Twenty years ago the first place to start research a stock was to get a copy of the S&P “tearsheet” and con­tact the com­pany to get sent a pile of printed mate­ri­als to go over.

These days every­one starts online because it’s fast and easy. How­ever for pub­lic infor­ma­tion to be enlight­en­ing one must make a bit more of an effort to gather from the most linked and traf­ficked sources of information.

While some focus too hard on cul­ti­vat­ing non-public sources of infor­ma­tion a skilled use of pub­lic infor­ma­tion is crit­i­cal for get­ting the basics done before mak­ing a greater invest­ment in devel­op­ing or pur­chas­ing pro­pri­etary information.

Learn­ing these will make you more effec­tive in gen­er­at­ing the ini­tial research story around a com­pany and/or industry.

The Com­pany Web­site: Of course this is where lots of peo­ple get many of the basics out of the way. This is a good place to review the com­pany posi­tion­ing state­ment (About) and then look through the man­age­ment team, board of direc­tors, prod­ucts and also recent news releases.

The next level is to review past events if the com­pany has them online. Prior pre­sen­ta­tions from investor con­fer­ences are one of the most valu­able to look at but not every com­pany includes them. It’s often worth look­ing at the last quar­terly report and lis­ten­ing to that call to get a sense of how man­age­ment talks about their busi­ness. The Q&A is often the most use­ful part.

Lastly before leav­ing the com­pany web­site if there is a devel­oper or part­ner pro­gram avail­able and I plan to fol­low a com­pany I join that. The more you can get into the com­mu­nity around the com­pany the more pub­lic sources of infor­ma­tion you will get.

Google: Googling the com­pany name won’t get you much far­ther than the web­site but adding terms like “[prod­uct name] reviews” or “alter­na­tives” or “prob­lems” might turn up arti­cles that are more obscure and full of infor­ma­tion. Being cre­ative with Google is a good way to unearth less commonly-known infor­ma­tion about the com­pany. The same search­ing tech­nique can be used on sites like Twitter.

Twit­ter & Stock­Twits: Search­ing Twit­ter is a first step. Then it’s often use­ful to see who might have author­ity there and con­nect to them there. (If you are not famil­iar with Twit­ter you need to be.) Some­times you can get a direct con­ver­sa­tion going and find out more infor­ma­tion that isn’t in the “pub­lic time­line.” Stock­Twits is a sim­i­lar ser­vice for investors but is very trad­ing ori­ented. Still worth a look.

Quora: Quora is a newer and slightly dif­fer­ent online net­work­ing site that is focused on ques­tions and top­ics rather than peo­ple. You can search for and fol­low top­ics and ques­tions. Some of the infor­ma­tion there is very good and unique. If you have time you can also ask ques­tions and even appeal to peo­ple to answer them.

Google Finance: Along with Yahoo Finance and other sites this is the per­fect place to get stock his­tory, basic finan­cial infor­ma­tion, upcom­ing investor events, news releases and some sense of the com­pa­ra­ble com­pa­nies in the group. Although Google Finance is not great with links (for some rea­son) some­times links to good arti­cles are found here.

Mar­ket Orga­ni­za­tions: Although many of these links can be found at Google Finance the SEC in the US pro­vides online fil­ings and more detailed infor­ma­tion about shares traded, shares sold short and so on may be found here and on sites like the NASDAQ.

Seek­ing Alpha: Although this is a retail-oriented investor site there are some­times use­ful posts here. In addi­tion they also pub­lish tran­scripts of prior com­pany quar­terly earn­ings calls that can be faster than lis­ten­ing to them. It’s best to read them in “sin­gle page view” and often I just use the “jump to the Q&A” fea­ture to see what investors were focused on. It’s best to go to the site and enter in the ticker to search.

Local News­pa­pers: In many cases local news­pa­pers (online or offline) spill much more ink on local com­pa­nies. So look at where the com­pany is based and search those news sites in par­tic­u­lar to get more detailed sto­ries. They often have more con­tent on the man­age­ment than national sources.

Indus­try Research: Most indus­try research (like from Gart­ner Group or For­rester) is not avail­able to the pub­lic. How­ever there is a use­ful and sim­ple trick here. First go to those sites and search for the research. If there is a good research report go back and Google the title. Often one of the com­pa­nies in the report will pay the research firm so that they can put it up on their web­site and make it avail­able for free to peo­ple that reg­is­ter. For exam­ple a good report from For­rester cov­er­ing online video plat­forms was use­ful for a recent report on Bright­cove and avail­able for free at one of the other online video plat­form sites.

Job List­ings: Many ana­lysts rou­tinely use job list­ings for clues about what com­pa­nies are work­ing on. The same can be done using the Google patent fil­ings search. Job list­ings help iden­tify com­pany hir­ing plans and by doing a search on the com­pany prod­ucts one can see if end-user com­pa­nies are spec­i­fy­ing these prod­ucts in their own hir­ing plans. We have found Sim­ply­Hired to be one of the best and eas­i­est to search.

Glass­door: This is a ser­vice that starts to move into a more pro­pri­etary space but it is still a very open and pub­lic way to get some inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion on a com­pany. By sign­ing up and con­tribut­ing infor­ma­tion to Glass­door about com­pa­nies you have worked for and/or inter­viewed with, you can then get infor­ma­tion that oth­ers have shared. Level of con­tent varies a great deal but there are some­times some good nuggets in there.

Retail Bro­kers: If you have a bro­ker­age account some of them fur­nish some decent Wall Street research at no charge. For exam­ple E*Trade pro­vides Credit Suisse reports. Many oth­ers do some­thing sim­i­lar. It’s the fastest way to peel the onion of con­sen­sus estimates.

This pro­vides a rea­son­able start­ing point for any com­pany analy­sis. A fairly decent pic­ture can be put together based on these sources before send­ing one email or mak­ing one phone call. The next level is focused mostly on pro­pri­etary sources be they paid for (like Cap­i­tal IQ, or The Infor­ma­tion Pro) or devel­oped by resource­ful, applied effort.

If there are good pub­lic or semi-public sources we missed please leave us some feed­back and we will make revi­sions to this from time to time.