This article first appeared in Personal Wealth, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 17, 2020 - August 23, 2020

There are opportunities in volatile markets, but those who want to start investing might be overwhelmed by the amount of information available and would not know where to begin. At the same time, experienced investors may be looking for trading ideas or free tools that can assist in their research process.

BursaMKTPLC is a free tool by Bursa Malaysia Bhd that aims to help beginner, intermediate or advanced investors address these challenges.

The BursaMKTPLC website and mobile app provide investors with an overview of the performance of various local indexes in real time. Investors can also access information about the most active stocks and warrants, as well as the real-time prices of futures, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), real estate investment trusts (REITs) and the LEAP market stocks in Malaysia.

Investors can also click on each stock to see its latest price, financial performance for the previous quarters and past year, latest news and research reports. The screener tool allows investors to use filters such as dividend yield and price-earnings ratio to look for relevant stocks.

Investors can also find trading ideas on the website, where five stocks are suggested based on analysts’ consensus and scores given by the Alpha Indicator, a quantitative tool developed by Thomson Reuters. The higher a company’s Alpha Indicator score, the better its performance compared to its peers.

A tool that is only available on the website and not on the mobile app is the heat map, which displays the price movement of stocks on a map using different colours. Investors can sort the stocks on the map according to volume traded, market value, price value movement (in terms of absolute value or percentage), profit and loss.

An additional feature on the website is the Bursa Academy and education segment, where novices can learn how to invest in stocks, futures and other asset classes.

For instance, in the “start stocks” tab, investors are asked if they want to invest in tycoons, which refer to companies in the FBM KLCI Benchmark Index, big buildings, which directs investors to REITs, or a basket of stocks, which leads investors to a list of ETFs. There are a series of videos and articles available for investors to enjoy.

Lastly, the website version also hosts a market simulation game and the mirror, learn and trade platform for investors to learn by trading in virtual stocks.

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