It’s often joked that the more screens a trader has in front of them, the worse they will perform. By extension of that, presumably the more they spend on market data and information services offers little correlation with their trading prowess, either.
With that in mind, we’ve scoured the web for the best free tools retail traders might want to bookmark in the New Year if they’ve decided that the solution to the never-ending cost of living crisis is to try and become the next Warren Buffett.
1) UK Corporate news - Investegate. www.investegate.co.uk Free, real time feeds of regulatory news updates for retail investors, plus what is billed as the biggest free to access archive of all UK regulatory news filings with coverage dating back more than twenty years. Publication of market moving company news on a live basis gives investors that much-needed democratic access to information and there’s also the option of registering to receive updates in real time by e-mail too, helping level the playing field just a little with institutional traders.
2) Economic calendars – Trading Economics. https://tradingeconomics.com/calendar A comprehensive, free to access calendar covering major macroeconomic events across the globe. The results can be filtered by country, timeframe and significance. The provision of forecasts for some data points before they are released provides not only potential trading signals, but also acts as valuable tool to help investors understand how markets react when the data doesn’t come in quite as had been expected.
3) US earnings calendars – the popular UK retail investing platform Interactive Investor comes with an easy to access calendar for US earnings news https://www.ii.co.uk/investing-with-ii/international-investing/us-earnings-season#calendar giving an accurate guide to the often busy quarterly reporting seasons from across the pond.
4) UK earnings calendars – These have a greater tendency to see last minute changes when compared to their US counterparts so the best guides here tend to be produced with a shorter timeframe. Financial information provider Sharecast https://www.sharecast.com/company_diary provide a weekly report covering the announcements that are expected in the coming days.
5) Big data (markets) – Want to know how far the stock market has risen over the last 10 years? If you’re after historical market data to run your own analysis on, Investing.com https://uk.investing.com/ is a reliable choice with a significant archive available when it comes to major indices. Daily FTSE-100 data is available as far back as 2001, whilst the Dow Jones history runs back to the early 1990s. Periodic data is often available back to even earlier dates. Search for the index you need then look for the “Historical Data” tab.
6) Big data (economic news) – The Trading Economics calendar again frequently hosts useful charts of how an economic indicator has performed in recent history, but for something more nuanced, Statistia http://www.statistia.com provides some great free tools, albeit on a limited basis. It’s also supported by an expensive subscription service but if you want to find a chart of UK GDP from the end of World War II or annual global wheat production over the last 12 years, this is your place.
7) Breaking finance and city news – Obviously you can’t go wrong with the expert analysis and insight from the Evening Standard http://www.standard.co.uk/business and our crack team of experienced business journalists, publishing the latest news as it happens every trading day.
