a list of books and online resources that help me to research stocks for investing
- Stock Market Investing for Beginners: Essentials to Start Investing Successfully (Tycho Press) - A small book filled with the most essential information about investing into the stock market. I read it at least 3 times. It's not a comprehensive investing guide, but definitely the best place to start.
- Fundamental Analysis For Dummies (Matt Krantz) - Introduction into Fundamental Analysis. It covers different financial ratios, explains basics how to read between the lines financial reports, perform discounted cash flow analysis and much more.
- Reading Financial Reports For Dummies (Lita Epstein) - In detail covers Income Statements, Cash Flow Statements, Balance Sheets, Proxy Statements. Also explains how to dig into 10-K and 10-Q reports.
- Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week (Phil Town) - A great books to setup an initial investing strategy. Be aware 15 mins a week is a marketing lie, you'll have to dedicate more time.
- The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham) - Once you feel more or less comfortable with the basics of the stock market you will enjoy reading this book. Every page is filled with the eternal wisdom. Warren Buffett says it's the best book on investing ever written. It's hard to disagree.
- Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (Philip Fisher) - A classics of the Growth Investing. Charlie Munger is one of famous disciples of the Phisher's approach to investing.
- Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond (Bruce C. N. Greenwald) - a little encyclopedia of value investing.
- Margin Of Safety (Seth A. Klarman)
- Good Stocks Cheap (Kenneth Jeffrey Marshall) - IMHO one of the best books in this list. Author uncovers his investing framework: what means "to understand the business", how to evaluate it, how to perform different qualitative and quantitative analyses. Every chapter is covered with a concrete example with a real company, what brings all the information into practice.
- You Can Be a Stock Market Genius (Joel Greenblat) - the best guide into special situations: spin-offs, mergers, restructuring, bankruptcies, recapitalizations...
- Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks and Fraud in Financial Reports (Howard M. Schilit) - By reading this book and applying it in practice, you'll ensure you don't buy the next Enron on WorldCom.
- (RUS) Финансовая отчетность для руководителей и начинающих специалистов (Алексей Герасименко) - a very nice book (in russian), that explains how are the financial reports are being written. It provides much of use for an investor, because one learns to read those reports between the lines.
- Principles of Corporate Finance (Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen) The bible book for corporate finance covering value, risk management, financing decisions, options, debt financing and mergers
- Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives (John C. Hull) From basics to advances related to the future markets. Different type of contracts, how to value, apply strategies and handle risk
The list of websites where you can quickly grasp a basic financial information about public companies:
- Investing.com
- Finviz - only for US companies
- Morning Star
- Yahoo Finance
- MSN Money
- Wallmine - the site provides a lot of different information, but I primary use it get information about insider ownership and insider transactions.
- Simply Wall St - non-free service that visualizes companies with a single spot (green or read) that represents a company from an investing perspective. Provides a lot of additional valuable information that goes beyond regular ratios: visualized debt and equity development, insider trades, ownership breakdown, management compensations, etc...
- Glassdoor - I use this website to find out what employees think about their company.
- Consumer Affairs - find out what consumers think about the company and its products
- WhaleWisdom - an aggregator of 13F filings, that tracks buys & sells of famous and prominent investors. Could be a good source of investing ideas, especially for those who practice coattail investing.
- Value Investors Club - a place to exchange value investing ideas
- The Zen of Investing - list of upcoming spin-offs
- Macro Trends - provides macro economical data. But I see it's more valuable for visualized historical data (and ratios) for US stocks.
- Trading Economics - provides a lot of different macro economical data (e.g. historical unemployment rate in Georgia).
Those are the sites that publish analytical articles.