Tools & books
Things we genuinely reach for. No affiliate links, no sponsorships — if it's here, it's because it's useful. Every entry comes with an honest note on where it helps and where to keep your skeptic's hat firmly on.
Tools we actually use
Good tools help you look; they don't do the thinking. A screener that spits out "winners" is showing you the past, not the future. With that in mind:
Finviz
A fast, free way to see the whole market at a glance — the heatmap alone is worth the visit — plus a flexible stock screener for slicing by size, sector or fundamentals.
Good for: quick overviews and filtering ideas. Watch out: free data is delayed, and a screen is a starting question, not an answer — the output is not a buy list.
Seeking Alpha
A huge library of contributor articles, earnings-call transcripts and news. Its real strength is finding the bear case next to the bull case on almost any stock.
Good for: hearing both sides and tracking earnings. Watch out: contributor quality swings wildly, some pieces are quietly promotional, and its ratings are opinions — not a verified track record.
FRED
The St. Louis Fed's free trove of economic data — interest rates, inflation, employment, money supply — straight from the source, charted in seconds.
Good for: checking the actual numbers behind a headline. Watch out: almost nothing — this is a neutral primary source. Our kind of place.
SEC EDGAR
Every US public company's official filings — annual reports, prospectuses, insider trades — free and unfiltered. The document, before anyone spins it.
Good for: going to the source instead of the hot take. Watch out: it's raw and dense, but that's the point — no middleman.
Portfolio Visualizer
Lets you test how a portfolio mix would have behaved historically — returns, drawdowns, diversification — useful for building intuition about risk.
Good for: understanding how mixes behave. Watch out: a great backtest is the easiest thing in finance to fake by accident — see backtest alchemy. Past ≠ future.
Morningstar
Deep data on funds and ETFs — fees, holdings, and its well-known star ratings — handy for comparing costs, which are one of the few things that reliably predict fund results.
Good for: comparing fees and fundamentals. Watch out: star ratings look backward, and past performance is a weak guide to future performance.
Books worth your time
A short, opinionated shelf. These age well because they're built on evidence and behaviour, not on this year's story. If you read only two, start with the first two.
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
The clearest case ever made for low-cost index funds, from the man who invented them. The whole "you probably can't beat the market, so stop paying to try" argument in one calm book.
The Psychology of Money
Short, human essays on why smart people do dumb things with money. The best cure for the feeling that everyone else has it figured out.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street
The classic on why markets are hard to beat and why most "systems" are noise dressed as signal. Sceptical in exactly the way we like.
The Four Pillars of Investing
Theory, history, psychology and the business of investing in one grown-up package. A little heavier, and worth it.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Not an investing book, but maybe the most important one on this list: how your own brain talks you into bad decisions. Overconfidence has a chapter.
Winning the Loser's Game
The argument that investing is won by avoiding mistakes, not by scoring brilliance — like amateur tennis. Short and quietly persuasive.