When Philippe and I look for investment ideas, we rely on a few tools to help us to discover new ideas or to follow closely the companies that we think might fit our criteria eventually. In this article, I would like to present you a tool that we use daily and that we feel is beneficial for any type of investor: Conference Call Transcripts (CCT).

CCT is a website that helps investors track all the public filings of their favorite companies. All you have to do is create an account, enter the ticker symbols of the companies you would like to follow, and then CCT will deliver every new filing on SEDAR in Canada and EDGAR in USA directly to your email address or cellphone via SMS. This tool is free for any portfolio of 50 companies or less, so you can try it at no risk. Unlimited portfolio is only $5 per month.

We like CCT because it is very convenient and helps us stay aware of any news or financial statements releases. That makes our watch list much easier to manage. There is also a feature that allows you to get alerts when there is a change on a specific webpage. For example, one could set an alert on a company’s products or customers page to be informed at the moment the company updates it with new information.

We think CCT is very user-friendly and easy to use, so here is a quick tutorial on the features that we like:

When you are on Home page, you can directly type the name of the company you are looking for and CCT will provide you with all recent filings in chronological order. You can also access transcripts, schedule and shareholders if there are any available but usually there are not any for the companies that we look for.

The main features are located into the ‘’Get Notified!’’ section of the upper menu. When you have an account, that is where you will be able to set alerts for the companies you wish to follow.

Simply enter a company’s name and click ‘’Add To Notifications’’. By default, you will receive every new filing by email. Check the SMS box if you would like to get your notifications delivered to your cellphone. You can also click on the small pencil under ‘’Other’’ to get access to more features:

Some companies will already have one or more custom features added by other users such as Pioneering Technology Corp where you can receive updates on any insider transaction reported on Canadian Insider. That is where you can add a web page (URL section) to get notified about any changes the company makes. When you are done, don’t forget to save your changes at the bottom right of the page.

Another recent feature that we’ve been using is the SEDAR keyword search engine, which you can access at SEDAR Search. There is a free trial period, after which the feature is only available through a subscription at $49.99 per month.

What this feature allows you to do is to receive an alert every time a specific keyword or set of words is used in any new public filing of any company on SEDAR. We have been using this tool to find private placement opportunities by looking at this specific keyword.

For example, there is a company called Pioneering Technology that announced a private placement a few months ago and the announcement was buried in the last paragraph of a press release about their latest financial results. Since Pioneering Technology was on our watch list, we quickly realized that this might be a compelling opportunity so we started doing more due diligence. We finally participated in the private placement at $0.125 per share and the stock currently trades at $0.325 per share. We found this rare opportunity thanks to CCT and this is why we love it so much and will continue to use it. It already made us plenty of money.

We hope this quick tutorial will help you get the best out of Conference Call Transcripts. Most of the features are free (or have a free trial period), so we recommend that you give it a try and see for yourself how useful it is. On our side, we will be on the lookout for other investment tools to share with our readers in the future!