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Buy! Sell! Hold: Investing via the Web
Finding reliable, high-quality investment information on the Web can be tricky. According to the Center for Media Research (http://digbig.com/4phmq), the most popular financial news and information Internet sites are Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/), MSN Money (http://moneycentral.msn.com/home.asp) and AOL Money & Finance (http://money.aol.com/).
These sites all have their merits and provide easy ways to look up stock prices, screen for stocks and even track portfolios of stocks. Which of these sites you prefer is just a matter of personal preference. But how can investors dig deeper? Here are some tips.
A quick, convenient way to access investment information is to type a stock ticker directly into Google's main search box. The first search result provides a quick snapshot of the stock, as well as direct links to many of the most popular financial sites, including Google Finance (http://finance.google.com/finance), CNN Money (http://money.cnn.com) and MarketWatch (http://www.marketwatch.com/).
To get comprehensive business news, however, you'll have to go beyond what you'll find at these financial Web sites. One of the most popular and highly regarded sources for financial news is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Unfortunately, the WSJ Online (http://online.wsj.com) only makes a few articles freely available each day (check the "Free Today" section at http://online.wsj.com/public/page/2_0323.html). The WSJ can justify this because people are willing to pay—the WSJ.com is the largest paid subscription news site on the Web.
The good news is that the UB community has some alternatives. Factiva provides easy access to the full-text of the current WSJ, plus a deep archive of older articles back to 1979 (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/factiva.html). When you enter Factiva, you're at the "Newstand" where you'll find current editions of the WSJ, plus other popular business publications like Barron's, Forbes and Fortune. To search for older articles, click the search tab in the upper left. ABI Inform (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/abi.html) provides more limited access to the WSJ, although a handy feature is that you can set up email alerts when new editions are available (click the "Set Up Alert" link at http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb/pqdauto?RQT
=318&TS=1164125659&clientId=39334&VType=PQD&VName=
PQD&VInst=PROD&pmid=7510&PageNum=1).
Another resource for investors is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at http://www.sec.gov/. All public U.S. companies are required by the SEC to disclose any information that impacts investors. These disclosures take the form of filings that are available from the SEC's EDGAR system (http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml). Brace yourself for information overload—big companies have lots of filings (Google, for example, has more than 30 filings in November). To save time, look for the major filings called 10Ks and 10Qs.
The SEC site also includes a helpful investor education and assistance section (http://www.sec.gov/investor.shtml) where you'll find advice, including podcasts, on managing your investments, savings and retirement funds. More investor education information can be found at the Path to Investing (http://www.pathtoinvesting.org) site from the Foundation for Investor Education.
Finally, for investment recommendations and research, the UB community can access Standard and Poor's (S&P) NetAdvantage (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/NetAdvantage.html). NetAdvantage provides access to research, ratings and opinions on stocks, mutual funds and industries that investors can use to make more informed investment decisions.
—Charles Lyons, University Libraries