Useful Finance Websites
Investopedia - This is a very good site that covers just about everything. It has educational articles, a dictionary of investment terms, and tutorials. http://investopedia.com/
InvestorWords - This is an online glossary for investing terminology. http://www.investorwords.com/
NASD Individual Investor Service - This is one of the best sites for learning about investing. http://www.nasd.com/web/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1144&ssSourceNodeId=460
Yahoo! Education Center - This site has good tutorials for the beginning investor and has several investing dictionaries. http://biz.yahoo.com/edu/index.html
NYSE's Educational Publications - This is a simple introduction to stock investing. http://www.nyse.com/about/education/1098034584990.html
MSN MoneyCentral's Risk Tolerance Quiz – This website allows users to assess their tolerance for investment risk. http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/calcs/n_riskq/main.asp
T-bills, Notes, & Bonds Online - This site, by the U.S. Treasury, provides information on Treasury securities. http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/sec/sec.htm
FRBNY Fedpoint 41: Treasury Auctions – This website gives the process used by the U.S. government to raise funds in their regular auctions of government securities. http://www.ny.frb.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed41.html
Money Market Instruments from the Richmond Fed - This is a copy of the, now out of print, book "Instruments of the Money Market." It is an excellent source for information on money market securities. http://www.rich.frb.org/pubs/instruments/
Ameritrade on Money Market Securities - This has a good summary of different money market instruments. http://www.ameritrade.com/education/html/encyclopedia/tutorial3/t3_s10.html
Understanding Securities Analyst Recommendations
- This excellent paper from NASD Research explains how to interpret analyst
stock recommendations.
http://www.nasd.com/web/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=580
S&P Bond Ratings - This site explains bond ratings by Standard & Poor's. http://www2.standardandpoors.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=sp/Page/FixedIncomeRatingsCriteriaPg&r=1&l=EN&b=2&s=21
Lipper Leaders – This site has the leading mutual funds in a number of different categories. http://www.lipperleaders.com/USA/en/index.html
Mutual Funds Education Alliance - This site provides a lot of educational material on mutual funds. http://www.mfea.com/
Morningstar - This is a great site for choosing mutual funds. It provides lots of information that is difficult to find elsewhere. http://www.morningstar.com/#mbrV
Investment Company Institute – The National Association of American Mutual Funds maintains this site to enhance public understanding of mutual funds. http://www.ici.org/
NASD Regulation: Margin Information: This website gives information from NASD about trading on margin. http://www.nasd.com/
SEC Investor Tips: Margin: This gives information directly from the SEC website about trading on margin. http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/margin.htm
Sites for Quotes, News, Charts and SEC Documents
MSN Investor - This is a fabulous site. It also includes CNBC.com. http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/home.asp
Yahoo! Finance - This is similar to MSN Investor. http://finance.yahoo.com/
EdgarScan - This site, by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, allows you to get all of the SEC documents and financial statements. http://edgarscan.pwcglobal.com/servlets/edgarscan
PRARS - Public Register's Annual Report Service allows you to get free annual reports. http://www.prars.com/
NASD BondInfo (TRACE) - This site reports the prices and yields of all OTC corporate bond trades, has a bond screener that can be used to find bonds, and a glossary of the terms used by the service. http://www.nasdbondinfo.com/asp/bond_search.asp
The Bond Market Association - This site has a lot of information about bonds, including the same TRACE pricing data as the NASD site above. http://www.investinginbonds.com/
Stock screeners help you to find stocks that meet the criteria that you specify.
Reuters PowerScreen - This is a very good java-based screener. It has 80 pre-defined variables and you can define your own. You will have to create an account. https://secure.investor.reuters.com/
Yahoo Stock Screener - This link gets you to a very useful of screening tool. http://screener.finance.yahoo.com/newscreener.html?quicken=2
Barron's Economic Calendar - This is a great calendar of economic events, such as releases of economic indicators. It gives you the information for each date and tells what the market will focus on, the consensus estimates, and definitions. You will need to be a subscriber to view this. http://users1.wsj.com/lmda/do/checkLogin?a=t&url=http%3A%2F%2Finteractive.wsj.com%2Fbarrons%2Fb-econoday.htm
The American Stock Exchange: http://www.amex.com/
The Nasdaq Stock Market: http://www.nasdaq.com/
The New York Stock Exchange: http://www.nyse.com/
The Philadelphia Stock Exchange: http://www.phlx.com/
The Tokyo Stock Exchange: http://www.tse.or.jp/english/index.shtml
The Toronto Stock Exchange : http://www.tse.com/
The Bureau of Labor Statistics - Statistics on, inflation, productivity, and many others. They also have discussions of how the numbers are calculated. http://www.bls.gov/
The Bureau of Economic Analysis - As
part of the Department of Commerce, the BEA produces the National Income and
Product Accounts (NIPA), such as estimates of GDP and related measures.
http://www.bea.doc.gov/
U.S. Census Bureau Economic Programs – This gives data on home ownership, durable goods, international trade, and more. http://www.census.gov/econ/www/index.html
Federal Reserve Banks - This site is the gateway to the 12 districts banks of the Federal Reserve. It includes all of the data and research that they compile. http://www.federalreservebanks.org/
Dismal Scientist - This site offers current economic indicators and analysis. http://www.economy.com/dismal/
FreeLunch.Com - More than 1,680,000 economic data series are available to download. The site and data are free, but you must register. http://www.economy.com/freelunch/default.asp
The Conference Board - Get the leading, coincident, and lagging indicators as well as their consumer confidence index. http://www.conference-board.org/