THE INVESTMENT DESK — TOOLS, CHARTS, AND ANALYSIS

A room of the Due Diligence Lab, in the Wiz Think Tank. Every tool listed here is free to use.

The working bench: the government statistics, the standard stock-research tools, the charts, and the software that fits one series against another and projects the result. Every tool free.

Tools and data only. Nothing on this page is investment advice, and the Institute is not an investment adviser.

THE DATA LEG — THE GOVERNMENT STATISTICS

One library gathers nearly all of it:

• FRED — the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. More than 800,000 data series from over a hundred sources — the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD. Charts on the site; every series downloadable. This is the data leg.
• ALFRED — FRED's vintage archive: each series as it was first released, before the revisions. For checking what was actually known at the time.
• U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis — GDP and the national accounts, at the source.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — employment and the Consumer Price Index, at the source.
• U.S. Treasury — Daily Par Yield Curve Rates — the Treasury's own yield table, updated daily.
• Federal Reserve H.15 — selected interest rates, the release the prime rate hangs from.

STOCK RESEARCH — THE STANDARD TOOLS

• SEC EDGAR — the primary source. Every public company's filings — the 10-K, the 10-Q, the 8-K — free, straight from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Read what the company filed, not what was said about it.
• FINVIZ Screener — the standard free screener: filter the whole market by price, sector, ratios, and chart patterns.
• Koyfin — a research terminal with a free tier: financial statements, ratios, estimates, and watchlists in one place.
• Yahoo Finance — quotes, company statistics, and the earnings calendar.
• Macrotrends — price and ratio histories running back decades, charted.
• multpl — market valuation by the numbers: the Shiller P/E and its companion series.

THE CHART LEG

• The Institute's Market Reports — this desk's own Friday snapshot: spot gold and silver, DJT, sweet crude, the 10-year and 30-year Treasury yields, and the prime rate, each with its chart.
• TradingView — the standard free charting platform: any market, any time frame, indicators laid over the price.
• StockCharts — Free Charts — the free chart gallery and technical indicators.

THE FIT LEG — CORRELATION, FIT, AND PROJECTION

• gretl — free, open-source econometrics software. Regression and correlation, time-series models (ARIMA, VAR), and forecasts produced with their graphs and error bands. It opens data downloaded from FRED directly. This is the fit leg.
• GNU R — the deeper bench, also free, for work that outgrows gretl.

The workflow, in four steps:

1. Pull the series from FRED and download it.
2. Open it in gretl.
3. Fit the relationship — correlation first, then the regression — and read how much of the movement the fit actually explains.
4. Project, and write the projection's error band down beside it. A projection without its band is a guess wearing a suit.

The Bench — this desk’s own bench, on this site: the statistics aboard, the fit and the projection run in your browser. Open the Bench →

Site Map — every page on the site, by area.