As with investments, the choice of investment services is dependent on your needs and judgement of value compared to price. Value is what the service is worth to you; price is what you pay for the service.

Beyond the general press and magazines, information on ASX shares is provided by:

• Online stockbrokers,
• Advisory stockbrokers and planners,
• Investment newsletters offering ‘Buy’ and ‘Sell’ advice, and
• Online publishers with analytics to choose companies with particular characteristics.

Overlaps exist in the service offerings but each targets the differing requirements of investors. As a result, each service represents a different value irrespective of price. A combination of services may be used depending on an investor’s requirements. Typical combinations include investors using.

• An online stockbroker and full advice stockbroker, or
• A publisher used together with an online broker.

Services are not free. This may appear to be the case as a result of ‘Packaging’ by the service provider. Characteristics of charges by service include:

• Online stockbrokers – charges include brokerage and interest spread on in-house linked cash accounts. Additionally, a membership fee may be levied based on trading activity.

  Share data is presented on a company by company basis. Typically suited to self directed investors with brokerage structured to target active investors such as day traders.

• Advisory stockbrokers and planners – a range of full service and interest spread of cash to fee for service or up front loads apply.

  As a guide, full service brokerage of around 1% of each buy and sell trade applies. Planners may charge a mix of up front and ongoing service fees perhaps with a discounted full service brokerage. Indicatively, planners’ fees on direct shares are at least equivalent to full service advice brokers.

  Share data is limited substantially to trading activity and holdings, and not a company’s fundamental or technical characteristics. The latter is provided in a summary form based on market and company events with a bias to commentary.

• Investment newsletters – charged based on a subscription fee which is priced in the order of $600 per annum and more.

  Share data is structured around the analyst’s view with an emphasis on commentary underlying the investment recommendation.

• Publisher with analytics – a diverse range of fee structures from a straight subscription fee, possibly supplemented by fee for use of analytics that add value but are not required by all, to the addition of an up front fee.

  As a guide subscriptions are a multiple of Investment Newsletter charges. Supplements are typically discretionary and upfront fees can be a multiple of the subscription fee.

Publishing with analytics is the domain of Market Shares. Refer to Subscriber Rates for details of subscription charges and options.

Market Shares is typically suited to:

• investors starting out that value a philosophy to investing and seek to build investment savvy,
• confirmers seeking a structured view across a shares characteristics to ‘test’ a broker’s, planner’s or newsletter’s recommendation,
• seasoned investors who value construction of an investment strategy to identify shares they like, and
• self directed investors seeking structured quantitative information providing fundamental and technical analysis.

Making the right investment service choice for your requirements is fundamental to your success or otherwise in the market. Do not choose on price, the key is value.

No. Key factors should include what purpose the strategy seeks to satisfy. Is it a ‘momentum’ play which is likely to have short term holding periods which in turn has capital gains tax implications? Or does it focus on longer term holdings? Please note strategy performance is stated pre tax.

Also the number of trades and holdings can vary greatly between strategies. High trade volumes demand more of your time. High holding numbers may be impractical with a small investment kitty.

Additionally, the risk profile of the companies targeted in the strategy may not meet your personal comfort levels. Losses must be expected but do you feel comfortable with a complete company failure which can and has occurred? The latter can occur in any strategy but companies with sound financials are more likely to contain the risk.

Current returns are displayed as one of a number of considerations that may be made in deciding whether to lease a strategy.

The positions and trades of strategies that may be leased are delayed in order to protect the interest of the author and subscribers of the strategy. Current positions and trade information are available on subscribing to the strategy. Similarly, current details are displayed for strategies that you have authored.

Leasing a strategy provides access to the outcomes of the strategy, not the basis of how it was composed. This is done to protect the intellectual property of the author of the strategy.

Editing of a strategy that is available for leasing is disabled to safeguard the integrity of that strategy. Leasing decisions are based on the profile and results of the published strategy. Editing is likely to cause changes which may alter a subscriber’s decision on whether to lease.

As the author, details of the strategy including filters used are accessible. Accordingly, before submitting a strategy for lease, you may duplicate the strategy and perform edits on what is then a new version.

If a Sell criteria is not mirrored as a Buy criteria, then it may result in high turnover; eg. If RSI Weekly is set as a Sell criteria but RSI Weekly is not set as a Buy criteria then trade volumes are likely to increase with little or no return benefit.

The most common causes are two.

Firstly, your Sell criteria maybe unduly conservative relative to your Buy criteria.

Secondly, your PE Buy criteria may not be filtering out shares that have significant anomalies in Historical PE’s relative to the current PE. Consider reviewing, from the My Back Tests tab, the Trades screen provided in Autopsy.

Strategies that are available to be leased are listed with various details including trade and holding volumes on a weekly and monthly periods.

A strategy may have current holdings, due to the ‘Buy’ criteria having been previously met, and the ‘Sell’ criteria not having been met at the current point of time.

Under such market conditions, the strategy is effectively in a hold status. No buy or sell triggers will be signalled until a share meets the strategy's criteria.

Each screen is known as a 'Company Perspective Screen'. There are 15 of them, divided into 4 groupings; Profile, Value, Risk and Momentum. Each considers the data from a different perspective, allowing the user to consider a structured analysis technique.

Market Shares acquires data from Aspect Huntley, who collect the data from various sources, including the individual companies and the ASX. We can only publish the data we receive. Some companies have only been listed for less than 10 years and therefore only those years show data. We display 'n.a.' when we are not in possession of such data.

The companies listed are from the subject company's market sector. The subject company is always highlighted. The default order is by Market Capitalisation but where you can choose various alternate selections (by clicking on any heading with a downward pointing triangle) which will determine different orders.

The Altman Z-Score is a world standard for measuring the overall health of any business.

For years, researchers had attempted to identify a ratio or set of ratios that provided an early warning of a business going bankrupt. In the early part of the 20th century, for example, some researchers concluded that the best ratio to calculate and examine was Net Working Capital to Total Assets.

A few years later, someone discovered that the Return on Net Worth and Net Worth to Total Debt ratios were best. Later on, other researchers successfully focused on the Current Ratio, Net Worth to Total Debt, Times Interest Earned, and Net Profit-to-Sales ratios.

Finally, in the 1960s, Edward Altman combined 5 ratios into what has become known as the Altman Z-Score, the best-known predictor of bankruptcy. What the Altman Z-Score does is calculate and the combine 5 financial ratios, assigning each a different weighting.

If the total Z-Score is 1.81 or less, there is a very good chance the business could go bankrupt in the coming year. If the total Z-Score is 3.00 or better there is little danger of bankruptcy.

As well as providing the usual 30 and 70 percentage indicator lines, Markets Shares include 5th and 95th percentile* indicator lines.

Markets Shares believe that it is considerably more valuable to identify when a company's RSI reaches its abnormal regions (above its 95th or below its 5th) irrespective of the actual RSI value. 

*Percentile - A statistical value that represents a distribution of data.  In descriptive statistics, a percentile is any of the 99 values that divide the sorted data into 100 equal parts, so that each part represents 1/100th of the sample or population.