The daily newspapers in large cities provide the closing prices of stocks for the previous business day along with several other useful bits of data about each stock. The newspapers in smaller cities often restrict their coverage to a small number of heavily traded stocks and/or those of local interest. To make sure that you get at least a reasonable minimum amount of useful information about stocks, stay with the big city dailies. National circulation dailies are a step up from your local paper. The most prominent of these are The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), The New York Times ( see Figure 4-1), and Investor’s Business Daily (IBD). USA Today also provides adequate coverage, but not with the depth of either the WSJ or the IBD. The best way to get a feel for the kind of information available in print is to occasionally buy a copy of Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) and spend at least an hour reading it in some detail. The quality and depth of information in its pages comes close to meeting all your information needs about stocks.

Televised daily stock updates

If you want to check the stock market in progress, you can tune into many larger cities’ televised stock market coverage or on cable programming (channels like CNN and CNBC) across the country. What you typically see is the stock market ticker for the NYSE and Nasdaq, and maybe for the AMEX, moving across the lower half of the screen. This ever-moving electronic version of the original stock market ticker tape, usually displays at short intervals various stock market averages, showing their daily gains and losses. Both the market averages and individual stock quotations run 20 minutes behind the actual stock trades they report.

The big problem with TV coverage of the stock market is that you can sit in front of the screen for an hour and never see stocks that you’re watching or investing in. Generally, TV coverage is good for a quick overview of market conditions. Look for shows that provide commentary on the stock market in general and breaking news that can affect the markets.

Online daily stock updates

Daily stock updates via the Internet are impressive. Many free Web sites display stock averages using a 20-minute delay. If you need even more instantaneous information, you can subscribe to special Web sites. A few of the many free and subscription Web sites are listed in CliffsNotes Resource Center at the end of this article. As a beginning investor, however, you rarely need this kind of up-to-the-minute information. When the time comes for you to place an order to buy or sell stock, your broker can give you the current market value of each stock. Web sites, besides providing an abundance of information on an ongoing basis, also offer an array of long-term data on individual firms. By clicking a few buttons, you can obtain recent news stories about a stock, charts showing fluctuations in the price of shares over varying time periods, some analytic reports, and brokers’ recommendations for the stock, among other things. A good place to start your Web search is to visit a gateway site that provides links to many other sites that provide information on stocks. One of the most popular gateway sites is www.yahoo.com.

Weekly and other reports on stocks

As you move from daily to weekly or longer reporting, you can expect to gain better balance and perspective. You also widen your view to more trend analysis. Among the more reputable and truly impressive sources of stock information is Barron’s, a weekly tabloid that contains everything you ever wanted to know about stocks and a few other things besides. Reading highly specialized papers like Barron’s or the IBD can lead to information overload. Exercise caution, and tackle your reading and research in digestible bites. Magazines such as Forbes (a biweekly publication) and Money (13 issues a year) focus less on the stock market but still have good, readable sections on investments, market trends, declining and emerging sectors, and so on. Money is an especially good magazine to read if you want to keep current on many aspects of personal finance, not merely on the stock market. Don’t subscribe to papers or magazines for the prime purpose of tracking the stock market. The subscription costs of a combination of only one paper and one magazine may exceed $200 a year. $200 could represent the annual return on a small investment portfolio. Go to your public library and save your money to buy stocks. When you move beyond newsstand offerings or the periodicals available at your discount articlestore, you jump into the real pricey subscription services like Value Line, and an endless array of specialized investor guides with typical annual subscription prices of $250 and up.

A good question is, where can you find suitable reading material to develop your sense of the market? My answer is in your public library, university library, or possibly in your corporate library. The company you work for may subscribe to a wide range of general business magazines. If these are circulated, don’t be shy about asking to be added to the list. Several business-oriented magazines are well worth reading, not for investment guidance but for developing your knowledge and awareness of trends in the world economy. Specifically, I recommend

- Business Week

- The Economist

- Fortune After you narrow your choice of stocks to 100 or fewer, you may want to consult the particularly serious guides like Value Line and the various periodic corporate analyses produced by Standard & Poor’s in your public or university library.