How to organize research?

[j2000]

Hi,

how do you organize research you do about for example a specific stock?
Are you using any software/websites that helps out keeping track and making it easier to get an overview of data, news articles, your own thoughts about the stock at different times?

At the moment I am just organizing data / news articles etc I find about stocks I am interesting in, into a Word document, which is not ideal.

 

[malaguti]

Hi,

how do you organize research you do about for example a specific stock?
Are you using any software/websites that helps out keeping track and making it easier to get an overview of data, news articles, your own thoughts about the stock at different times?

At the moment I am just organizing data / news articles etc I find about stocks I am interesting in, into a Word document, which is not ideal.

Have you tried something like Evernote? Tag the note with the stock symbol or name, create a notebook just for research another notebook for trade history again tag by symbol
Then when you search on tag it brings up all trade history and any recent articles
Just a suggestion

 

[sminicooper]

This is my experience:

In the past I've used spreadsheet or paper pro forma successfully. Spreadsheet is very good for being able to flag up dates/values as colour-coded cells. Also easy to annotate comments and attach screenshots. As a mainly technical trader I don't pay as much attention to data/articles/news as a fundamentalist, so I'm very happy at the moment to use a combination of spreadsheet and manual pro forma – it's very quick and efficient: I've found that the more data you collect and enter into a spreadsheet, the more time you spend not trading!

I've also experimented with Microsoft One Note which is supposed to be useful for this sort of thing, but I've found it lacking due to the difficulty of structuring trading information appropriately.

For a fundamentalist, this might be a good option:
For collecting and organising all sorts of trading data in an easily used fashion, the best software I have found is Zotero https://www.zotero.org/ which is an open source free program primarily designed for academic research and structuring of academic papers. (Those with serious academic experience will know that organising and categorising research properly, is quite a difficult and time-consuming problem). Zotero has the ability to accept all kinds of data and one of its huge advantages for trading is that it will record a webpage with one click and file it appropriately. Its other extremely useful facility is that of note-taking in a highly structured way (one of the most useful things when I look back over a trade and see what I thought at the time). The data is then accessible off-line. (There are certain academic facilities within the program which you can just ignore). I also use DAM (digital asset management) software for other purposes, and I've also tried it for trading stuff, but it costs money and although good for its intended purpose it's not as suitable as Zotero for trading purposes.

Taking an overall view, I try to put as much info on the chart as I can (and I don't mean indicators!) so that it's instantly readable – and that's very easy with the ancient version of Metastock that I use. The big problem I've always run up against no matter what software I use, is information overload and the ability to display it concisely.

 

[tomorton]

How to organise research is such an important question, well worth a post. In general terms, research can potentially become the objective, and absorb all available time and resources. So knowing when to stop is vital. Know when to stop by deciding in advance what questions research will need to answer.

With regards information on stocks specifically, its not something I do but I recommend an old book by Jim Slater, The Zulu Principle. He stripped this task right down to bare bones with a rational and practical check-list for each company he needed to take a view on.

 

[sminicooper]

How to organise research is such an important question, well worth a post. In general terms, research can potentially become the objective, and absorb all available time and resources. So knowing when to stop is vital. Know when to stop by deciding in advance what questions research will need to answer.

With regards information on stocks specifically, its not something I do but I recommend an old book by Jim Slater, The Zulu Principle. He stripped this task right down to bare bones with a rational and practical check-list for each company he needed to take a view on.

Agreed. Select your params and when the ducks line up - go for it. No "feelings in the water" - just good old fashioned mathematical probability which always pays off in the long term.