Here you can review a company's balance sheet, its sources of income and the way it manages its cash and its income and expenses. Before making any investment, you should do your own research. It is always best to research several stocks in the same industry, in order to carry out a comparative analysis. Access to information is usually not a problem. The biggest constraint on becoming your own stock market analyst is time.
Retail investors who have a lot of other things to do may not be able to spend as much time as professional security analysts. However, I'm sure that at first you can only hire one or two firms to see how well you can analyze them. That would help you understand the process. With more experience and time, you can think about putting more actions under your lens. Let's look at a hypothetical scenario.
Let's say I want to add a home improvement stock to my portfolio and I'm trying to decide between Home Depot (HD 0.58%) and Lowe's (LOW -0.41%).
