In: Categories » Legal and finance » Stocks and mutual funds » Researching Mutual Funds and Stocks on the Internet
Mutual funds and stocks are the two most popular kinds of investments. Not coincidentally, numerous Web sites devoted to stocks and mutual funds can be found on the Internet. From these sites, you can check the latest price of a stock or mutual fund. You can also dig deeper to investigate or screen funds and stocks. In the following pages, I unscrew the inscrutable and show you where to go on the Internet to research mutual funds and stocks. To find out anything about a security on the Internet, you usually have to know its ticker symbol. A ticker symbol is an abbreviated company name that is used for tracking the performance of stocks, mutual funds, and bonds. You can usually find these symbols on the statements that you receive from brokers. If you don’t know a security’s ticker symbol, go to PC Quote (www.pcquote.com) and use the search engine there to find it (look for the Symbol Lookup hyperlink). No terminology is harder to understand than investment terminology. Do you know what a price/earnings (P/E) ratio is? A short sell? A put? A shotput? When you get stumped by an investment term, go to the glossary on the Yahoo! Finance Web site at finance.yahoo.com (look under Investing, and click the Glossary hyperlink under Education). The Yahoo! glossary is thorough, well written, and easy to search.
Researching a mutual fund on the Internet
Mutual funds are the favorite of investors who want to reap the benefits of investing without doing the legwork. A mutual fund is a company that buys stocks, bonds, precious metals, and other securities. Investors buy shares in the fund. If the fund managers know their stuff, the securities that the mutual fund owns increase in value and shares in the fund increase in value as well. Owning shares in a mutual fund is like owning shares of stock in a company. The difference is that a share of a mutual fund represents ownership in many different companies, as well as bonds and other securities. Many people don’t have the time, the expertise, or the inclination to research investment opportunities. For those people, mutual funds are ideal. You can rely on the fund managers’ investing know-how. You can buy shares in a mutual fund without speaking to a broker. By definition, a mutual fund is diversified because it owns shares of many different securities, so you don’t have to worry about diversification when you invest in a mutual fund. Before you start dabbling in mutual funds, you need to know how fees are levied, about the different kinds of funds, and about the risks. After you know that, you can start looking for a fund that meets your needs. Here are some Web sites where you can acquire the basics of mutual fund investing:
- Brill’s Mutual Funds Interactive: This is the all-purpose Web site for mutual fund investing. Here, you can read about mutual fund investing or search for funds by name and read about them. Address: www. fundsinteractive.com
- Mutual Fund Investor’s Center: This excellent Web site offers articles about mutual fund investing and ranks mutual funds in various ways. You can also search for mutual funds using different criteria. Address: www.mfea.com At last count, investors could choose from among 10,000 mutual funds. After you know what you want in a mutual fund, check out these Web sites, where you can search for a mutual fund that fits your investment strategy:
- MoneyCentral Investor: Enter keywords that describe what you want in a mutual fund. This site, also offers charts and performance analyses. Address: http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/home.asp
- Morningstar.com: The granddaddy of mutual fund analysis, this site offers reports on 7,000 mutual funds. You can get fund profiles, performance reports, financial statements, and news articles. (Click the Funds hyperlink.) Address: www.morningstar.com
- SmartMoney.com: This site offers a sophisticated search engine for pinpointing mutual funds. (Click the Funds hyperlink, and choose the Fund Finder hyperlink.) Address: www.smartmoney.com
Researching stocks on the Internet
The stock market, it has been said, is 85 percent psychology and 15 percent economics. And that’s only half the problem. The other half has to do with its hard-to-understand terminology and the numerous confusing ways to buy and sell stock. If you decide to forsake mutual funds and jump into the stock market on your own, more power to you. This article cannot possibly delve into everything you need to know to invest in the stock market, but I can point the way to a few Web sites that will help you on the road to riches. To get general-purpose information about stocks and stock markets, read stock tips, and discover stock-picking strategies, try these sites, which are good starting places:
- DailyStocks.com: This site provides links to market indexes, news sources, earnings figures, and newsletters. Address: www.dailystocks.com
- Wall Street Research Net: This site offers links to many financial resources, including brokers sites and government data. Address: stocks.internetnews.com When you want to hunker down and examine specific stocks, go to one of these sites (and be sure to read “Researching a Company Online,” earlier in this article, as well):
- MoneyCentral Investor: Look under Stocks, and click a hyperlink to find a stock quote, a chart, and analyst ratings. You can also screen stocks from this Web site. Address: investor.msn.com
- PCQuote.com: You can enter a ticker symbol and get stock quotes and charts. This site also presents market news, a “stock pick of the week,” and news articles about the markets. Address: www.pcquote.com
- Yahoo! Finance: Enter a ticker symbol and you can get a price chart, news articles about a stock, charts that track its performance, and links to the company’s SEC filings. You can also compare the performance of two different stocks against each other. Address: http://finance.yahoo.com Suppose that you want to target a stock but you don’t know what it is yet. In other words, you believe that the future is bright for a certain industry and you want to buy shares in companies in that industry. Or you want to buy a certain kind of stock stock in a foreign corporation, a small cap stock, or a blue-chip stock. Searching for stocks this way is called screening. The Reuter’s Investor Web site offers stock-screening databases you can search using different variables. (Click the Screening Center hyperlink.) Its address is www.investor.reuters.com.
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