Understanding Stocks
You will need to a solid understanding of stocks, how they work and what they can do for you before you start investing. Investopedia can get you started with a basic introduction to stocks, types of stocks, how stocks trade and how to buy and trade them..
How to read a stock table/quote is a must for your investment knowledge.
The Investment FAQ site gives you more than you ever wanted to know about publicly traded stocks, including a basics of stocks.
Owning a Piece of the Company
What’s not to like about StockScouter, a site that’ll show you 50 top-rated stocks in a variety of categories? Some of the potential categories are industries and sectors.
QuoteLinks provides extensive listings of the companies in the detailed sectors.
Globeinvestor.com offers free and unlimited stock performance analysis for Canadian and U.S. markets, including stock screening and analysis tools and quotes.
ValueLine is a research company that collects data and analyzes performance of approximately 8,000 stocks, 13,000 mutual funds, 80,000 options and other securities. Subscribe to the online version or you may want to use the Library’s print copy located at these branches.
Daily Stock Prices
Weekly stock prices can be found at Barron’s Online.
Online financial news sources are a great way to keep up with your stocks. You might want to look at the following sources.
Cost-Basis Historical Stock Quotes
Figuring out your cost basis is all-important in determining a payment of capital gains taxes. A “BigHelp” is BigChart’s Historical Quote Utility, with stock and mutual fund quotes to 1970. Mergers and symbol changes disrupt the software, so contact the Library if you don’t find the quote you need.
Researching the value of Old Stock Certificates can be a challenge. Oftentimes the company is no longer traded on any exchange or may have merged with another company or changed names. Either way, you have a challenge before you.
Need to look up a ticker symbol? Try Yahoo! Finance Ticker Symbol Lookup.
Stock Indexes
A stock index groups representative stocks. To the degree that the index is successful, you can get an idea of how the market is doing without individually looking at every stock involved in that market. There are also bond indexes, industry indexes and other tools. Major market indexes from BigCharts and MarketWatch give you a good overall perspective.
Here are other stock market indexes.
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