Many investors subscribe or at least follow the social media of a handful news publications to receive updates about the financial markets.
Bloomberg, Financial Times, The Business Times and The Edge Singapore come into mind, but this isn’t the best way to follow the development of companies if you are a stock investor.
#1 – The first reason being that the news publications would take time to write the stories and get them approved for publishing.
It will take at least hours from the first release of the information to get published in the press. You would want to get ahead of most investors in a legal manner (not insider information) by receiving the information before the news publish it.
#2 – The second reason is that you would also want to receive the information at source to prevent misinterpretations and translation losses. Journalists are humans too. They have their biases and job requirements to fulfil. Sometimes the information can be skewed that caused you to gain a perspective that might be very different from that if you have read it at source.
#3 – The third reason is that not all companies are reported by the press. By Pareto Principle, only the top 20% companies by popularity or size are reported 80% of the time. This creates non-uniform attention to the stocks listed in the stock market. For example, there are about 730 stocks listed on the SGX but only about 30 (STI components) are being presented actively. If you own stocks that are not covered by the press, you might miss out of material developments when you just wait for the news.
The solution is a simple one. And it is free as well.
Simply follow the company announcements. As publicly listed companies, the management are obliged to make announcements when there are important changes or developments. These announcements are made through the stock exchanges which the companies are listed on.
You can go to the stock exchange websites to view the announcements but it would be tedious and moreover there may be no new announcements every day.
The good news is that you can use technology to solve this problem.
There are many tools you can use such as app notifications, chatbots and emails to receive company announcements.
I’m a big believer of creating a system to guide your behaviour and it is no different when it comes to monitoring your stocks (since most people find it a chore and they just buy stocks and forget about them) – you just need to set up a personalised stock monitoring alert system and I am going to share with you how to do it step-by-step.
#1 – Singapore Stocks: SGX App or Stockbot.sg
SGX has produced a free app available for both iOS and Android.
You can set the alerts as shown in the picture below:
Once done, you will get a notification on your smartphone and you can read the announcement in the app. This will be faster than what you get from the press!
If you do not like to have many apps in your smartphone because you are a Marie Kondo practitioner, you can consider using a chatbot on Facebook Messenger – stockbot.sg
Voila! Anytime the company of your interest has new announcements you will receive a message via Facebook Messenger. You will never miss an important piece of news ever again!
#2 – Hong Kong Stocks: HKEX News Alert
Some of you might invest in Hong Kong stocks and you can’t use the tools mentioned above.
My preferred way is to use the free email alert service provided by HKEX. You can go to the website and create a free account.
Once you have set up an account and logged in, you can start adding the stocks to your alert list.
You will receive emails with headers like these once the companies you followed issued announcements:
A typical email will contain a link to the announcement document, which is in the exact format that was submitted to the exchange by the company.
#3 – U.S. Stocks – Docoh SEC Filing Alerts
Some investors swear by U.S. stocks and you can follow the company announcements using this website by Docoh, which emails you whenever the announcements are filed with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).
Simply create a free account and you can start adding the U.S. stocks to your dashboard.
You will start to receive emails in your inbox that looks like this:
A typical email would contain the announcement which you can conveniently read it off without being redirected to other websites.
Remember to check out other tools in Docoh website as it is user-friendly and rich in features.
#4 – Chinese A Shares: Tencent Stock App 腾讯自选股
China is poised to be the next superpower and we are particularly keen investors in Chinese companies.
There are quite a handful of good Chinese stock market but Tencent’s stock app is the best because it provides announcement alerts!
I don’t know why it is hard to find this app on the play store “腾讯自选股” on Google and download via the link. And yes, it will be in mandarin unfortunately. So brush it up!
You will need either a WeChat or QQ account to sign in to the app.
Once in, you would be able to search for the stock of your interest and follow the steps in the picture to set up the alerts!
You need a Good Information System as a Stock Investor and get it done quick
Most investors like to follow news by various publications but I pointed out that it is usually a slow way to get information about the stocks you care about.
Instead, you should be following the company announcements directly.
You should also use the tools mentioned in this article to make your stock monitoring task easier.
Set it up once and the system will take care of it for you! You can thank me afterwards.