Analysis is only ever as good as its inputs. Before a new analyst learns to read a balance sheet or build a model, they need to know where information actually comes from — which sources to trust, which to treat with suspicion, and how to keep a steady flow of market context arriving without hunting for it. That is the whole purpose of this session, the first in the Spring 2023 series: a guided tour of the club's information toolbox, organised into seven categories, from the morning's headlines to the books on the shelf.
The structure mirrors how research actually escalates. You stay current with news; you frame the environment with market and industry analysis; you go to the primary source — the company itself — for the facts; you sanity-check your thinking against other analysts' work; you use screeners to surface candidates; and podcasts and books fill the gaps the workday leaves.
Source categories
7
News, market analysis, company info, company analysis, screeners, podcasts, books
The Ben Graham screen
431 → 10
What six FinViz filters do to the US large-cap universe
Podcasts on rotation
8
From the FT's daily briefing to The Macro Trading Floor
The toolbox, in three moves
Move 1
Stay current
News outlets, newsletters that come to you, social accounts worth following, and podcasts for the commute. The market does not wait for you to go looking.
Move 2
Frame the context
Bank outlooks, fund managers' letters, and industry reports — the macro and sector backdrop every pitch sits inside.
Move 3
Go deep on the company
Investor relations first — the primary source — then the aggregators, the analysis platforms, and the screeners that surface the next candidate.
News: how to get updated
Six outlets carry the daily load, each with a distinct role — and several are free through Nova:
| Outlet | What it's for | Access |
|---|---|---|
| Bloomberg | Factual and on-time | A few free articles; readable on the library terminals |
| Financial Times | Great news source with lots of opinion articles; excellent iOS and Android apps | Free with your Nova account |
| The Economist | The longer stories | Free while at Nova; weekly magazine in the library |
| Finviz | News aggregator combining outlets with blog articles, plus lots of other functionality | Free |
| CNBC | US market stories and data | Most articles free; some premium |
| Jornal de Negócios | The best for Portuguese market news | Newspaper available at the library |
Market analysis: framing the backdrop
For the macro picture, go straight to the people paid to write it. The leading investment banks — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Barclays, Citi, UBS — publish annual, quarterly, and weekly outlooks, and fund managers' letters to investors (Warren Buffett's, Bill Ackman's) are worth the read. Inside an outlook you will find exactly what a pitch's macro section needs: growth expectations stated in plain terms, and the relevant graphs behind them.
For industry work, the session points to Statista (free access through your Nova account), the big consulting firms — McKinsey, Deloitte, PwC — for larger industries, and dedicated market-report shops: The Business Research Company, Fortune Business Insights, and CSI Market. A typical report gives you market size and growth — the worked example sized the global recreational-vehicle market at USD 55.9 billion in 2021, projected to USD 87.9 billion by 2028 at a 6.7% CAGR — plus segmentation and the key companies profiled.
Company info: the primary source first
Investor Relations is the most trustworthy source for company data. Every listed company has an IR page where it publishes reports and communicates with investors, and three artifacts on it do most of the work:
Artifact 1
The presentation
Probably the best way to get familiarised with the company: current results, past performance, future outlook and growth strategy, the business model, and the product and geography segmentation.
Artifact 2
The earnings release
Filed quarterly and annually. The detailed financial statements for the period, both GAAP and non-GAAP. Annual reports are more extensive and break down everything about the business.
Artifact 3
The transcript
Every earnings release comes with an event where the company presents and explains its results. Here you find guidance for the next quarters, the analysts' main concerns in the Q&A, and the company's explanation.
For everything the IR page wraps in narrative, Yahoo Finance is the open aggregator of record — the session tours it tab by tab on Cleveland-Cliffs:
| Tab | What you get |
|---|---|
| Summary | Price, market cap, beta, P/E and EPS, earnings date, dividend, one-year target |
| Chart | Price history with indicators — and comparisons against peers or the underlying commodity |
| Profile | Business description, sector and industry, employee count, website |
| Financials | Detailed income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow — annual, quarterly, and trailing twelve months |
| Holders | Insider and institutional ownership, top institutional holders, insider purchases |
| Analysis | Earnings and revenue estimates, analyst price targets, upgrades and downgrades |
| Historical Data | Prices at any frequency since listing — downloadable straight to Excel for further analysis |
Company analysis: standing on others' work
Three platforms carry other people's analysis — useful for pressure-testing your own, never a substitute for it:
Platform 1
Seeking Alpha
Combines many of Yahoo Finance's functionalities with in-depth stock analysis from authors — relevant discussion with strong, sustained arguments from well-known investors and platform regulars, plus investment ideas across asset classes and strategies.
Platform 2
GuruFocus
Combines the relevant data for listed securities with a great deal of analysis — valuation metrics to use as guides (and to play with, including a DCF tool), plus screeners and idea lists based on the gurus' strategies: Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, and others. A free account shows a lot; seven-day trials do the trick for the rest.
Platform 3
Simply Wall Street
A complete, visual analysis of any security — balance sheet, peers, valuation, growth, dividend, and management, summarised in its snowflake chart. Five free stocks per month. Once again: use cautiously.
The equity screener
An equity screener is a tool for finding investment opportunities according to a given strategy: it produces a list of listed companies matching your criteria. Filters come in three families — descriptive (country, exchange, sector, industry, market cap, volume), fundamental (P/E, EV/EBITDA, P/B, margins, ROA/ROE/ROIC, liquidity and solvency ratios, dividend yield, EPS growth), and technical (RSI, MACD, moving averages).
“A screener can be an initial stage of stock picking. It must be followed by a thorough and detailed analysis of the company and its business.
”
The worked example runs Ben Graham's criteria through FinViz: large US companies, positive dividend yield, low P/E and P/B, and a healthy current ratio. The first three filters — US, large cap, positive yield — return 431 listed companies. Adding the fundamental filters (P/E under 15, P/B under 2, current ratio over 1.5) cuts the list to ten names: Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, BorgWarner, Coterra Energy, HF Sinclair, Intel, Knight-Swift, Micron, Tyson Foods, and Westlake. Now the actual work starts: each of the ten gets the full company treatment — sector, financials, valuation, and so on. Yahoo Finance offers its own screener as an alternative, with freer filter values and savable screens.
Podcasts: info on the go
Everything below lives in your average podcast app — a great alternative to reading on the way to or from Nova:
| Podcast | From | Cadence | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| News Briefing | Financial Times | Daily | Updating on the news |
| Thoughts on the Market | Morgan Stanley | Daily | Insights on sectors, geographies, and investment opportunities |
| Exchanges | Goldman Sachs | Weekly | Longer recap and outlook of what's happening in the markets |
| Surveillance | Bloomberg | Daily | Longer discussion of market drivers |
| Motley Fool Money | The Motley Fool | Bi-weekly | Stock-picking ideas |
| Investing with IBD | Investor's Business Daily | Weekly, 1 hour | Ideas for stock picking |
| TBOY — The Best One Yet | — | Daily | Which companies are in the news, and why |
| The Macro Trading Floor | Blockworks | Weekly | Markets from a macroeconomics perspective |
Books: the old-fashioned way
Four starters — the session calls them the "beginner" stock-market books, and they help you succeed both technically and psychologically:
Graham
The Intelligent Investor
Benjamin Graham. The Bible of investing in the stock market.
Lynch
One Up on Wall Street
Peter Lynch. A great book on how to be successful in the stock market.
Greenwald et al.
Value Investing
From Graham to Buffett and beyond — how to find and value opportunities.
Greenblatt
You Can Be a Stock Market Genius
Joel Greenblatt. Special situations: why they occur and how to deal with them.
“Great analysis is downstream of great inputs. Build the pipeline once — the newsletters, the feeds, the screeners, the shelf — and every pitch after that starts a week ahead.
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