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How to profit from shares
Finding companies to invest in
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Stock screeners
An excellent product for the really serious investor is REFS (Really Essential Financial Statistics). It's essentially a database that gives a snapshot of every quoted company, detailing amongst other things, past financial records, various performance ratios and future profit estimates. Although REFS is published monthly in Yellow Pages-sized volumes, perhaps the best medium to receive the product is via a CD. The CD allows the excellent facility of setting up personal search criteria (eg: low price to earnings ratios, high dividend yields) to present a list of suitable companies. You can also use REFS online.
The main drawback with REFS is that it is expensive (very -- at the time of writing close to £800 a year). But if you are a serious investor, it's well worth considering. Cheaper sites, popular with many people on our discussion boards, include Sharelock Holmes, Fundies Info and It Pays Dividends.
Stock screeners can save you a lot of legwork but it's best to never rely on them completely for financial information. In practice, most people use them to draw up a shortlist of possible candidates but then check the key information for each company back to their annual accounts or results statements.
