Tickertape: How to Pick and Analyze a Stock

For succeeding in stock markets, one needs to master fundamental and technical analysis. Fundamental analysis deals with the underlying value of the company. This includes monitoring of performance indicators like revenue, profits, debt, cash flow etc. Once you have doubled down on the stock you plan to buy, you move to technical analysis. This deals with the timing of entry/exit of the stock basis parameters like moving averages, volumes, momentum etc.

Let’s understand this using a real life example. You plan to buy an Air conditioner for your home. You start your search with the fundamental analysis. Tonnage, Window or Split (type), electricity consumption rating, brands, reviews, after sales service and what not. Finally you decide that you plan to buy a Voltas AC. Now, you don’t buy it immediately after that. You think of a correct time of purchase. May be you get a good discount as the season draws towards it’s end (you might be planning for next year), you might be looking forward to that Holi/Diwali sale on Amazon. May be there’s an additional cashback on your bank’s credit card etc. You also ask your friend about the price he got it for. All this is equivalent to a technical analysis.

Why am I telling you all this? Because today’s topic of the blogpost is a fintech platform, that aims to simplify this entire process for you. Tickertape, a smallcase owned company, has this amazing product which is perfect for beginners and professionals, alike.

What is Tickertape?

Tickertape is a suite of products available online that helps you with various aspects of decision making while investing in stock market. The most famous products out of these are screener and market mood indicator (MMI) (More on these in a while). Tickertape provides data, information & content about Indian stocks, ETFs & indices. It is a new age screener tool built specifically for a crisper, concise and quick analysis of stocks in a particular basket.

This tool is funded and invested by Zerodha. For those who don’t know, Zerodha is India’s largest stock broker. A bootstrapped company that turned into a unicorn a few months ago. If you follow any of the finance bloggers (creating content on stock market) on the internet (including YouTube, WordPress and Instagram), you would find almost all of them using tickertape. After all who doesn’t love a product that simplifies a complicated job.

Why Tickertape?

Although company has not confirmed this officially, I think the name ‘tickertape‘ has to do with the old school method of tracking stocks.

Back in the day, Ticker Tape referred to the ribbon of paper or electronic representation of price quotes that appear in a linear fashion, providing market information to investors. Ticker tape first appeared as part of 19th-century ticker devices that printed stock symbols and numeric data to convey information about trades and prices via information transmitted over telegraph wire. (Source).

In today’s world, tickertape is completely electronic. However, when it wasn’t, the machine used to make the “tick-tick” sound while printing. Hence the name.

Tickertape Products:

Coming back to the star of our blogpost, modern day tickertape. As mentioned earlier, key offerings of tickertape are screener and Market Mood Index. Let’s see what they have in store for us:

1. Market Mood Index (MMI)

Be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy.

– Warren Buffet

While it may sound absurd to a beginner, this quote by Warren Buffet encapsulates the crux of stock market investing. The best time to pick up the right stocks is when everyone is selling in the panic mode. You can get the stock of your choice at the right price this way.

Market mood index will help you gauge this metric. While looking at the data for a single day may not cull out meaningful insights, if you track it over a period of time, you may be able to formulate a trend and hence taking better investing decisions.

Not only this, each sentiment is also explained in the tool so that a relatively new investor knows the significance of each mood.

2. Screener:

When I first found this feature, I instantly fell in love with it. It is super handy to know all the key details of the stock.

In the overview of the stock, you would get some basic information about the stock:

• Intrinsic Value: Analysts at tickertape would guess an intrinsic value of the stock. Basis that value, it is suggested if the stock is overpriced right now or not.
• Returns Vs FD: Duh! FD’s are the investment instruments with lowest yields after a savings account. So, if you are putting your money into a relatively risky instrument, it is imperative that the stock should earn more than the FDs at least.
• Dividend Returns: Dividends are like rewards paid to the investors/shareholders from the earnings of the company. A red signal here means that this company doesn’t pay significant dividends. A good dividend paying company indicates strong future growth prospects.
• Entry Point: This shows if the stock is in overbought or underbought zone.

Other section includes features like financials that have all the key ratios for the company for a period of 10 years. Apart from the key ratios, there are some key insights drawn from them for your perusal. You may also chose to download company’s annual reports and investor’s presentations from the same area.

Conclusion:

Although tickertape is completely free to use, some of the features are available only in the pro mode. Plans for pro are pretty economical given the value it adds to your life. A typical plan would cost you a meagre Rs. 100 per month. If you like a stock while analyzing, you can place an order for the same straight from the tickertape app/website. It seamlessly connects with all the key brokers. There is a possibility of doing a competitive analysis as well if need be.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and boast your analytical skills right away. But before that, let me know your stock of interest.

Got questions? Want to take it to the next level? Reach out to me using your preferred platform from the links below

Until next time..

This blogpost is in association with Blogchatter’s #BlogchatterA2ZChallenge