With YCHARTS you can create and track up to 40 stocks, rank stocks by various metrics, draft up comparison charts, and get broad sector data. There is also a blog setup that shares just how detailed these charts can be.

There are 2 main types of ownerships that are usually clumped together: insider and institutional ownership. They can usually be clumped together because the big amounts of money these institutions invest in a company can gain them some say; however, we’ll be focusing more on insider ownership.

The top executives make management decisions. Because their incentive are tied to producing positive numbers, you can believe they will make good long-term moves. At the same time, you can see when these same insiders buy and sell shares. If their picking up shares, then you can pretty much assume they think the stock is heading higher, and if they start dumping shares then that could be a tip that these particular insiders feel the price is about to drop.

There are many ways to find out what the insiders are doing in a particular company; however, some sites are updated more quickly than others. The easiest method is to check under the “Insider Transactions” link on Yahoo Finance.

Just like other fundamental analysis tools, you can also scan for stocks based on insider ownership and/or institutional ownership of some value you decide.

Screen image below – finviz.com

Basically return on equity measures how profitable the company is for the shareholders. Obviously as an investor you wouldn’t necessarily want to invest in a company with a low or negative ROE. That means they are either losing money or not generating much return, which will ultimately be passed on to the stock price.

As with most ratios, it is best to compare return on equity among similar companies than with the market overall. If a retail store has an ROE of 20% and a oil producer has an ROE of 40%, then that doesn’t mean the retail store is bad. Instead see the ROE of other retail stores and compare 20% with those.

ROE = Net Income / Average Shareholders Equity

The “average” is taken over the time period being calculated and is equal to “the sum of the beginning equity balance and the ending equity balance, divided by two.”

If the ROE is 20% then 20 cents of assets are created for every dollar originally invested.

All else equal, return on equity generally grows when net margin increases, more revenue is generated from a company’s assets, or the company becomes more leveraged.

There are many different ways to determine what the return of equity of a company is, but the easiest is to check out Yahoo Finance under the Key Statistics link. You can also find stocks through screeners using a desired value of return on equity.

Screener image below – finviz.com