Hidden Tools that Investors Don’t Want You to Know!

One day, a friend approached me and asked whether I would be keen to do other forms of business apart from investing in companies. I replied: while I will have my private investments in F&B and properties in the future, there is nothing I would rather do and there is nothing happier than to grow together with a community of investors. This gives me fulfilment knowing that my knowledge is passed down to people around me. My methods are not special, it is just a framework and a system which anyone — given time and effort, could duplicate. It is trainable, transferable and implementable.

For the first time, I am revealing a couple of my tools to you. These tools give you some advantage.

Ever wondered how do you determine whether the latest scandal of Liu Qiangdong’s alleged misconduct would affect JD.com’s sales?

Do you wish to find an item’s sales in real time even without being an employee of the company?

Do you want to have an information advantage?

If your answer is YES to all my questions, you have to read this entire post without any distractions. 

Disclaimer: the tools may not provide full and accurate statistics all the time. It is used to aid your research process and it should never be taken as the gospel truth. 

Rank2Traffic

For e-commerce companies, site visits are especially crucial. There are barometers or leading indicators of the future performance. While some views do not get converted into actual sales online, there is a correlation. When there are more site visits, we can safely assume more sales will be generated. You’ll get information before the quarter results are out.

Introducing you to, Rank2traffic.com. It is a website that indicates the number of visitors on a daily basis. Using this link, I received these statistics.

You can test it out on JD.com, Ctrip.com, Facebook.com, Booking.com, VictoriasSecret.com, or any other companies you are keen. Facebook’s visits have been declining.

CamelCamelCamel

When your company is using Amazon as a distribution source, Camelx3 tracks the sales and price changes for you. For example, Turtle Beach uses Amazon to sell their headphones. Increasingly, product sales on Amazon’s platform are seen as a measurement of its commercial success in other distribution channels as well. To view the statistics, you need to create a free account.

I used Camelx3 to evaluate the product sales of SodaStream. You could see its sales are hovering between 1,000 to 2,000 units from September to October 2018. You want to see them selling more over time. The key is not to calculate the total sales from this product, but you would like to see the trend. More sales or fewer sales?

Google Trends

According to Wikipedia, Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. Naturally, when there are more searches, it is a sign of demand indicators of the products/services.

I tested it on Victoria’s Secret which is a brand under L Brands. The results tell me that the interest is declining for the past 5 years – continuously!

What can you see from this chart? The chart is a downtrend. Every year, there is a mega event called Victoria’s Secret show. It tends to air late November or early December, this is where you see a spike in interest as consumers/media start to search and create content. This is seasonality.

For travel companies like Booking.com, there is seasonality too.

Do not ever use Google Trends for Chinese companies. In China, the Chinese do not use Google to search so the information will be highly inaccurate. You have to use Baidu, Sogou or WeChat Index.

Sogou Index

Sogou is a search engine in China with a market share of below 20%. Its Sogou Index is free and it performs a similar role as Google Trends.

Using this search, this is what you’ll get. I am comparing the search popularity between JD (京东) and Tmall (天猫). You can see that JD has an average score of 423,374 while Tmall has 114,064. The results would be different if you compare JD with Taobao. Over the same time period, you want to see an increased in the searches.

SimilarWebs

Similarweb provides statistics on a website, it is especially useful for e-commerce websites. It displays the year founded, headquarters, global rank, country rank and category rank. I enjoy their traffic overview (no. of visits) and breakdown by countries.

Here is an example using Taobao.com:

Using Tmall.com:

You can see that Tmall receives most of its traffic from Taobao then it gets funnelled out to either login page (11.15%) and cart (9.13%).

Glassdoors

Glassdoors is a top website where employees could review their employers on work culture, management, co-workers, and training. Its reviews are highly regarded and many prospective employees search up their employers in this website before accepting a job. Glassdoor was acquired by Recruit Holdings in May 2018, valuing it at $1.2 billion.

While I have no statistics to back my claim, I do feel that happy employees tend to be the most productive and this shows that the company is well-organised.

You can check out this HBR article, 28 Years of Stock Market Data Shows a Link Between Employee Satisfaction and Long-Term Value.

Let’s use Adobe as an example:

Conclusion

Using a combination of these tools, you will find out what are people searching online. When there is strong interest, it tends to translate into real sales. The tools do not give you an exact picture of the sales however they are good proxies. I’ve used a combination plus a few other scuttlebutt methods to give me the unfair advantage. After reading this article, you’ve gained this advantage for yourself too!

I hope you enjoyed this content piece. Feel free to chat with me (kelvesy@gmail.com) or share my article with your friends or on your Facebook wall!