Stockopedia extends coverage across Asian, Australasian and Canadian markets

One of the great motivations to start developing the software at Stockopedia was the fact that none of the investment products I used covered the markets I invested in. UK based products like REFS and ShareScope covered only the UK and USA, while American products like ValueLine, Investors.com and Zacks always seemed to stop their coverage at the US border. Morningstar just didn’t cut it while the free websites I’d used had hopelessly inaccurate data. Why had nobody built a product that provided global equity insights, in a well designed interface at affordable prices?

Now I’m a British investor, but I’m married to an Australian. My founding partner Dave is UK educated and resident Kiwi. As the company has grown we’ve attracted staff from all over the world, Poland, India and Dubai, and even though we’re a UK founded company we’ve now got customers who live in 95 countries around the world. The world is globalising and everyone has their our own unique international outlook and that tends to be reflected in our personal investment preferences. It’s perhaps unsurprising that extending Stockopedia’s geographic coverage has become one of the most requested features on our suggestion forums.

So today we’re announcing a huge extension to the coverage at Stockopedia across four new subscription regions. Developed Asia (including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and Taiwan), Australasia (including Australia & New Zealand), Canada and India, adding to the UK, European and US coverage we already provide. This adds another 16,500 stocks to our universe with full StockReports, StockRanks and GuruScreens provided for all. Each of these subscription regions can be subscribed to alone or in combination with any of the others. Please do check out all the options available at the plans page and if you want to learn more about the coverage please sign up to this Thursday’s Webinar.

There are still more territories to add. By early 2017 we hope to have added Latin America, Middle East, African and Emerging Asia. We’ll also be making the subscription possibilities ever more flexible - so you’ll be able to create any combination of individual countries or regions. So if you’re someone who wants to subscribe to an unusual combination such as UAE and the Philipines (I guarantee that somebody will!) then we’ll have you covered.

Region Filters

The biggest issue with cross region financial websites is that they can become very hard to navigate. If you are a British investor, you really don’t want to see Asian stocks cluttering the interface unless you really are interested in them. So what we’ve tried to do is hide most of the international features unless they are specifically subscribed to. But for our cross region subscribers we’ve introduced some innovative features which we think make international stock hunting a joy.

Global Focus Mode

If you’re a British investor, but you are interested in International stock markets, then you won’t necessarily want to be wading through Asian stocks all day every day. So we’ve introduced a new feature we’re calling ‘Focus Mode’. With one click you can ‘focus’ the site on a single region. By hovering over the flag icon in the main site menu you can change the site’s focus to a single region. Once you are in focus mode the site universe changes. You will only see UK Stocks across the screener, StockRank portal and other site areas. We’ll be extending focus mode across news and calendar events in the new version of the site due in early 2017. It’s a really powerful and exciting tool that I’m sure will be popularly used - you can learn about it in more detail here.

Local Regional Filters

Many subscribers have asked for an easier way to screen broader regions on a per country basis. Your wish is our command, so we’ve launched some great new regional filtering capabilities:

We’ve added a regional sidebar filter to the StockRanks portal. You’ll find the filter in the sidebar which allows you to screen the StockRanks down to a single country or a single region in addition to the previous size, sector and StockRank filters. If you want to find the highest StockRank stock in Greece, Canada or Taiwan - this is where to do it.

In the screener there’s a new dropdown menu at the top left of tables. This nested list allows quick further filtering of any stock screen similarly - to a region or a single country. You’ll also find this regional dropdown menu on some of the other core site features such as the Directory and Sector pages. Please do read up a bit more on this feature here.

New Sector Aggregates

We’ve spruced up the sector pages with the addition of more data and filters. We’re now computing aggregate data on all ten economic sectors across global, regional and country levels, as well as 54 industry groups. Please do have a play with the new filters on this page, personally I find it quite addictive hunting for high ranking sectors and clicking through to see the constituents.

Introducing the local, regional and global StockRanks

There is a new link at the top right of StockReports which the beady eyed will have spotted. This allows any subscriber to view a StockReport against either the local, regional or global peer group. So if you are a UK subscriber this means you can compare a stock against one of three sets - all UK & Ireland stocks, all European stocks or our ‘Global’ stock universe. (By ‘Global’ we mean our total market coverage, which is of course liable to change over time as we add more regions. )

Using the dropdown menu will switch the StockReport as you view it. StockRanks and TrafficLights will change. Generally the changes are moderate, but StockRanks can move up or down by 10 percentiles or more when comparing a stock locally versus globally. If you think about it this makes sense as a certain stock may seem less expensive compared against its local peer group than the rest of the world.

The default StockRank setting is ‘local’ but you can change this in your site settings to regional or global if you prefer. Anybody who wants to know how we’re computing the StockRanks ‘locally’ and ‘regionally’ should please read the associated technical help article we’ve provided here.

More GuruScreen tracking

We’re now tracking the GuruScreens across all the main subscription regions previously highlighted. As long time subscribers will know we do live tracking of screen and rank performance, rather than backtesting. So just as has happened with our UK coverage, the performance tracking has started from zero and will build over time.

It’s been great to see some of the UK originated strategies do so well internationally - I’m thinking especially of the Naked Trader screen and the Slater Zulu screen. Two of my favourite investment books have been standing up to our ruthless international testing ! It will be interesting to see how they perform across these new territories.

Pricing and Currencies

We’ve reduced our prices across some of the core subscription regions. In the last 2 years we’ve been able to reduce our European pricing down from £600 to £425 today, and we’ve now cut our United States pricing from £350 per year from £300 - do check out the plans page for more details. Some of the cross region plans have also been reduced in price accordingly. If you have subscribed to any of the affected regions we’ve reduced your renewal rate accordingly so you may get a pleasant surprise if you check your billing and subscription page!

Given my father in law has been struggling with his oil and mining investments in recent years down under, I figured it best to help him out and bring Stockopedia to Australia. But to make it easier for those in Oz to subscribe we’ve also added Australian Dollar pricing. It’s the fourth currency we’ve added to the Stockopedia service and we’re considering adding several more in the next year - if you feel strongly that we should add a currency please do let us know. We’re still working on some better currency localisation so that your preferred currency displays across the site in tables. We hope to have this updated by the weekend.

On Global Factor Investing

The question I’m asked is how well do I think the StockRanks will perform across these new territories ? Well I’m cautiously optimistic. Ultimately what we’re doing with the StockRanks is applying time tested ‘factor investing’ principles to the market - so while we can’t backtest our approach across all these new regions (yet) we can dig into the historic research and come up with some general expectations.

The academic literature on factor investing - Value, Momentum, Size, Quality and other anomalies - is very deep for US markets, but somewhat thinner internationally. We have though uncovered various research papers that show that factor investing works very well internationally. 

I’m hoping to write a detailed piece on my findings in the next week or two but essentially here's a few rules of thumb. Factor investing generally works much more strongly in Developed Asia and Developed Europe than in the USA possibly due to the more efficient markets in the USA. From what we’ve found, the Value and Momentum effects do seem to be ‘everywhere’, with strong returns in Australia, Emerging Markets, Canada, and Asia. Momentum has had a pretty poor run in Japan though there’s evidence it still works in small caps.

I’m not going to bang the drum on international investing here. We’re providing these options for those that want them and for those that are interested. Anyone who has applied the European coverage over the last couple of years may have extremely well in the markets but the future isn’t the past and macro concerns remain.

As ever safe investing and do join me on Thursday for the webinar which will go through some of the above features in more detail.