How to Turn Your PC into an Online Trading Station

By Matt Krantz from Investing Online For Dummies, 8th Edition

3 of 6 in Series: The Essentials of Investing Online

If you are investing online, you need ways to access the kind of financial information that will help you make smart choices with your investments. You can turn your computer into a market-monitoring station by bookmarking or creating favorites to key sites with data you need.

Most Internet browsers have this capability, and they all work slightly differently. But just so you have an idea, if you’re using Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, you can create favorites by doing the following:

Navigate to the Web site you’re interested in saving.
Click the Favorites icon (the one with the little gold star next to the word Favorites) in the upper-left corner of the screen.

A menu opens.
Click the Add to Favorites button (the little gold star with the plus sign).

An Add a Favorite dialog box opens.
Enter a name for your favorite into the dialog box’s Name field.

Most sites do this for you, but you may want give the site a name you can remember a bit better.
In the Create In space, choose the Favorite folder you want to put the favorite into.

If you want to put this favorite in a separate folder, you can create a folder by clicking the New Folder button. If you’re not sure, just use the default Favorite folder.
Click the Add button.

What sites are worth creating as favorites? Most professional trading workstations are set up so that they can take on five distinct tasks:

Tracking the market’s every move
Monitoring news that has the potential to affect stock prices
Checking in on Wall Street chatter
Accessing company financial statements and regulatory filings
Executing trades

Create separate favorite folders for all five functions and then fill them with the sites you want to follow. Nearly any site can give you stock quotes for the day, including the financial news Web sites.