The most conventional and beneficial research tool for investment research is the stock screener. Stock screening websites allow you to enter qualifiers such as industry type, market cap, sales, dividends, and so forth. The more sophisticated the stock screening, the larger number of qualifiers. After you put in all the qualifiers, the stock screener looks at all the companies listed on the ASX and pulls out those that meet your qualifications.

A company’s ASX share price usually changes over time, either increasing or decreasing in value. The fluctuation of share prices can be gradual, erratic or sudden. Bull and bear markets are descriptions of market trends that are widely used by financial media, commentators and investors.

But share price by its own does not mean that much. The more refined stock screeners allow you to run extra stock screening on the set you just generated, while the free stock screener tends to leave you with just the list. Either way, you have just saved yourself hours and hours of work by narrowing down the possible candidates.

Until recently the options for ASX screeners were quite limited. Most tools were subscription based and the free ones were almost useless. In the past 2 years though couple of good free screeners for ASX became available. Of those the most sophisticated one is Stock Value. Stock Value is a free ASX share screener. All you need is a valid email address and then you are good to go. Through that website you can search for ASX share price to find undervalued shares quite easily.

A good number of CFD brokers in Australia offer CFDs over the shares making up the ASX top 300, the rationale behind this is simple, stocks with a bigger market capitalisation tend to be much more liquid. Some CFD brokers forget that we live in Australia, a land rich in resources and of course also rich in resource shares. A good number of shares listed on the ASX are resource based, this is in fact the biggest sector of the Australian share market.

CFD trading over speculative resource stocks can be extremely rewarding if you select your stocks intelligently. When trading CFDs over speculative shares you should do some research on the company. Prior to choosing your shares you should ensure that the company has first-class management and a solid project. Needless to say if the copper price has gone up and you’re in search of exposure to shares in this sector logically you wouldn’t pick a CFD over a stock with gold assets, this is why picking stocks in the relevant sector is also crucial. It is always vital that you keep in mind trading CFDs over speculative stocks has risks as these types of stocks can go up in price as fast as they can come down.

So why a trade CFD rather than buying the Stock outright?
The answer to this question is simple and can be summed up in a couple of words, unrealised profits and losses. Unlike stocks CFDs are marked to market every day meaning that the profits or losses are credited or deducted to and from your account each trading day. The profits and losses from buying and selling stocks are handled very differently in that they are only realised once the stock is sold. Realising profits and losses on a daily basis means that you can use your unrealised to profits to buy new positions without needing to deposit further money into your trading account, needless to say the same goes for losses in that you’ll have to deposit cash into your trading account if the trade moves against you.
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The Australian Stock Exch. Ltd (ASX) operates Australia’s federal market exchange for equities/stocks, derivatives along with fixed interest securities, as in bond certificates. The central exchange also renders general stock market info plus trading information to a broad array of traders, stockbrokers and charges.

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