Knowledge Center

Basic Tools

SEC Filings

There is no more important research tool than going directly to a company's filings with the SEC. To become a good investor, you need to be able to access the financial and other statements released by the company.

Quarterly financial statements are called 10-Q's by the SEC. Annual financial statements are 10-K's. Important updates are provided in 8-K and other forms. 13-G forms will tell you when someone has acquired more than 5% of the shares of a company. 13-G/A forms well tell you when someone with 5% of the shares of a company have either dropped below 5% or added more shares. 404 and other forms disclose to you when company insiders are buying or selling.  There are literally hundreds of other forms, each of which are important.

Our favorite site for accessing SEC forms is www.freeedgar.com FreeEdgar allows you to find a company's filings just by the ticker. While they could do a better job explaining the why and wherefore of the filings, FreeEdgar's effort is the best we've found on the web. The site has degraded significantly after being purchased by EdgarOnline, but it still works well enough and hey, it's free!

News about your stocks

Only barely second in importance to SEC filings to an investor is a fast and regular feed of news about stocks. News Alert at www.newsalert.com is a must have for every investor. News Alert is both a paid and free service. Initially, you can simply search by ticker or keyword for press releases and news stories. News Alert combines the PRNewswire and BusinessWire services, Reuters, UPI (paid), and several others news services. In our opinion, you cannot invest without this or a similar services

Best of all, News Alert allows you to choose to be automatically fed news articles on subjects you specify. Their free service allows you three such news feeds. Set one up called "Portfolio News" and enter the ticker symbols of all the stocks in your portfolio. Any time a news story or press release covering one of the stocks in your portfolio appears, you will get a near-instant e-mail notification with a link to the whole story. Set your second one up as "Watch List" and put the tickers of those stocks who you are watching or researching. Set the third one up as "Sector News" and generate a search routine covering all the competitor and market sector news for the stocks in your portfolio. This third set will keep you abreast of developments that could affect your portfolio.

If you want any more than three e-mail lists, you'll have to pay. We suggest paying News Alert's minimal monthly fee anyway because it expands the number of news feeds you receive. Once you have an unlimited number of search routines, you can get as broad or as narrow as you like in your story notifications.

Talking heads

OK. We know what you are going to say, but face it -- CNBC's parade of anchors, reporters, and guests move the market. Bloomberg, CNN, Fox, and others have competing networks, but so far nobody can touch the 10 years of experience and influence CNBC has. Next time you see a shot of a trading or exchange floor, take a look at the monitors in the background -- more often than not you'll see a feed from CNBC there.

Watch CNBC early and often. Try and watch at least the 45 minutes before the market opens. If you have more time, catch the final 10 minutes before the close, too. Maria Bartiromo likes to show off her opinion a little too much, but the other reporters are vey good. David Faber is, well, David Faber but he's very well connected into M&A activity and breaks news regularly. Joe Kernan is a genius at unearthing interesting stocks when his editors will let him. Then there are the morning and evening offerings by Maria Bartiromo, the boys from Dow Jones on the Halftime Report at noon eastern, and the reports from the NASDAQ and NYSE market sites. However you slice your day, the more you can watch CNBC the better off you will be. Ron Ansana and Sue Herrera's reformatted (July 1999) Business Center program has become an absolute must see for us these days -- even if the editors make Ron interview people like Ozzie Osbourne.

Ink by the barrel

There is no substitute for reading the Wall Street Journal every morning. The WSJ Electronic Edition is close, but cannot compare to the market-wide impact of the paper version. Get your hands inky and read it. The best thing to do is read the ink edition and subscribe to the electronic edition. The latter has a great search function and some other features that are nice to have. You can find information on subscribing to both at www.wsj.com

Investor's Business Daily certainly likes to congratulate itself on the good job it does for investors. If your trading style allows you to read more than one paper, make IBD your second one. The charts and stock analysis tools can be useful in ferreting out good stocks, even if their system tends to be more reactive than predictive. With their 1998 change in format, the news content has gone downhill, but the information on stocks improved. They have a free trial that comes with an interesting video tape. Try them out, if only for a few months. Investor's Business Daily