Investment Resources

Hey all,

Thanks Alfred for creating this blog. For this post, I wanted to provide you with some of the resources that some of us have come across. Feel free to add more resources that you find helpful.

www.investopedia.com : This is basically an investing encyclopedia created in 1999 that has gotten incredibly popular over the years. It provides information on all kinds of investing, including: retirement, real estate, currency, bonds, ETFs, stocks, etc.

The site also discusses economics and financial theory if you want to educate yourself on that. In particular, investopedia is helpful to understand certain financial lingo and terminology. As a new investor, you will come across many terms you may not know. As such, investopedia is a convenient resource that will provide definitions in layman's terms.

www.fool.com : Motley Fool is a website about stocks and investing created by the Gardner brothers back in 1993. The website is free to use as long as you don't subscribe to their investment advisory services. Essentially, subscription to those services would provide you with stock picks that their staff recommend. For instance, the top advisory service is the "Motley Fool Stock Advisor," headed by Tom and David Gardner themselves. Over the years, their performance has been pretty impressive and their portfolios have still maintained positive returns despite this economic downturn.

Personally, I have been using the website as an initial screen to pick solid stocks. If you type in the ticker in the search bar and click on "get quote," the website will direct you towards a page that shows its ratings and other people's opinions on the stock. The rating system that fool.com uses is called CAPS, and it operates by having members score stocks from 1 to 5 stars. Members that are more credible, have more influence in the overall rating of a stock. To determine which members have more influence, the system keeps track of each member's prediction and provides an accuracy score as well as a score that measures how much the pick outperformed the S&P 500 index. Furthermore, members that are in the top 20% in terms of overall rating, are given the honor of being known as "all-stars."

Therefore, when choosing a stock to invest in, I like to look at the overall CAPS rating and specifically, the "All-Star" ratings provided in the stock page. Since I've gotten more experienced in my investing, I have chosen to only invest in 5-star CAPS and maybe some 4-star CAPS.

www.finance.yahoo.com : This is a good site to keep track of the overall market and to look up specific stocks. In addition, there's a nice feature where you can keep track of your whole portfolio performance. To create your own portfolio simply go to the homepage, click on the "my portfolio" tab and type in the tickers and the respective transaction information. Yahoo provides both a "last trade" and "real-time" price for each stock. The "real-time" stock price is more accurate since it is more up-to-date so you should follow that.

www.marketwatch.com : Marketwatch is a good website to keep up to date with all stock information and specific earnings releases. It is affilated with the Wall Street Journal and also has some informative podcasts that you can download from iTunes for free.

Incidentally, there are a lot of podcasts you can subscribe to from iTunes if you feel like it.

I also like to read the wall street journal (www.wsj.com) and the nytimes (www.nytimes.com). The information from articles may not be particularly relevant to investing in a stock, but they may help you to understand the macro picture of how the economy is doing.

Hope this has all been helpful to you all. Comments and questions are welcome. I would like to write a little about the sequence of events that have led to the financial turmoil we find ourselves in next time.

::Edit::
www.seekingalpha.com : This is currently the world's largest stock market blog. It also has many articles and tools to look at stocks. I hope you guys check it out and if you learn about a cool feature, please share it with us all. Thanks.