Online investing
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been interested in the stock market and how it works. I’ve always loved numbers and solving problems. That’s partly why I like writing computer programs and is likely the source of my stock market affection.
After years of watching the stock market from the sidelines, thousands of hours watching CNBC and reading dozens books on trading strategies from the “experts” I can finally afford to take the leap myself and I feel well equipped to make sound investment decisions.
Fortunately the internet has created a closer to level playing field for investors like myself. In the past I would’ve had to subscribe to newpapers to see price listings, call or mail companies for their prospectus, phone my broker to place an order then phone back to find out if the order was executed and watch business reports in the hope of hearing some news (preferrably good) about the companies I owned stock in. Today, I can go to any number of financial sites to get all this information and more.
Now I can look at industry analyst estimates on earnings, get up to the second news about a company and compaines related to an industry, watch near realtime stock prices move up and down by the penny, place limit orders with a degree of confidence, watch daily stock volume, listen to company conference calls and interact with company management.
I use a few web sites to research stocks for different reason. I use Yahoo!Finance because I like the clean interface and the ability to list the historical information (highs, lows, open, close, volume) between a specified period of time, but it isn’t good for getting deep into company financials. I like MSN Moneycentral because it is good at getting deep into the financials of a company and has a pretty decent stock screener, but the interface is uncomfortable and cluttered. There are other sites that do things better as well, like AOL does a great job of covering conference calls and Reuters, of course, does news very well.
Enter Google. They just launched Google Finance (beta of course) and have done a fantastic job of bringing all of these great resources together in one location. Google has answered my need by centralizing the best financial data. Their charts are amazing, they post relavant information from all the sources mentioned above, they give direct links to company information on the company web site and they link to the best parts of the outside web sites, some of them competitors like Yahoo!. Google Finance has created a one stop investing location for all my research needs. You have to check it out and seriously consider moving your portfolio research over to them. I will be playing with it and posting a review in the coming weeks.
