Top financial websites
The world of stockmarket investing can be fraught with danger, especially in volatile times, as we have seen over the last year. Trouble can be avoided by getting clued up as much as possible using a selection of the top financial websites, many of which provide all sorts of useful data for free.
The best advice of all though is this: if you are unsure about an investment, sometimes the superior position to take is no position at all. In other words to not buy or short-sell, but remain on the sidelines, biding your time for a more compelling opportunity.
Where is it best to find information though? There is a vast array of great financial websites, which can help you determine whether you should buy a share, or avoid it altogether. This post will concentrate mainly on UK companies, but feel free to share comments on useful international data websites.
One of the best sites for information on investments and trading is the London Stock Exchange. The LSE provide market data and statistics to help you investigate potential investments. They also have an Education section containing articles on Investing in Shares, Shares Analysis and Security Types. Well worth having a really good rummage around this website.
There is another stock exchange for small and mid-cap companies called PLUS Markets. This is another one worth checking out, as it’s packed with information on the kinds of shares small private investors should be interested in. The very low-priced stocks are normally something I tend to avoid, as I don’t buy shares with a bid-offer spread much above 5-10%, and the cheap stocks can have eye-watering spreads. However, if you have a sensibly well-diversified portfolio already and a reasonable appetite for risk, you may wish to have a dabble in penny stock investing. Especially with these shares, do your own research and have a plan!
The main site I use for stockmarket data is the Advanced Financial Network (ADVFN). They offer different packages according to what you are willing to pay! So you can get live market prices streamed to your computer, set up watchlists of shares you are interested in, filter all the data to see tables of the top percentage gainers and losers etc. All for free, plus of course, there are the free bulletin boards, where other investors can discuss particular companies, why the shares are down or up. Take these boards with a hefty pinch of salt though, and never make a decision to buy a share based on a ‘tip’ from anybody on there. The acronym you will see time and again is DYOR – Do Your Own Research!
ADVFN offers a premium service, which gets you into the premium bulletin boards – a little bit more trustworthy, with professional traders. You can also get enhanced data such as Breakouts and Chart Alerts which are sometimes quite useful. Absolutely loads of other stuff of interest on there including financial data on all the individual companies – sometimes quite out of date – so beware! Go there and explore the free stuff; you’ll probably have to sign up but that’s free also.
That’s an awful lot of information to digest in one sitting, so I’ll come back to this subject at a later date. If you are desperate for more though, take a look at CityWire, Digital Look and Yahoo Finance – you’ll get a lot of the stats you’d get via ADVFN, but I always like to double and triple-check data from different sources to avoid disasters!
Good luck with your research if you are new to stockmarket investing. If you are not, and use other internet services for data and news, feel free to post a comment and share.
Related posts:
June 18th, 2009 at 4:49 am
Hey, great post, really well written. You should post more about this.