Investment research on the internet can be very rewarding in reaping the benefits of other peoples’ knowledge. There are countless numbers of websites who are willing and ready to freely give of their investment strategies and insight. Some of these have a vast array of experience and knowledge behind them and others are just trying to sell you something.
One of the places to research investing is MorningStar.com. I have found their research and expert articles to be consistently accurate. Morning Star offers many of their services for free and has a free 14 day trial of their premium service for you to see if the $16.95 monthly subscription will be worth paying to enhance your investment information needs. I would highly recommend Morning Star for someone just starting out in equities investment.
Most of the people I know don’t have an extra five to ten thousand dollars set aside for a stock portfolio. With some of the options on the internet today, an investor doesn’t need more than a tenth of that. There are several places that offer trading accounts as well as investment research and most of them require as little as $500 to open a trading account.
One of these web sites is TDAmeritrade. There are others such as Scott Trade and Trade King but the most well known of these is TDAmeritrade.
Still there are those who don’t have it in the budget to let go of $500 all at once. I have one other investment research and trade option that I consider to be the “no excuses” investment site. The site I am referring to is Sharebuilder.com. Sharebuilder.com lets you trade for blue chip stocks at a fraction of the cost and if you can only afford to spend say $40 a week for stocks, that’s all you have to spend! An investor can trade as much as or little as he wants for just $4 a month. The way Sharebuilder.com does this is-
Let’s say there are 1000 people who want to buy Wal Mart stock. All of these people can only afford to invest $100 to buy this great stock but they can afford to do this every month. At the tome of the investment, Wal Mart is priced at $200 per share. Now comes the dilemma. A regular brokerage would not be able to service any of these people unless they saved for two months and came back and even then might not if the stock price increased any at all. At Sharebuilder.com these 1000 people invest their 100 dollars each, Sharebuilder then takes the $100,000 and buys 500 shares of Wal Mart stock and everyone gets share.
I know I have over-simplified this but you can see how the average Joe without a large sum of money can get into investing in securities. I might also add, Sharebuilder.com has a great deal of research resources.