Where to Find Financial Info for Smart Online Investing

By Matt Krantz

When you are investing online, keeping up with what’s going on in the world of finance is key to financial success. To make informed decisions, you can monitor industry changes, company mergers, market momentum, and other investment-related details.

Watch for financial industry changes

Sweeping changes in an industry can have a tremendous influence on all the companies in it. If you’re interested in keeping up with industry trends, here are several online sources:

Industry associations: Typically, the easiest way to find such groups is by just entering the name of the industry into a search engine and see what that turns up.
Pay services: Hoovers.com provides full reports on a wide range of industries to subscribers. Standard & Poor’s also publishes industry surveys, but they can cost hundreds of dollars.
The U.S. government: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains a set of comprehensive industry data that’s free to the public.
Competitor information: Yahoo! Finance lists the main rivals of any company. Just enter the stock symbol of the company into the Enter Symbol(s) text field on the home page and click the Get Quotes button. Next, click the Competitors option under the Company heading.
Competitor filings: Using the Securities and Exchange Commission’s database, you can look up regulatory filings made by competitors.

Check up on changes within companies

Company mergers and changes in managements can cause stock prices to fluctuate. You can track management changes with the help of the following:

Press releases: Regulators require that such releases be put out the moment a company announces a significant personnel change.
AFL-CIO CEO Pay Database : This Web site provides data on the comings and goings of corporate executives, with a focus on how much the people at the top are getting paid.
The Corporate Library: This Web site tracks trends and data on executives.

It’s common for shares of a company being acquired to rise. That’s why investors love trying to predict takeover candidates. Some places track merger activity, including the following sites:

mergermarket: This site offers comprehensive merger-tracking information.
FactSet Mergerstat: This Web site provides some free data about the merger-and-acquisition market if you register.
Yahoo! Finance: Count on Yahoo! to summarize all its M&A news in one place.

Keep tabs on prices of raw materials

When the prices of these goods rise, that can be bad for the companies’ bottom lines. You can track the pricing of key commodities at the following sites:

Chicago Mercantile Exchange is home for the trading of many financial instruments including futures and options, making it a good place to see the prices of different foreign currencies. But it’s also home to many agricultural product tradings, including pork bellies and live cattle.
Bloomberg maintains a relatively easy-to-read and -understand table of most of the commodities you’re likely to care about.

Pay attention to financial market momentum

There’s always a handful of stocks that short-term speculators jump on. The following sites highlight these high-octane stocks:

BigCharts.com This site has a BigReports tab that gives you access to all the stocks with the biggest moves.
USATODAY.com: Click the Most Active Stocks header located near the top of the page to see which stocks investors are making heavy bets on.
Briefing.com: Here you can view daily market updates.

Take note of bond yields

Stocks can be sensitive to changes in the yield on debt sold by the U.S. government. Investors keep a close eye Treasury notes that mature in ten years or less and Treasury bills that mature in less than a year. The yield on Treasuries is important because it indicates what return investors can expect in exchange for taking no or low risk.

These sites help show the relationship between Treasury yields and stocks:

StockCharts.com: This Web site shows you, graphically, how the yields for short-term Treasuries compare with yields for long-term Treasuries.
Smart Money’s Living Yield Curve: This site not only plots the yield curve but also helps you understand it by explaining what it means if short-term rates are higher, lower, or equal to long-term rates.