Introduction to ShareInvestor Membership
For a very long time, I have always utilized Google Finance and SGX StockFacts to perform stocks’ screening and analysis on a regular basis. However, after Google decided to drop their data for the finance site and SGX StockFacts come short of my increased needs for higher level of comparison, I needed another viable option.
And that’s when i bit the bullet and subscribed to ShareInvestor WebPro, a web-based membership plan that offers a wide array of financial information. After using it for some time, I seriously feel that it is a great tool to have – I personally saved tons of time by getting a quick snapshot of the company’s financials over long periods of time.
If you are interested to find out more about the membership, you are in luck!
In the 1st ever ShareInvestor Membership Review, we are going to delve deep into the Shareinvestor features (only available to premium members) in our 3-part series.
In our 1st part of the series, we will touch on “Shareholder Ownership” + “Insider Trades”.
Share Ownership & Insider Trades
Quick Summary:
- Importance of Shareholder Structure
- [Walk-through] How to navigate through Shareinvestor.com in a Step-by-Step guide
- Conclusion
Importance of Shareholder Structure
Occasionally, I would like to look at insider or share buybacks to see if I am lucky to spot any hidden gems. In fact, this is also one of the more commonly used strategies by investors. Why is that so? As the legendary Fund manager Peter Lynch once said,
“Insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy them for only one: they think the price will rise.”
As such, it makes sense to buy into companies where the management team have a significant stake in the firm – aligning their interests to that of the company.
You can take heart that you are in the right company when you see the CEO and many big funds holding big stakes in the same company as you. And with Shareinvestor, you can easily browse through the Top 20 shareholders of any company at 1 glance!
Walk-through
Go to Fundamental Tab -> Ownership.
Enter the Stock Exchange (SGX, Bursa etc.) & Company Name (or ticker) you want to research.
In this article, I selected AEM Holdings as a case study because it’s a company I am familiar with and wanted to ascertain the accuracy of the tool.
Below, you immediately get a table with the top 20 shareholders of the company, organized from the larger to the smaller percentage held and a pie chart representative of this table.
In the chart, you can’t always read the names but if you hover over it you’ll get the information.
Here, you can quickly see some big fund names like Aberdeen Standard Investments, Orion Phoenix and HSBC Asset Management. In addition, AEM’s executive chairman Loke Wai San and CEO Chok Yean Hung are in the list as well.
Moreover, by clicking on the name of the shareholder in the table we are redirected to a page that shows the positions in which this shareholder is a Top 20 shareholder. Usually when these shareholders have only one or two positions, they are likely to be part of the management team of the company or other related entity.
It is also important to note the date of the last update. I usually do a quick search for the most recent news to see if there’s been any significant event that changes the shareholder structure.
Since the shareholder structure is not fixed, it is also important to analyze how it has changed. This information also gives us an indication of the sentiment regarding company performance by members who have a greater involvement with the company than any of us mere mortals. These are the so-called insiders and their trades reveal their insights.
Insider Trades + Significant Purchase/Sales
When we click on the “Insider Trades” tab, we receive a summary table of the changes in ownership fillings, sorted from the most recent to the oldest.
Again, depending on the company, too many results may appear, that’s why Shareinvestor.com allows us to also select the main purchases or sales in the other tabs. Here we get an identical table, but with only the largest transactions in the last 180 days.
Notice than in our example, in the last 6 months, UBS was the only entity to have disposed a significant amount of shares. Through UBS AG, the holding UBS Group AG saw a decrease of its deemed interest in AEM’s shares. Talk about detail!
In these tables, we can easily see who was the shareholder and its classification (at the end of the table there is a code description), how much you bought or sold, at what price and even the position in the company after the operation.
If you are curious about any particular transaction, we can still see on the last column at the right a note with brief explanation of the transaction. I found this extremely helpful.
In a nutshell, we gather the benefits of using ShareInvestor’s Ownership Tool:
- Pie chart gives you an immediate idea of the capital dispersion;
- Information is easy to find and to work with;
- “Insider Trades” feature allows for filtering the most relevant transactions;
- Insider trades have a note for further due diligence without having to go through the changes in ownership fillings.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, this is really a very helpful tool that can save you a great deal of time. It also wins hands-down when you compare it to SGX Stockfacts (see screenshot of AEM’s ownership below).
Would you even know who Ban Toh is?! When his actual name is actually Mr. Toh Ban Leng James, Founder and Non-Executive Director of Novo Tellus Capital Partners!
In addition, i love it when all the accurate information is compiled into 1 place – save my precious time verifying against other sources.
But that’s not the value this tool has to offer. In the next 2 parts of our series, we will drill into 4 other features of why ShareInvestor is an essential investment tool for all investors.
Convinced of the value ShareInvestor’s membership can bring for you? You would be thrilled to find out that they are having an Xmas promotion with 25% OFF & NTUC Vouchers to be won!
