Online Investing

In simpler times, the individual investor was stuck with hardcopy financial reports, a calculator, and tedious pencil pushing. Now, the Web has opened new avenues for data. Data subscriptions for comprehensive financial measures aren't free, bu...

Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires companies to report information in specific formats and at specific times, companies have some leeway in how they present their financial data—and they use that leeway to portray th...

After you decide which web site you prefer, use Excel web queries [Hack #7] to download data into a spreadsheet, refreshing the data whenever you want or grabbing data for another mutual fund. 3.3.1 Picking the Data Behind Door Number...

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are merely a set of guidelines that have evolved over the years to help accountants present financial information fairly and consistently from company to company. Truth be told, there's wiggle...

Finding a company with terrific growth and impeccable quality isn't enough—an exorbitant stock price puts your potential return into the financial toilet. Before you buy a stock, you should check the current price to see if it's a good value....

Those who study fundamental measures use historical prices to identify typical P/E ratios and dividend yields for stocks. Because fundamental investors buy for the long term, they want historical prices going back several years. Conversely, t...

The problem has always been data entry. Evaluating trends in financial measures requires at least three years of values, but who wants to manually transcribe three years of income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements into a spre...

Without any value-added manipulation [Hack #15] and [Hack #20], you have to judge for yourself whether data truly reflects a company's performance. Many web sites provide information suitable for your initial research and qualitative evaluati...

They create standardized data by assigning the reported values for income and expense items into the most appropriate standard categories. In addition to saving you time in calculating or categorizing reported numbers, standardized data definit...

Most of these sites offer delivery of headlines, company news, and industry trends—all useful, yet potentially more information than you want flooding your email box. Savvy investors want to know what's going on in the overall market, which ...

Like other aspects of investing, finding competitors isn't as easy as you might think. Most financial data providers and web sites categorize companies by sector and industry—but they typically define their own set of sectors and industries, ...

To understand whether a company is performing well or is down with the dogs, you must compare its financial measures with those of the overall industry to which it belongs. And, because most industries include companies of different sizes or ...

Instead of constantly interrupting your work, you can set up a group of portfolio alerts to notify you when something's going on with an individual stock or your entire portfolio. Several popular financial sites offer alerts for free, but you...