The Best Tools for the Job | 2024

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

Hi there,

Merry Christmas! Inspired by Edwin’s Christmas List for professional investors, here is a list of all the tools and data sources that we use for our analysis. If you are in the mood to share some Christmas joy, please consider upgrading to our lifetime membership or giving a friend a gift subscription to Market Sentiment :)

None of the following are paid endorsements, and we receive no affiliate commissions. Every link in this list is based on our own experience using the product. Most of the links are free, and some are paid. We hope you find this helpful.

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Institutional Research

1. Spark Line Capital (Free) — Monthly/quarterly deep dive by an investment manager focused on finding alpha. His Intangible Value report is one of our all-time favorites.

2. AQR Research (Free) — Gold standard in investment research. Their paper, Fact, Fiction, and Factor Investing, won the best article for 2023 published in the Journal of Portfolio Management Research! (You should also follow AQR’s CEO Cliff on Twitter — It’s rare that someone who is so high up shares his views without any filters)

3. Consilient Observer (Free) — High-quality, in-depth reports by Michael Mauboussin of Morgan Stanley.

4. JP Morgan Weekly Market Recap (Free) — Great resource to get a quick overview of what happened in the previous week.

5. Alpha Architect (Free) — While the publication frequency is very low, they cover some esoteric topics like how to start an ETF, why traditional stock picking is challenging, etc. They do have a bias towards active investing.

6. Vanguard Research (Free) — To offset the above bias, check out Vanguard Research. They share insights from primary research conducted by their team.

7. Dimensional Insights (Free) — Great visualizations but short articles.

8. Quantpedia (Freemium) — Consider it an encyclopedia for quantitative trading strategies. They publish reports on the viability of different trading strategies created by academia.

9. NDVR (Free): Their reports are excellent, but they have a slight bias towards active management. Time In vs. Timing the Market is an excellent read. 

10. VettaFi Advisor Perspectives (Free) — They have great research. We especially love the reports from Laurence B Siegel (linked)

11. Meketa (Free) — While I am not sure whose idea was to name their insights page “thought leadership,” their reports are excellent. We really liked their white paper on Small Caps.

Note — For what it’s worth, please be aware that all corporate research will have its own biases based on the product they are selling. As the popular saying goes, if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything. Another pro-tip is if there is a disclaimer page, always say that you are a financial advisor — some of them hide the good stuff there.

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Newsletters/Blogs

1. Junto Investments (Free) — Great articles on mental models, moats, and stock picking.

2. 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.

3. Collab Fund (Free) — Morgan Housel has some of the best stories in Finance. Plus, both of his books, The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever, are great reads.

4. Saber Notes (Freemium)—A solid 10! John provides an in-depth view of investing and the stock market. His Substack is paid, but you can access some of the archives for free here. His Sources of Enduring Business Success is a must-read if you pick individual stocks and are a long-term investor.

5. Musings on the market (Free) — A newsletter by the legendary valuation professor Aswath Damodaran.

6. The Alchemy of Money
   (Freemium) — Learnings from the best investors on the planet.

7. Matt Levine (Free) — Undoubtedly, the wittiest and most market-savvy person to follow to keep up to date with Wall Street.

8. Moontower Meta (Paid) — Kris spent 20+ years trading options, starting out at Susquehanna (SIG). He writes about options, volatility, investing, learning, and more.

9. Of Dollars And Data (Free): Nick Maggiulli has the unique ability to present the data clearly without making it sensational or clickbait.

10. Young Money by Jack Raines
    (Free): Jack brings fresh perspectives about investing, money, and life. You only have to get rich once, and The Cost of Apathy are both great reads.

11. Breaking the Market (Free) — Matt dives deep into the topics of Geometric Rebalancing and portfolio allocation.

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Short-Sellers

1. Hindenburg Research (Free) — The most famous activist short seller on the market. These guys are the ones who released the reports on Nikola (which caused the stock to drop by 99.94% and the founder to go to prison for 4 years) and Clover Health.

2. J Capital Research (Free): Although they focus mainly on Chinese markets, they have also issued short reports for multiple companies listed in the US.

3. Muddy Waters Research (Free) — They produce reports on business, accounting, and fundamental fraud in companies. They mainly focus on the Chinese market.

4. The Bear Cave
   (Paid) — 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.

Note — We evaluated both the short and long-term performance of these firms & their stock picks in 2022.

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Tools for Portfolio Analysis/Backtesting

1. Portfolio Visualizer (Freemium)— This was the biggest downgrade of 2024! Most of their backtests are behind a paywall. We used to be able to share portfolios like this, but now we can only do backtests for up to 10 years.

2. Testfolio (Free) — Alternative to Portfolio Visualizer. While it’s not as comprehensive as PV, it still does get the job done in most cases. Rob Berger has made an excellent video on how to use Testfolio.

3. Composer (Freemium) — Composer is a great tool to create and backtest dynamic investing strategies quickly. They have a decent implementation of AI as well, which does a good job of creating portfolios from natural language inputs.

4. Lazy Portfolio ETF (Free) — Contains a collection of portfolios that require minimal maintenance and backtests going back up to 30 years.

5. ETFreplay (Free) — Research, analysis, and backtesting website for Exchange Traded Funds.

6. Curvo (Free) — It's like Portfolio Visualizer but for European investors.

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Data Sources

1. Polygon (freemium)—Polygon is the best option for live stock market data. Its API is robust and simple to use and supports intraday data and OTC tickers. We created askstockbot (now defunct) using the Polygon API. The team was also really supportive and proactive during development.

2. Alpha Vantage (freemium) — Historical data for stocks is better formatted here, and it provides both fundamental and macroeconomic data.

3. CoinGecko API (paid) — The most comprehensive cryptocurrency API with aggregated historical data across 317 different exchanges related to price, market capital, and trading volume. Our crypto DCA report was created using CoinGecko data.

4. Open Insider (free) — Tracks all the stock transactions made by insiders in public companies.

5. IPOScoop (freemium) — Tracks both the short and long-term performance of all the U.S. IPOs.

6. 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.

7. Barclay Hedge (paid) — Provides comprehensive data related to Hedge Funds and alternative investments.

8. 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.

9. roic.ai (Freemium) — Comprehensive summary of companies in one place with financials going back up to 30 years.

10. ETFdb (freemium) — Complete list of all ETFs classified by asset classes, industries, issuers, and investment styles.

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Miscellaneous

1. Similarweb (Freemium) — To check how much traffic any website is receiving. Great for competitor analysis as well.

2. Google Trends (Free) — Analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search

3. Datawrapper (Freemium) — To create stunning visualizations. Most of our charts are made using this tool.

4. Uncle Stock (Freemium) — One of the most powerful screeners we have come across. It has a steep learning curve, though.

5. Finviz (Freemium) — A great stock screener that’s good enough for most of us.

6. Social Blade (Freemium) — Track the social media growth of your favorite companies or influencers.

7. 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 :)

8. 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.

9. Google Scholar (Free) — Simple way to search all existing published research. This, in combination with Libgen (7), is incredibly powerful.

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

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