Chapter 2

Getting Your Device Ready for Online Investing

IN THIS CHAPTER

Turning your PC or mobile device into an online investing station

Pinpointing online resources that can make you a more informed investor

Securing your computer from online financial crooks

Practicing your techniques with online tutorials and simulations

You live in a do-it-yourself world. You’re expected to fill your own gas tank at the service station, refill your own soda at the fast-food restaurant, and book your own airline tickets. It’s the same story with investing. If you want to reach your financial goals and retire comfortably, it’s up to you to make it happen. The age of employers looking after their workers’ futures with pensions is vanishing and being replaced with do-it-yourself retirement plans like 401(k)s.

If you ask for help, you’re almost always pointed to the Internet and told to look it up or do your own research. That sounds reasonable, except that the Internet is a massive collection of web pages, and you can find dozens if not hundreds of sources for investing advice, much of which is conflicting or, worse, wrong. No wonder many investors throw their hands up in utter frustration.

That’s where this chapter comes in. In Book 6, Chapter 1 , we fill you in on what it takes to prepare yourself to be an online investor. Here in Book 6, Chapter 2 , it’s time to prepare your computer, smartphone, or tablet for online investing and make it a tool that quickly provides you with the answers you need. This chapter helps you tweak your device until it’s like your personal investing workstation. It’ll feel as comfortable to you as an old leather chair. And by using mostly free online resources, you’ll save yourself some money in the process.

We escort you through the morass of financial websites and apps and show you which ones you need to know. You find out what types of investing information are available online and how to access what you need from your computer or other device. You also find out how to use online simulation sites that let you take a dry run investing with fake money to make sure you know what you’re doing before using real money.

Turning Your Device into a Trading Station

When you think of a stock trading floor, you probably picture a room full of traders wearing brightly colored jackets, throwing papers around, and yelling out market orders. Some of that drama still exists on the New York Stock Exchange floor and in the Chicago futures markets, but it’s largely a throwback from the old days.

Today, trading floors look more like insurance offices. They have rows of desks with computers not unlike the one that’s probably sitting on your desk. Professional traders do have an advantage: Many have high-end trading systems and software that cost thousands of dollars a month. That might be beyond your price range, but you might be amazed at how much market information you can get, for free or for little money, if you know where to go.

Mobile devices have become go-to devices for checking mail, keeping track of appointments, and — yes — wasting time. There’s no question when you’re looking for a quick check on your portfolio or to see how stocks are doing, your smartphone is your trusty mobile companion. Because of the increased popularity of mobile devices, they are included in this section. But the emphasis, still, is on good ol’ fashioned computers. Why? Online brokers say that about 85 percent of trading still happens on PCs. The bigger screen, dedicated keyboard, and better tools still make the PC the tool of choice when it comes to investing.

Using favorites to put data at your fingertips

The easiest way to turn your computer into a market-monitoring station is by bookmarking or creating favorites to key sites with data you need. Favorites (also sometimes called bookmarks) are links in your Internet browser that let you quickly reach a web page when you need it, without typing a long website address. Most Internet browsers have this capability, and they all work slightly differently. But just so you have an idea, if you’re using Microsoft’s Edge browser in Windows 10, you can create favorites by doing the following:

1. Navigate to the website you’re interested in saving.

2. Click the Favorites icon (the one with the star, which you can see in Figure 2-1 ) in the upper-right corner of the screen.

   A menu opens.

3. Give the favorite a name.

   Choose a name that will quickly identify the site for you.

4. 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 Create New Folder option. If you’re not sure, just use the default Favorite folder.

5. Click the Add button.

Source: NYE.com

FIGURE 2-1: Setting financial websites as favorites is a matter of just clicking a few buttons.

If you want to access that address again, click the “Hub” icon (the icon that looks like three lines) and scroll down until you see the title of the page you’re interested in.

Putting key mobile apps a touch away

Investors are increasingly looking to their smartphones and tablets as a way to keep up with the markets, especially when they’re away from the office. The computer is still the ideal place to do most of your work — given the spacious size of the screen, increased processing power, and greater storage. But some investors like the simplicity of the mobile device or use it to keep an eye on their money at all times.

All the major mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows 10) provide an app store. That’s where you go to download the apps you’ll want to track your money. You probably already know how to do this, but for more on this, consult iPhone For Dummies , Android Phones For Dummies , or Windows 10 For Dummies, all published by Wiley.

To make it easier to find the apps you’re looking for, consider creating an app folder called “Investing” or “Money” and putting all your finance-related apps in there. You’ll save yourself lots of wasted time scrolling through menus. In Windows 10 Mobile, do this by pressing down on an app on the Start screen and dragging it on top of an icon of a related app. A folder will be created to organize them.

Also, some tablets and smartphones allow you to make a button that quickly launches a favorite website. In Windows 10 Mobile, for example, launch the Edge browser and navigate to a website. Touch the three dots in the lower right-hand corner and choose “Pin to start.” The website now appears as an app on the Start page.

Compiling a list of must-watch sites

So you know how to create favorites and organize your mobile apps. But what sites are worth creating as favorites? Our suggestion is to take a page from the professionals and try to replicate the data they’re most interested in. Most professional trading workstations are set up so 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

Tracking the Market’s Every Move

You’re probably hoping to study the market and find ways to score big and fast. Hey, everyone wants to get rich quick. Just remember that making money by darting in and out of stocks is extremely tough to do, and most investors, online or not, will be better off forming a long-term investment strategy and sticking with it. The difference between long-term investing (the in-it-for-the-long-haul approach, called passive investing) and short-term trading (the darting-in-and-out way of doing things, called active investing) is discussed in Book 6, Chapter 1 , where we also give you the tools necessary for figuring out how to decide which approach is best for you.

No matter what kind of investor you plan to be, watching real-time stock movements is fascinating. Watching rapid price moves with stock prices dancing around and flashing on the computer screen is a guilty pleasure and a source of entertainment for some investors.

You can find a great deal of overlap among online investing resources. Many of the following sites and apps do more than what we highlight here. Explore the different sites and see whether certain ones suit you best.

There’s no shortage of places where you can get stock quotes and see the value of popular market indexes such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard & Poor’s 500 index, and NASDAQ composite index. That’s why you can afford to demand more from websites if they’re going to earn a position as one of your favorites. The next section has a quick list that can help you get started creating general-purpose online investing favorites or decide which apps are worthy of occupying space on your phone. The sites listed here make the cut because they not only provide stock quotes but also go a step further by being the best at a certain aspect of tracking the market.

Getting price quotes on markets and stocks

Nearly any site or finance app can give you stock quotes for the day, including the financial news websites discussed later in this chapter. But a few sites deserve special mention because they make it easy to get stock quotes for days in the past and even download them to your computer for further analysis. And because they deserve special mention, they’re getting it right here:

• MSN Money ( http://money.msn.com ) is handy for looking up prices of stocks and market indexes because it’s fast and gives you everything you need, ranging from the stock’s closing price to how much trading activity there was when dividends (cash payments) were paid to investors. One nifty trick of MSN Money is that it has a companion app for Windows 10, iOS, and Android that remembers which stocks you’re most interested in. You can create this list by clicking the My Watchlist tab on the website or on the Watchlist menu in the app.
• Yahoo! Finance ( http://finance.yahoo.com ) lets you download historical data, a feature that’s getting surprisingly scarce in non-professional tools. Enter a stock symbol and click the Look Up button. Then, in the left column, click the Historical Prices link. You’ll see a page with a table of dates and the stock’s prices on those dates. In the Set Date Range area near the top, you can pick a range of dates you’d like stock prices for. Below the table (scroll down a bit) is a link to Download to Spreadsheet. Yahoo! Finance also offers an app for several smartphones, making it a convenient choice.
• Google Finance ( www.google.com/finance ) does a solid job of summarizing in one page many of the basics you need to know about a stock. You’ll find not only the stock price but also a list of competitors, a summary of how Wall Street experts feel about the stock, and basic financial information. Google Finance also offers free real-time stock prices.
• FreeStockCharts.com ( www.freestockcharts.com ) gives you great flexibility in creating stock charts, allowing you to add all sorts of different indicators that show you how a stock is doing. And unlike most other stock sites, FreeStockCharts lets you download the end-of-year values of investments. End-of-year data is helpful when you want to see how an investment has performed over the long haul.

Slicing and dicing the markets

Although quite a few market indexes exist, all online investors need to be familiar with some major market benchmarks. These are the ones so commonly discussed that they need to be part of your investor vocabulary. Table 2-1 presents them in all their market-dominating glory.

TABLE 2-1 Key Market Indexes

Index Name	What It Measures
Dow Jones Industrial Average	Thirty big, industrial companies. When investors hear about “the market,” more often than not they think of the Dow.
Standard & Poor’s 500 index	Big companies, including 500 of the nation’s most well-known stocks. Moves very similarly to the Dow, even though it includes more stocks.
NASDAQ Composite index	Stocks that trade on the NASDAQ stock market. It tends to closely track technology stocks.
Wilshire 5000 Total Market index	The entire stock market. Contains all significant stocks from the largest to the smallest.
Russell 2000 index	Small-company stocks. Tends to be more volatile than indexes that track large companies — the S&P 500, for example.

Nearly all financial websites let you track all the indexes listed in the table. Yahoo! Finance, though, makes it easy to monitor how different slices of the markets are doing, such as foreign stocks, specific industry sectors, and bonds. The Yahoo! Finance website offers a couple of different ways for you to dig beyond the market indexes, as the following list makes clear:

• Get a quick read on all U.S. market indexes. To see how most of the key U.S. market indexes are doing, start at Yahoo! Finance’s main page at http://finance.yahoo.com . Click the Stocks link that opens if you hover your cursor over the Market Data option at the left side of the page. You can then see many market indexes by clicking the different tabs, such as S&P, Dow Jones, and Other US Indices. The Other US Indices heading appears to the right of where you see the NYSE tab below the US & World Indices heading.
• Get a rundown of how foreign stocks are doing. Click the Stocks link that magically appears when you hover your cursor over the Market Data option on the left-hand side. Change the drop-down option on the right side, set to U.S. by default, to a different region, say “Europe.” The drop-down box is located pretty far to the right of the page — just to the left of where you’ll probably see an advertisement. A new page opens that lets you monitor just about any foreign market you’d care to track.
• Get a summary of industry performances. The Yahoo! Finance page allows you to track how different industries are doing, if you know where to look. The easiest way is through this link: http://biz.yahoo.com/p/ . Set it as a favorite, or you’ll never find it again.

Don’t confuse stocks with indexes. Stocks are shares in individual companies, such as General Electric or Exxon Mobil. The prices of stocks reflect how much you would have to pay for a share of the stock. Indexes, on the other hand, are mathematical formulas that tell you how much a collection of stocks has changed in value. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which contains 30 stocks, hits 16,000, that doesn’t mean you can buy it for $16,000. It’s just a number that represents relative value.

Your crystal ball: Predicting how the day will begin

Some investors like to get a jump-start on the trading day by watching the futures market. The futures market is an auction for future contracts, which are financial obligations that allow their buyers and sellers to lock in prices for commodities and other assets in the future. The futures market allows investors to bet how much certain assets will be worth minutes, day, weeks, or years from today.

You can see what the futures market is saying about stocks. Bloomberg, a major financial news and data company, gives investors a sneak peek on how stocks could open the next trading day. On its Futures page ( www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks/futures ), you can see how traders who apparently don’t have anything better to do are betting after the stock market is closed and how major market indexes around the world will open. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like surprises, it’s an easy way to see how investors are behaving even when the market centers are closed.

Getting company descriptions

Professional investors like to bone up on what a company does, who’s in charge, and how profitable it is without poring through dozens of industry reports. You can get the same kind of quick snapshot information with online company descriptions. All the main investing sites we discuss have sections that describe the business a company is in. Here are a few more sites worth checking out:

• Reuters ( www.reuters.com/finance/stocks ): This site offers in-depth profiles on companies. Just enter the name of the company you want to know about, click the Search button, and click the name of the company. The page that opens shows you all the vital information about the company, ranging from the names of its management team (if you click the People tab) to a description of what it does. You can also see a comprehensive rundown of company information on the right side of the page, including data on the company’s competitors and earnings.
• Yahoo! Finance ( http://finance.yahoo.com ): This site offers a comprehensive summary of a company’s information. From the site’s main page, enter the stock’s symbol in the Quote Lookup box located on the left-hand side of the screen and click the Go button. Click the Profile link on the left-hand side of the page. If you click the Competitors link on the left-hand side of the page, Yahoo! Finance identifies other companies in the industry.

Tracking bonds and U.S. Treasuries

A bond is an IOU issued by a government, a company, or another borrower. An owner of a bond is entitled to receive the borrowed funds when they’re paid back by a certain time in the future at a predetermined interest rate. Even if you have no interest in investing in bonds, you still should know what rates are doing. After all, if you could invest in bonds issued by the federal government that come due in 30 years — bonds known as Treasury bonds — and get 9 percent annual returns guaranteed, wouldn’t you be a bit less enthusiastic about a risky stock that you think will return only 10 percent? The U.S. government sells other Treasuries, including Treasury bills (T-bills), that generally come due in a year or less and Treasury notes (T-notes) that come due in longer than a year but in ten years or less. A few sites to start you out with include the following:

• Bloomberg ( www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds ) makes tracking bonds very easy. Bloomberg lets you, at a glance, see the yields on just about any major bond or Treasury you can imagine.

• Federal Reserve Bank ( www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/openmarket.htm ) is the online presence for the Fed, as it’s affectionately called. The Fed is in charge of strongly influencing short-term interest rates, including the federal funds rate. That’s typically the rate banks lend money stored at the Fed to other banks overnight. No, you can’t borrow at that rate, but it’s very important to watch this interest rate because it affects long-term interest rates, which you can borrow at. You can see what the federal funds rate has been at the Fed’s site, as shown in Figure 2-2 . Traders buy and sell long-term Treasuries and set interest rates based in large part on where short-term rates are or where they’re expected to be.

Source: federalreserve.gov

FIGURE 2-2: The Fed’s website makes it easy to track important interest rates.

Monitoring Market-Moving News

Ever see a biotech stock skyrocket after the company announces a breakthrough treatment? Tech stocks routinely jump in price on the debut of popular new gadgets or software. That’s the power of news — often called market-moving news . Markets are constantly taking in and digesting all sorts of developments and changes, both good and bad. And to stay on top of these developments, you’ll want to set a few leading financial news sites as favorites. The following sections explore the different kinds of financial news sites in greater detail.

Financial websites

Many of the financial sites mentioned earlier in the chapter are also great places to get market-moving news. Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money pick up stories written by wire services on the markets and on individual stocks, making them helpful resources. Bloomberg covers just about every type of traditional investment you can imagine, thanks to its network of reporters. Others include the following:

• Google News ( http://news.google.com ) has a business section that pulls in important financial stories in one place. Its best feature is the capability to search for news based on very precise criteria, including keywords, the date the story appeared, or the geographic location of the news.
• Bing News ( www.bing.com/news ) also searches the Internet for business stories (if you click the Business tab). You can also set business as an “Interest” by clicking “Manage how you track this Interest” to get business news featured on the Bing mobile app.
• Briefing.com ( www.briefing.com ) is similar to the kind of data services that professional investors use to follow news. See Figure 2-3 . In fact, most of Briefing.com’s service is for large traders and investors who pay for its platinum or trader services. Still, the site makes some of its content available, for free, to regular investors. You can find running commentary on market-moving news and events. Briefing.com’s stock market update is a great way to find out what’s behind the market’s day-to-day swings so you can see how any random event can have a big effect on stocks.
• MarketWatch ( www.marketwatch.com ) focuses on business stories that are clickable. The site attempts to separate itself from the competition by providing columns from various financial writers who opine about everything from companies’ accounting practices to technology. MarketWatch has a feature that lets you instruct it to email you articles of interest. You can also have it send you an email if a stock moves by a certain amount.
• BigCharts.com ( www.bigcharts.com ) is a service of MarketWatch that’s dedicated to serving up graphical information about the markets. The best aspect of the site is the set of BigReports lists that show you, at a glance, what the biggest movers on Wall Street were that day in terms of price or percentage price change.
• Motley Fool ( www.fool.com ) has a little something for everyone. You find content for the active trader, including stock tips galore, as well as tricks and techniques on how to deeply analyze companies’ financial statements. Passive investors, though, will appreciate the more general personal finance stories.
• Reuters ( www.reuters.com ) makes high-end systems used by many professional traders. And it has put many of the same tools into your hands. If you enter a ticker symbol in the Search box at the upper-right corner of the page and then click the company’s name, you can see advanced statistics about the stock, including things like dividend yields and key ratios.

Source: Briefing.com

FIGURE 2-3: Briefing.com provides many free resources to online investors.

Many financial websites and news stories use the terms bullish and bearish. When investors are bullish, they think the stock market is going to go up. When investors are bearish, they think stocks will go down.

DO YOU SPEAK TICKER SYMBOL?

Nearly every financial website is centered on the ticker symbol. These are the one-, two-, three-, four-, or five-letter abbreviations used to symbolize stocks or investments. Originally, ticker symbols were used so brokers could quickly read a ticker tape, a scrolling printout of stocks and prices. But the symbol has taken on a new use in the online era, so much so that most sites have an empty text box at the top where you enter the symbol first, click a button, and then get sent to another part of the site where you’re handed all the information pertaining to that stock on a silver platter.

Ticker symbols have become so popular that investors sometimes use them instead of a company’s name. And sometimes companies have fun with their symbols to make them more memorable. In 2006, for instance, motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson changed its symbol from the boring HDI to the more exciting HOG, the nickname for its rumbling bikes. Other fun ticker symbols include the following:

Ticker	Company
CAKE	Cheesecake Factory
HOT	Starwood Hotels
LUV	Southwest Airlines
WOOF	VCA Antech (a veterinary company)
ZEUS	Olympic Steel (Get it? The Greek god)
EAT	Brinker (a restaurant company)
SAM	Boston Beer

Traditional financial news sites

Many of the financial news providers you might already be familiar with from newspapers, magazines, and TV also provide data that’s useful to investors online, including the following:

• USA TODAY ’s Money section ( http://money.usatoday.com ) delivers the business news that affects you. (Disclosure: Matt Krantz, one of the coauthors of this book, is a full-time reporter at USA TODAY. ) You can find not only the breaking news stories from wire services but also enterprise stories you won’t find anywhere else on beats ranging from markets to business travel and cars. You can find extensive personal finance and mutual fund coverage. The site also gives readers a quick summary of key statistics about stocks. Figure 2-4 shows the summary page for General Electric.
• The Wall Street Journal Online ( www.wsj.com ) is a source of breaking financial news. You might be familiar with the print edition of The Wall Street Journal; this is the online version. This site charges for much of its content.
• Financial Times ( www.ft.com ) is a London-based business publication, so it provides a unique spin on business events here. It’s a good source of merger announcements.
• CNBC ( www.cnbc.com ) routinely updates its website, and now the financial TV channel’s online presence offers many of the same things as other financial news sites. What makes it unique is that it lets you view segments that aired on CNBC that you might have missed. The segments are streamed to your browser, saving you the trouble of being in front of your TV.
• CNN Money ( http://money.cnn.com ) has a good mix of breaking financial news and general personal financial help. It contains specialized information on markets, technology, jobs, personal finance, and real estate.
• Investor’s Business Daily ( www.investors.com ) is largely geared for active investors and allows subscribers to read the next day’s paper early. The site also has tools to help you find stocks that are outperforming the rest of the stock market.
• Barron’s ( www.barrons.com ) is a weekly publication written mainly for more advanced investors. Most of the features are available only to subscribers. Subscribers to The Wall Street Journal ’s website get a price break on Barron’s online site because both are owned by Dow Jones.

Source: USAToday.com

FIGURE 2-4: USATODAY.com’s page gives investors a quick look at stocks.

Checking In on Wall Street Chatter

Rumor and innuendo are key parts to traders’ lives. Because stock prices are highly sensitive in the short run to what other traders and investors are saying about a stock, traders make it their business to follow any murmur. As an individual investor, you’re somewhat at a disadvantage in this department because you don’t have portfolio managers of giant mutual funds calling you and telling you what they’re hearing. But you can use what’s become known as social networking or social investing, which are online tools that allow investors to swap information with each other. Chat rooms were an early form of social investing, but the area has evolved to include blogs and podcasts if you’re interested in the scuttlebutt. Twitter has also become a tool for investors. Several online brokers’ sites also let users communicate with each other.

If you’re a passive investor, you probably couldn’t care less about rumors. Even so, you can take advantage of blogs and chat rooms that are dedicated to index investing. Just remember that these are casual and sometimes unreliable ways to keep up with the market chatter on various topics.

BEWARE OF RUMORS

Investors can’t help themselves when it comes to rumors. And sometimes certain blogs and podcasts only feed your innate desire to get the inside scoop on an investment that’s about to explode in value. Investment rumors are kind of like celebrity gossip: You’re probably better off ignoring them, but sometimes it’s impossible to resist. Just remember that making investment decisions based on rumors is usually a very bad idea.

Even giant stocks can get swept up in rumors and result in pain for gullible investors. Here’s an example: On May 17, 2012, Facebook, the world’s largest social networking company, sold its stock to public investors for the first time for $38 a share. The website is so popular with consumers that quickly the rumor mill went into overdrive. Many people with little to no experience with investing thought they had to jump into the initial public offering of Facebook since it was bound to soar on its first day. But these rumors proved to be far wrong. Shares of Facebook barely moved on their first day of trading and the stock lost 22 percent of its value from the offering price by the end of May. Shares have since performed very well, but investors who bought on the rumor had to endure a long period of pain, which might not be what they expected. That’s one rumor investors would have been better off ignoring.

Checking in with blogs

Thanks to low-cost computers, mobile devices, and Internet connections, just about anyone with an opinion and a keyboard or smartphone can profess his or her view of investments to the world. Some of these opinions are worth listening to, but many are not. One popular vehicle for sharing opinions is a blog (short for web log ), which is a sort of an online journal. Blogs can vary greatly in quality. Some are the modern-day equivalent of a crazy person on the street corner yelling at anyone who walks by, whereas other blogs are thoughtful and well-informed. It’s buyer beware with blogs, and you have to decide whether the person is worth listening to. Ask yourself what the blogger’s track record is and how the blogger makes money.

With so many blogs out there, sometimes the toughest part can be finding the ones that are worthwhile. Here are several ways you can locate them:

• General search engines: All the leading search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, let you search much of the blogging world. If it’s a major blog, you’re likely to find it just by searching this way: Enter the words investing blog in Bing.com, for example, and you can find general-interest finance blogs. Yahoo! Finance ( http://finance.yahoo.com ) also has a way to pull in relevant posts from financial blogs that makes searching easier. Just enter a stock symbol, and when the page for that particular stock appears, click the Market Pulse link under the News & Info heading on the left side of the page. (We discuss how to turn search engines into your investment tools later in this chapter.) Enter a stock symbol into Google Finance ( www.google.com/finance ) and click News, and you can find blog posts mentioning the stock.
• Community sites: Facebook ( www.facebook.com ) is best known as an online place for friends to keep tabs on each other and for families to share photos with each other. But some financial blogs are also lurking there. To find them, just log on to the site and search for the words financial, money, investing, and stocks.
• Mainstream media: Almost all the news sites have some of their writers penning blogs as well. Many blogs are available from the mainstream media outlet’s website or via Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which we explain in the later section “Getting your computer to do the work: RSS feeds .”

Getting in tune with podcasts

Next time you see someone listening to a smartphone with earphone cords dangling from his ears, don’t assume he’s rocking out. He might be researching stocks or learning about investing. A podcast is an audio broadcast that’s transferred electronically over the Internet to your computer, smartphone, or MP3 player — they’re like radio shows for the Internet age. Like blogs, podcasts are often done by amateurs, so the same need for caution applies. But also like blogs, some podcasts are done by major media.

Finding podcasts

It’s easy to find a radio or TV station: Just turn on the radio and start flipping. But finding podcasts takes a little more doing. It’s not difficult, though, if you try these different methods:

• Podcast search engines: Most of the major online search companies have special online tools to help you pinpoint podcasts. You can also use a search engine dedicated to podcasts, such as PodcastDirectory.com ( www.podcastdirectory.com ), which lets you enter search terms and then get a giant list of podcasts that meet your requirements. Stitcher Radio ( www.stitcher.com ) is another popular podcast search site.
• Audio software: Apple’s iTunes software ( www.apple.com/itunes ), for instance, has an excellent podcast search function as part of its iTunes Store, which you can access from the Store link. Click the Podcasts link and then click Business, and you can scroll through hundreds of available podcasts, including some from mainstream outlets like Bloomberg Businessweek, CNBC, and National Public Radio. There are mobile apps with similar functionality. The Podcasts app for Windows Mobile allows you to type keywords and find podcasts that match.

Listening to podcasts

You can listen to most podcasts in three ways:

• Listen on the site. You can listen to most podcasts by clicking a link, usually labeled Listen, directly on the site.
• Download. Some podcasts let you click a Download button or, with Windows PCs, you can often also right-click the Listen link and download the podcasts.
• Subscribe. You can install special software that searches your favorite podcasts and automatically downloads new episodes when they’re available. An option for both Windows and Mac users is downloading and installing Apple’s iTunes software ( www.apple.com/itunes ). iTunes handles all aspects of listening to podcasts, ranging from finding podcasts to subscribing to them so they’re automatically downloaded to your computer.

Taming Twitter

Social media like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly the go-to places to keep on top of real-time business news from major outlets. Here’s the quick-and-dirty of what you need to get set up: Download TweetDeck ( tweetdeck.twitter.com ). The app, which is available for computer and mobile devices, allows you to search for news outlets, bloggers, or other sources of market news and follow them. Once you follow these outlets, TweetDeck will monitor Twitter and present you with all the news being tweeted out so you won’t miss a thing. TweetDeck is the easiest way we’ve found to keep up with the action on Twitter. And it’s free; you just need to sign up for Twitter.

Getting your computer to do the work: RSS feeds

If you want to read investing news, read blogs, or listen to podcasts, you can use the Favorites feature of your web browser to bookmark a bunch of the sites mentioned in this chapter and then methodically make your way down your favorites list at your leisure. But some online investors don’t have time for that, so many still rely on technology called RSS feeds , short for Rich Site Summary and often called Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are kind of like notices sent out by some blogs, podcasts, and news sites to let the world know that something new is available. If you use RSS feeds, you subscribe to a news website, blog, or podcast, and the news comes to you.

Yes, Twitter is quickly replacing RSS as a source of real-time news, but RSS is still worth being aware of because it’s still widely available. Many companies still use RSS to notify the public they’ve released new information.

It’s easy to get started. First you need to have a way to receive the RSS feeds. You have three main ways to do this:

• Use your web browser. If you’re like us, you like to install as little software on your computer as you can get away with, and you don’t like signing up for all kinds of web services. If that describes you, you might consider checking to see whether your Internet browser supports RSS.
• Install an RSS reader. An RSS reader lets you tell the computer what websites you’d like to subscribe to. The RSS reader software then pulls the feeds that contain articles from all the different news sites you’ve chosen and presents them in one page. Because RSS readers are software, the RSS articles the reader downloads are stored on your hard drive so you can read them later, even if you’re not connected to the Internet. Given the rise of social media, many companies have stopped making RSS reader software. FeedDemon ( http://FeedDemon.com ) is probably your best choice — it still works — but is no longer being supported with updates. There are other options such as RSS Reader Live (available in the Windows 10 store), which runs on computers and tablets.
• Subscribe to a web-based RSS aggregator. An aggregator creates a tailor-made page with all the RSS feeds you’ve requested. You can think of an aggregator as a web-based RSS reader. So, instead of logging on to individual sites or downloading reader software, you log on to this one site that has dutifully pulled in all the RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to. Digg Reader ( digg.com/reader ) is a dedicated RSS aggregator. There’s a catch to many of these RSS aggregators: You must be connected to the Internet to read your RSS feeds.

After you get your RSS software, web-based reader, or browser set up, it’s easy to start getting RSS feeds. Just navigate to your favorite investing sites and look for links that say “RSS Feed” or “XML” and click them. Your reader, aggregator, or browser then gives you instructions on how to subscribe.

Keeping Tabs on the Regulators

Professional traders’ computers also keep close tabs on regulatory filings from companies. Regulatory filings are often the best, if not the only, data that investors get directly from a company. If companies make any significant announcements, they’re required to notify the appropriate government watchdogs, which in most cases is the Securities and Exchange Commission.

You can get regulatory filings online through

• The company’s website: Most provide a section with their complete reports.
• Financial sites and portals: Most of the sites we list earlier in the chapter provide links to the documents.
• Aggregation sites: These sites parse the filings from companies and make them easy to find and download for free. SEC Info ( www.secinfo.com ) sorts all the regulatory filings into easy-to-understand categories. Last10K.com ( www.last10k.com ) allows you to find quickly companies’ financial reports. You also can find fee-based services, such as Morningstar Document Research ( http://documentresearch.morningstar.com ). It and other pay services go a step further and might even send you an email the second a company files a report. Depending on your needs, those might be worth your money.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission: For most investors, the free SEC site ( www.sec.gov ) has as much info as any sane person would ever want, and it isn’t too difficult to navigate.

In fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission site is so easy to navigate that we’re going to show you how to do it right now. To find company regulatory filings, follow these steps:

1. Point your web browser to www.sec.gov .

   The SEC site makes an appearance.

2. Hover your mouse over the Filings tab and choose the Company Filings Search link.

   The Search the EDGAR Database page appears.

3. Enter the company’s name or ticker symbol into the appropriate box, and then click the Search button.

   You see a giant list of company filings in the order they were filed, as shown in Figure 2-5 .

   It’s an intimidating list that’s hardly user-friendly because the forms are distinguished only by their form, which is regulatory code for the types of information the documents contain. Table 2-2 gives you the skinny on what the various form codes mean. We don’t include all the form codes because there are so many. Several of the form codes are for documents you don’t need to worry about or for data you can get more easily elsewhere, including when officers of the company sell stock.

Source: SEC.gov

FIGURE 2-5: The SEC website provides regulatory filings to investors at no cost.

TABLE 2-2 SEC Forms You Can Use

Form Code	What It Contains
8-K	A news flash from the company. 8-Ks can contain just about anything that’s considered “material” or important to investors, ranging from the resignation of a top official to news of the win of a new customer.
10-Q	The company’s quarterly report. This form displays all the information a company is required to provide to investors each quarter. Here you can find the key financial statements, such as the income statement and balance sheet, which are covered in more detail in Book 7 .
10-K	The company’s year-end report. This is one of the most important documents a company creates. It gives you a summary of everything that happened during the year, including comments from management and financial statements that have been checked, or audited, by the company’s accounting firm.
DEF 14 and DEF 14A	The company’s proxy statement — a document that describes company matters to be discussed and voted on by shareholders at the annual meeting. Contains all the important company information that’s subject to shareholder approval and scrutiny. Most proxies contain everything that’s up for a vote at the shareholder meeting, including board members up for election, pay packages and other perks, and pending lawsuits. If you’re going to read any document, make it this one.

Companies don’t make their regulatory filings easy to read. You have to be part lawyer, part investor, and part investment banker to read between the lines in these often-cryptic statements. Online resources can help, including

• Footnoted.org ( www.footnoted.com ), a business blog that studies proxies and pinpoints things that smell fishy.
• The Analyst’s Accounting Observer ( www.accountingobserver.com ) is published by well-known accounting watchdog Jack Ciesielski, who is trained to find suspicious things in company filings.
• Major mainstream media also pick the proxy statements apart and find things that stand out. USA TODAY, for example, routinely analyzes proxy statements, looking for details about CEO compensation.

Executing Trades

With all this talk about researching and analyzing, don’t forget what job number one is: buying or selling investments. You need to either log on to the website of your broker or download special software from your brokers that can handle the trades. We go over the dizzying number of choices you have for online brokers in Book 6, Chapter 3 .

Searching the Internet High and Low

If you can’t find what you’re looking for by using the tips and techniques in the preceding sections, it might be time to hit the main web search engines. Some of the most popular search engines include

• Google ( www.google.com ): Definitely the biggest and most popular web search engine, so much so that investors often say they’ll google a stock. Because the site is so clean and Zen-like, it has the benefit of being very easy to use.
• Bing ( www.bing.com ): Microsoft’s attempt to come up with a Google killer, Bing.com has a few niceties for online investors, including the capability to quickly pull up stock quotes and charts by entering stock and also the company’s name or ticker symbol. For example, to get a quick datasheet on General Electric, type stock GE . Clicking the information box takes you to MSN Money for more analysis.
• Wolfram Alpha ( www.wolframalpha.com ): This site is a lesser-known search engine than the giants, but still has some valuable features. If you enter the ticker symbol of a stock, Wolfram Alpha generates an impressive page filled with all sorts of company information. Wolfram Alpha will calculate some advanced statistical information, for instance, that shows you how well the stock has done over different time periods.
• Yahoo! ( www.yahoo.com ): Yahoo! remains the go-to search place for many consumers. Yahoo! Finance has excellent resources for investors, as described earlier in this chapter, so it’s logical to try the site for searching, too.

Keeping the Bad Guys Out: Securing Your PC

If you’re going to use your computer to process your investing and banking tasks, you’d better lock it down. Cyber-criminals have gotten sophisticated and have targeted online investors in hopes of gaining control of a person’s account and stealing money.

Please don’t let such concerns scare you off from investing online. After all, cars get broken into and you still drive. It’s just that you must take certain precautions to make it harder for the bad guys to get into your PC, such as these:

• Installing antivirus software: If a sinister code designed to wreak havoc on your computer gets in your machine, it can be a real hassle. Viruses can corrupt system files and make your computer unreliable or unusable. Antivirus software is the easy solution. It runs in the background, looks at any program that tries to run on your computer, and stops the program if it tries to do something improper.

  You can go to all sorts of great lengths to lock down your aging computer, but really, the best defense is upgraded equipment running a modern operating system. Windows 10 comes with built-in security that’s good enough for you — unless you’re the Pentagon. Windows Defender, which is built into Windows 10 and also Windows 8, runs efficiently and is pretty much all you need.

  But for those of you who are truly paranoid, many antivirus software programs are available, including

  • Free versions: If you’re still running Windows 7, just upgrade to Windows 10. If you just can’t bear to part with Windows 7, one option is to download and install a free antivirus software program. Microsoft offers its own free antivirus software, called Microsoft Security Essentials ( www.microsoft.com/security_essentials ), which has gotten good reviews for being effective without slowing your computer down. Other free options include AVG Free ( http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage ) and Avast Free ( www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download ).
  • Commercial: Antivirus programs from McAfee ( www.mcafee.com ), Symantec ( www.symantec.com ), Kaspersky ( usa.kaspersky.com ), and TrendMicro ( www.trendmicro.com/us/indexnight.html ) are popular. But these will cost you — and are most likely overkill for most users.
• Installing antispyware software: Spyware is software that attaches itself to your computer without your permission and runs behind the scenes. It’s especially sinister because it might forward personal information to a third party, usually for marketing purposes. Microsoft Security Essentials can automatically scan the computer and make sure no spyware has hitched a ride on your computer. You can also find dedicated software programs designed to sniff out spyware. Malwarebytes ( www.malwarebytes.org ) works well (and probably has the greatest name).
• Using firewalls: A firewall is an electronic barrier that (selectively) separates you from the Internet at large. A proper firewall is like a moat around a castle — only traffic that you lower the drawbridge for can get in. You can use the following types of firewalls:
  • Built-in: If you have Microsoft’s Windows 7, Vista, Windows 8, or Windows 10, you have a firewall turned on by default.
  • Router: The other way to protect your computer with a firewall is to install a router. A router is a small box that sits between your computer and the wall jack that connects you to the Internet. Many routers work like a software firewall and can even make your computer invisible to other computers. Depending on your router, you might need to enable the firewall. Check the router’s instructions to find out how.
  • Third-party software: A number of companies make firewall software, some of which is free. ZoneAlarm Internet Security ( www.zonealarm.com ) is one option, which offers a free version and a more advanced version called ZoneAlarm Extreme that costs $45. Comodo Free Firewall ( www.personalfirewall.comodo.com ) is another option, and it is — you guessed it — free.
• Installing all-in-one security: If you’re running Windows 10, 8, 7, or Vista with an antivirus program, you’re in pretty good shape against the bad guys. Just make sure your copy of Windows is up to date by selecting the Start button, typing Windows Update in the search box in the window that appears, and following the on-screen prompts (it’s Check for updates in Windows 10). Windows 10 is designed to update itself anyway — eliminating this step. But if you’d prefer, some software programs provide three different levels of security (antivirus/antispyware/firewall). Symantec has Norton 360 ( http://us.norton.com/360 ), and McAfee offers McAfee Total Protection ( www.mcafee.com ), but neither is free, and for most common home users they don’t offer enough extra protection to warrant their costs.

Mastering the Basics with Online Tutorials and Simulations

Online investing is like Vegas in that you get no do-overs. If you invest all your money in a speculative company that goes belly up, you lose your money. Period. Don’t expect the government to bail you out, and don’t think that you can sue the company to get your money back. It’s most likely gone. That’s why if you’re new to investing, you might want to try the tutorials and simulations we discuss in the following sections before using real money.

Online tutorials

Before you jump into any risky activity, it’s worthwhile to take a deep breath, relax, and make absolutely sure that you understand how the process works. Several excellent online tutorials can step you through the process ahead of time to make sure you know what to expect. If you’re just starting out, it’s not a bad idea to run through one of the following:

• Investing Online Resource Center ( www.investingonline.org ): Here’s a site that all online investors should check out. Beginning investors should read through the materials and then read the Eight Things Every Investor Should Know section in the Online Investing tab. Don’t miss the site’s IORC Simulator Center, which lets you see what it’s like to invest online.
• Investing 101 at Investopedia ( www.investopedia.com/university/beginner ): A great primer of what you can expect, it’s worth running through to make sure you have all the basics down. Figure 2-6 shows you what an Investopedia page looks like.
• The Investor’s Clearinghouse ( www.investoreducation.org ): Here you find links to online resources on all sorts of investing topics, ranging from ways to research investments to finding investing help. An affiliated site, Help For Investors.org ( www.helpforinvestors.org ), provides even more tips.
• American Association of Individual Investors ( www.aaii.com ): This site provides some free resources to investors, including a virtual Investor Classroom that teaches the basics ( www.aaii.com/computerized-investing/article/aaiis-investor-classroom ).

Source: investopedia.com

FIGURE 2-6: Investopedia’s Investing 101 steps investors through most of the things they need to know.

WHAT WOULD BUFFETT DO?

An interesting feature about the AAII’s site is that investors can find portfolios that mirror famous investors’ strategies and see how they turn out. One portfolio is designed to be similar to that of famed investor Warren Buffett using reports of his holdings. You can also find portfolios in AAII that mirror the portfolios of other famous money managers’ strategies. This part of the site is available here: www.aaii.com/stock-screens .

Be careful about which online tutorials you read and pay attention to. Many so-called tutorials are thinly guised pitches for investment professionals trying to get you to hire them. Some also promote specialized trading techniques with the purpose of getting you to buy books, video recordings, and other materials.

Simulations

Online games, or simulations, let you buy and sell real stocks using only funny money. Online simulations are a good idea for investors because they let you get a taste for investing before you commit to a strategy.

A few simulators you can try out include

• Icarra ( www.icarra.com ) is a powerful portfolio tracking software program that’s so addictive, you might keep playing even after you set up an online trading account and invest for real. After downloading the software, you enter buys and sells. Icarra carefully tracks the performance of your stocks and tells you how you’re doing. Even more interesting, though, is that you can view other members’ portfolios and share your own.
• TradeStation Simulator ( www.tradestation.com/trading-technology/tradestation-platform/execute/simulator ) is the property of TradeStation. The simulator lets you practice trading online with a pretend account. You’ll need to sign up for an account, which is free, but you don’t need to put in any real money to use the simulator. Figure 2-7 shows the simulator home page of the TradeStation site.
• Investopedia Stock Simulator ( www.investopedia.com/simulator ) starts you with $100,000 in funny money and lets you invest in any way you choose.
• SmartStocks ( app.smartstocks.com ) gets you started with a pretty generous portfolio stuffed with $1 million in virtual cash. You can use this cash to build a portfolio of investments to see how you perform and even compete against your friends.

Source: tradestation.com

FIGURE 2-7: TradeStation’s simulator lets you try your hand at investing online with play money before putting your own money on the line.