Here are some resources I'm using for guidance in my investing:
Toward the end of 2004 I received a free report from The Motley Fool touting three stocks they'd recently featured in their Hidden Gems newsletter ("3 Hidden Gems Ready to Run"). Of those three stocks (IART, PRAA, and QSII), the first is now up 12%, the second is down 16%, and the last is up 60% in six months. Hmmmm. After thinking about it for a while, in May I finally signed up for Hidden Gems. So far I haven't liked all of their picks, but I haven't lost any money on any of the ones I bought either, and one so far has been a nice winner. (There'll be more on my holdings in the next post.) I've found the Motley Fool discussion boards useful.
I also got a free report recently from Fallen Angel Stocks (haven't bought their subscription service) and am on Russ Towne's Investment Thoughts and Chuck's Angels. I also watch Mad Money every day but usually TiVo-skip past the "Lightning Round." (Recaps of "Mad Money" can be found at Reasoned Investing).
I'm still finding new sites for research, but so far I like MarketWatch and MSN MoneyCentral. MoneyCentral in particular has a StockScouter rating, which I find useful to double-check my assessment of a company's financials. If I'm looking at getting into a stock, I will sometimes look at American Bulls, a candlestick analysis site. I'm looking for other good technical analysis sites. Trying to time the market is considered largely futile, I realize, but I haven't quite decided it's totally useless. American Bulls's system in particular seems to do a pretty good job predicting the trends of certain stocks, though not all of them. If they tell me to wait on a purchase, and they've been right often in the past, I'll probably wait a few days and see.
Of course my broker, Scottrade, also has a lot of good stuff, like analyst reports and S&P STARS ratings, and I use all that, but I can't link to it here.
Oh, and BoardCentral is a site I found recently that makes it easy to get an overview of what various stock discussion boards are saying about a stock.
Posted by kindall at June 29, 2005 01:05 PM