Matt Krantz

Protecting your retirement funds from disaster is a critical part of retirement planning. That’s where insurance comes in. You want to make sure your plan can withstand an unexpected event. Typically, health scares are the culprits in disrupting a plan, but home and auto accidents can be major expenses, too. Find your insurance declaration pages.

Make the most of fundamental analysis by getting familiar with financial statements and investment terms as well as knowing the best places to find fundamental data.Gathering the key documents for fundamental analysisCompanies create plenty of financial documents, so you need to know which ones are most important to fundamental analysis.

People who invest online are usually do-it-yourself investors. This means they're probably working without a tax consultant. But this can make it hard to understand how the money they earn while investing is taxed. That's where understanding capital gains taxes enters the picture.When you sell a stock held in a taxable account that has appreciated in value, you usually have taxes to pay.

Investment banking has a big impact on the world you live in, whether you have investments or not, and understanding what investment bankers do is important. Part of investment banking has to do with mergers and acquisitions, like why companies buy other companies and what’s in it for them. Even people who aren’t big on investing sometimes get the urge to be part of an initial public offering, more commonly known as an IPO.

Whether you’re new at investing online or a grizzled veteran, you can always find better ways to make the internet work for you and your portfolio. You’ll want to make sure you know a few basics before you get started. And some tricks of the trade will literally help you to trade. Finally, you’ll want to know the terminology of investing online to make sure you are talking the talk.

Ordinarily when you invest in stocks online, you hope to profit from a company's good times and rising profits. But there's a whole other class of investors, called shorts, who do just the opposite. They search the internet for news stories about diners getting food poisoning at a restaurant, for instance, and look for ways to cash in on the stock falling.

If you are investing online and have a taxable brokerage account, you need to understand how dividends work. Remember that a dividend is a distribution of a portion of a company's earnings to some of its shareholders. Dividends can be issued as cash payments, stock shares, or even other property.Dividends are paid based on how many shares you own or dividends per share (DPS).

As an online investor, you might be interested in finding out how many investors are shorting a stock you own, a statistic known as short interest. Some investors even incorporate tracking short interest in their strategies by seeking stocks that are heavily shorted, on the theory if the shorts are wrong, the stock might surge higher in a short squeeze.

Before you can analyze research reports for your online investments, you have to get your hands on them. Several techniques are available to do this online — some cost you money, but many don’t. The following list highlights a few resources of both the free and not-so-free types: Online brokers: You don’t have to be a client of the full-service brokerage firms like Credit Suisse or Goldman Sachs to get their analysts’ research reports.