Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - 12 Free Resources for Investors

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Time for some freebies! Chris Hill and Ricky Mulvey discuss some of the best investing resources that won’t cost you a penny. Some you’ll probably know and some you may not. Here's the full list: Websites & Writers: Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/ EDGAR: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch Glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/ YouTube (We know you know how to find it, but this is a FULL resource list): https://www.youtube.com/ SatPost by Trung Phan: https://trungphan.substack.com/ The Irrevant Investor: https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/ Aswath Damodaran Courses: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/home.htm Podcasts: Check Your Balances: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/check-your-balances/id1551991071 Plain English with Derek Thompson: https://www.theringer.com/plain-english-with-derek-thompson-podcast The Watch: https://www.theringer.com/the-watch Library Stuff: Hoopla: https://www.hoopladigital.com Libby: https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby Host: Chris Hill Guest: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. I've talked about FoolFest. Today is all about some of our favorite investing resources that won't cost you a penny. Motley Fool Money starts now. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks so much for listening. For the last two days, we have been coming to you from our annual investing conference, FoolFest. You've heard a lot about FoolFest and you've heard a lot about being a Motley Fool member. But on today's show, we wanted to do something a little different and focus entirely on the free. Joining me is someone

you've heard often on this show, but this is actually the first time we've been on together at the same time. It's Motley Fool Money producer, Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for being here. Oh, thanks for having me, Chris. I'm a little scared. I don't know exactly what question is going to come next, but I'm excited to see where this goes. It's free day. It's free day. And there's a lot of great information available for investors who are willing to pay for information. But we wanted to take a little time and talk about the great information that's available for free. And let's start with websites, because there's so many great websites out there. I've got one on my list, but what do you got?

up. I should say upfront, we are going to be providing this list in the show notes. If you want to take notes while you're listening, that's great. If you're driving your car while you're listening, don't take notes. We got you covered. No, this is going to be like a t-shirt cannon of free content. The one I probably use the most frequently is Investopedia. Anytime there's a term basic, something like the Inflation Reduction Act, even macro stuff going on that's going to hit your investments. I think they do an excellent job at providing, I would say, non-biased breakdowns of new terms and those kinds of things. There was something in the news about single-stock ETFs that were coming out.

Investopedia is the first place I'm going. If you want to buy leveraged positions in individual stocks, they have these single stock ETFs. I got the breakdown from Investopedia. When you did your show with Mina Kimes and she was talking about how she would look up terms from the Wall Street Journal, I can pretty much guarantee you she was going to Investopedia. You used the word unbiased, and that ties in nicely with the website I was going to talk about, which is Edgar, which is the SEC's website, which is really just this amazing repository of the publicly available information. The place where public companies have to post their quarterly reports, their annual reports, and there are no ads, by the way. It's a website. If you're just looking for

the basic straightforward factual information that companies are required to provide, you could do a whole lot worse than spending time on Edgar. If you want one with a ton of bias, I would go with Glassdoor. I like looking at small caps, and it's hard to find information about those companies. If you want to see what it's like to work there, going to Glassdoor is how I usually find out, especially when there's thinner information. And also there's a phenomenon among CEOs, which is they will portray themselves very differently in recorded media than perhaps they act when the doors are closed. And so I like using Glassdoor to find out what's going on. And obviously there's, I think, juicing on both

ends where if people are intensely negative about where they work, they're going to pipe up on Glassdoor and you got to take it with a grain of salt. And I think at this point, a lot of companies are savvy enough to understand that investors look at Glassdoor. One company I looked at, they said, what's the problem here? What are the cons? Well, there's no parking. Then for a completely separate company, there was a criticism where someone basically said, I don't like that the CEO's wife is in charge of the human resources department. Then I dug into that and I said, you know what? That might be a yellow flag. That might be. Last thing before we move off of websites, because you mentioned CEOs,

and you and I were talking about this earlier. YouTube can be a good resource in terms of CEO interviews because so much of financial television is quick hits, it's three-minute hits, that sort of thing. If you do enough digging on YouTube, you can find, particularly for some of the smaller companies, you can find CEOs who are doing 30-minute, 60-minute sit-down conversations. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, it's available. Bill Mann makes the argument, if you're going to own a company, you should listen to the CEO speak. That's where you're you're going to find it. I feel like I should say something smarter than go to www.youtube.com and then search the CEO's name, but that's unfortunately the answer.

Second category we came up with was writers, because there are so many people providing content. You can go the news route, but I think you and I and a lot of the people that we work with on the investing team have writers that we enjoy. Yeah. Oh, you'd like me to name one? Yes. I'm going to go with a guy named Trung Phan. Excellent Twitter account. And he has a newsletter called The Sat Post. And it's just, in my opinion, he has these like very thought-provoking kinds of, in some cases, financial posts, in some cases, not so financial. And there's always just like a lot of humor mixed in that genuinely makes me laugh. Like one of, one of my favorite newsletters that he's written is just called why is LinkedIn so cringe. And it's a description of

why like LinkedIn is a terrible website, but also profitable and better for a user than, than something like let's say, let's say Facebook or Twitter. And the spoiler alert is because it's built more on subscription revenue than advertising revenue. And then he's had some other ones. Like he did a financial analysis on how much the Mona Lisa is worth based on what people have paid for similar work. So, that's a comparison analysis looking at how much revenue it would bring into the French government. It brings into the French government. And obviously, it's all kind of silly because the French government literally has a law against selling the Mona Lisa. But it's an interesting way about thinking about financial valuation. And I think he's a really funny

writer. So I plug for SatPost. I like what he's doing there. I'm going to go with Michael Batnick, who's a managing partner at Ritholtz Wealth Management. He is also on Twitter, but I know that there are some people listening who are not on Twitter and don't want to be on Twitter. And I get that. But he has a website called The Irrelevant Investor. And it's just a lot of great content and a nice amount of personality as well. It's a lot of focus on numbers, but he will throw in references to pop culture and links to recommendations for people who are looking for things outside of the realm of investing. The Irrelevant Investor is a website to definitely kick the tires on. We were talking earlier, we could do a week-long

series on free resources for investors. One of the great things for us as investors is there are so many resources that are free that you can find the ones that suit your personality. For some people, the writers we're recommending, they might check them out and be like, okay, this isn't really the person for me. There are others out there. Whatever you're into, you're going to find someone who you click with. Yeah. One of the blog posts on Irrelevant, I think it might've been Josh Brown, actually. They work for the same firm, but there's a blog post about how essentially there is no all clear signal for market bottoms. And it was writing about March of 2009. And then I think that was

when it was written during the first COVID pandemic. But it's a blog that has helped kind of shape my view on investing in part because it looked at the day the market bottomed and the idea was that it only seemed like things were going to get worse from there. I think they got a good crew there. Sidebar, do you think Twitter has made you a better or worse investor? Because I don't know the answer to that question. I think it's made me a more informed investor because one of the benefits, I think, of Twitter is it is a way to get information quickly. As someone who spends a lot of time focused on financial news, there are times where I will go to a reputable news site, will not find what I'm looking for, and if I go onto Twitter

and do 30 seconds worth of searching, I can find what I'm looking for. It's definitely made me more informed. But yeah, you can't get trapped on Twitter. Not a writer, but a professor that I think is worth mentioning. And I believe we're going to have him on the show in the near future. In terms of just a plethora of information being out there, Aswath Damodaran, all of his classes are free. So this barrier that used to exist, essentially, where if you want to learn how to do valuation, you can attend an NYU class for free. Granted, it costs money for the certificate. You're not going to NYU. But there is now a complete breakdown, essentially, I would say, in information gating. And if you poke around a little bit, you know, it's not too hard to find some great stuff as well. Yeah, Dylan Lewis mentioned Demodarin when we talked last week. And yeah, I think the first time I heard about Demodarin, it was from Ron Gross, and he had mentioned that, he had talked about, you know, yeah, he's got all these. And I just remember looking at him quizzically and saying, what do you mean, he puts everything online?

He teaches at NYU and he just puts it. It's like, yeah, it's all there. He was talking about it on the Billionaire Podcast Network. And essentially, the idea is he said, yes, that's part of my deal there, which is I take more students and they allow me to put out all of my classes for free online, which I think is really cool. Speaking of podcasts, this podcast is free. Rule Breaker Investing with David Gardner is free. The Motley Fool money version that you can get out of Australia is free. But we're not here to promote our shows. After we just promoted our own shows. Exactly. After saying that thing, I'm not here to talk about that thing I just mentioned. But let's shine a light on some

other shows that we like and admire. Sure thing. One I really like, so first of all, I think you feel a similar way sometimes, which is like working on a financial podcast for most of your day when you're like, oh, I want to listen to something during a workout or on my drive home. it can be a little difficult to justify listening to another financial podcast. So I have a little bit of a workaround, one of which I really enjoy Plain English from Derek Thompson. He's a writer for The Atlantic. He does this podcast with The Ringer. Great at bringing sometimes macroeconomic stuff, looking at crypto crashes, emerging technologies like renewable energy. And he's got a really, I think, incisive opinion. And he's an excellent writer, great

communicator and knows how to dig deep on a subject and hold my attention for for 40 minutes which are two very different tasks and then also in the ringer universe uh i'd go with the watch it's it's more of a pop culture podcast but one of the hosts a guy named andy greenwald ended up he a few years ago he had a show for uh that aired on the usa network so i think it's a very good insider look at some of the stuff going on in Hollywood. They seem not only aware, but more knowledgeable with the people who are impacted by some of the key players that we often talk about from further down the sidelines. Well, and you were talking about Glassdoor earlier. The Watch is one of those shows

where if you're an investor and you're interested in, okay, the people who work in Hollywood, what do they think of Netflix, HBO, Warner Brothers, all these different streamings? What is it like for them to work for these companies? You definitely get those types of insights from a show like The Watch. I'm going to mention a show I've mentioned before, but I really just think Check Your Balances is a fantastic show. For anyone who's looking for a weekly show. New episodes come out on Wednesdays. It is two former colleagues, Dan Maseca and Ross Anderson, but they went out and started their own business. They have this great weekly show called Check Your Balances where they essentially focus on

a single topic. Episodes are about 20, 25 minutes. They have a great rapport and they don't waste your time. They have a great rapport, but it is never indulgent, and it's always smart. And the thing, I listened to a little bit of it, probably listened to significantly less episodes from you, but sort of the vibe I got from them is that they come at financial planning with a lot more humility. And they had a show I enjoyed called Point Counterpoint, where they looked at different topics like paying down low-cost debt versus investing, or passive versus active investing, when you should take Social Security. These are the different perspectives on these decisions. These are very personal decisions, and there's different answers for different people.

I liked that they came at it from more of humility and showing both sides than sometimes you get from a financial advisor show, which is this finger-wagging, thou shalt do this kind of thing. I like that one as well. Last thing I'll say is, the episodes they do have a really long shelf life because they're not really tied to the news of the day or the news of the week. It's the sort of thing where you can essentially just scroll through their episode feed and find a topic you're interested in. Last thing, when it comes to free, you wanted to add a category, and that is the public library. I came right into the outline and I added the category. Cause when we were planning this episode, you said for the love of all that is good, please do not just say,

go to the public library because you know, if, if having fun, isn't hard, all you need is a library card. I firmly believe that. But where do you even go? These two ideas don't involve getting in your car. So a lot of public library programs now have, have apps that you can use. One I really like is called Libby. I get a lot of books and audiobooks on there. They also have magazines. If I want to look at The Economist or something like Fast Company, they let you borrow the magazine similar to the slightly more germ-filled version that you might find in the sitting room of your public library. I enjoy that. The other one I like is a little bit less investment-related, but they got Hoopla. That's more of a streaming one. There's some

books on there, but it's primarily streaming video and some comic book stuff. But one thing I've really enjoyed about Hoopla is that they have a lot of the great courses on there. So if you remember like the back page of the New York times book review, when they listed all of the courses that were like 150 a pop, a lot of those are streaming on Hoopla. Uh, one I've been enjoying and we've got a podcast with Brian Stoffel coming out about this. It's, it's called think like a stoic. And I think there are a lot of, uh, tenants of the stoic philosophers that can help you. Uh, and it's helped me be a better investor. So those, those are two little paths that you might have at your, your public library. And also just go to your public library.

Yeah, I did realize that I came off as, as a little bit anti-library. Like this is, this is a very, like, I'm going to say something controversial, but this is a pro library show. I don't want to come off as an anti, anti-library commentator over here. We are pro-book, we are pro-reading, and we are defiantly pro-library. Ricky Mulvey, really appreciate you being here. Thanks. Thanks for having me. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against,

so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.