Studying financial statements is an integral process before selecting stocks for your portfolio. Or at least it should be. The statements themselves can be quite complex, especially for a beginner. Fortunately, there are many websites nowadays that can help you pick out the most important ones.

Before I get to the specific tips, I want to mention that I will only cover those that are either free or for a reasonable annual amount. It is clear that it would be pointless to write about, for example, Bloomberg Terminal, which costs over 500,000 CZK per year, which is absolute nonsense for the average retail investor.

1. Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance is probably one of the most well-known investment sites, which is also completely free. Apart from the financial results of companies, you can also find a lot of news from the markets and the economy. The site does not focus purely on stocks, but also on crypto.

Navigating the site is easy. As an example, the shares of Apple will serve in this article. After typing the stock name or ticker into the search engine, you will see this:

Here, of course, we will be most interested in the Financials entry. We then have the option to look at the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement. These are the most important numbers that are found in the financial statements.

The downside may be with Yahoo Finance that the financials are only up to 2018. 4 years is not a super large sample to compare numbers from each year, but for some investors it may be enough.

2. Seeking Alpha

On Seeking Alpha, we can find news and reports on individual stocks, macroeconomics, and other things that are also on Yahoo Finance. In addition, Seeking Alpha still offers analysis that can give you interesting tips. I recommend not to rely on them only, but mainly on your analysis.

In Financials, we can find data up to 2017, which is even nicer. We can notice that Seeking Alpha offers data up to 2012, but these are already hidden behind the pay wall. This is also true for the analyses mentioned and the other articles found there.

The price is very favorable for new subscribers, as a yearly subscription will currently cost you $119 (approx. CZK 2920)/month $9.9 (approx. CZK 243), compared to the regular $239 (approx. CZK 5870)/month $19.9 (approx. CZK 489), thanks to the 50% discount for the US Labor Day. The discount should end on Monday, September 5.

3. roic.ai

The site doesn't look as pro and fancy as, for example, Seeking Alpha from the first glance, but that may not be a bad thing at all, because there is power in simplicity. There is no news or analysis here, only financial results.

The results go back a long way, even back to 1985 in the case of Apple. The website therefore offers us an incredible service for a thorough analysis that can be done after the company has been founded. Moreover, the service is free in the case of annual results. The financials are listed below, so we don't have to click through the income statement or balance sheet.

If we want to see quarterly results, roic will ask us for an annual subscription for $90 (approx. 2210 CZK)/monthly $7.5 (approx. 184 CZK). It is questionable whether we need to examine the quarterly results in detail, but that is up to you.

4. Koyfin

I'm probably the most familiar with Koyfin so far of the sites mentioned. It is a kind of a mix of everything, we can find here financial results, links to news, or technical analysis options for charts.

Orientation takes some time, because Koyfin has a lot of features. When you enter the ticker, you will still have to then click on whether you want an Income Statement, Balance Sheet, or Cash Flow.

The data for the paid version of Basic goes back to 2017, which seems sufficient to me. For this page, we find 3 subscription options right away. Basic comes out to $180 ($4,420) per year / $15 per month (about $368). Plus is for $420 (approx. 10,307 CZK) per year/month $35 (approx. 859 CZK). Pro costs $840 (approx. 20,614 Kč) per year/month $70 (approx. 1,718 Kč).

But from my own experience, I have to say that the cheapest subscription version is perfectly fine for the average investor.

Summary

Every investor is looking for something a little different, so it's up to you what site you like the most. But for a complete analysis, it is still important to look at the financial statement, you will find there, for example, income from individual segments that are not on the mentioned sites.

I'd be interested to know which page you use. Also, how much detail do you examine the annual reports of the companies. Thank you for your attention 😄