The use is pretty self explanatory - simply tick the boxes according to your investing needs and let the treasure hunt begin.
• Equities info is the web where I look for value amongst the companies currently trading at their 52 week highs and lows.

US markets

• Yahoo Finance Stock Screener is one of the more obvious tools I only came across not that long ago. The screening facility for US stocks there is extensive and you can narrow your search down to levels not available in the ASX stock scanner mentioned above.
• Barchart.com is what I use for highs/lows and other market indicies of US markets. I am sure that there will be lots of similar US sites freely available but this one is the one I found good enough for my initial lookarounds.

With help of the tools above you should be able to find some potential value investments fairly quickly. But don’t forget, that you will also need to put the newly found treasures under your “investor microscopy�? for some closer look at its earnings, balance sheets etc.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:33 am and is filed under Australian stock, My View. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.