How to find information about stocks

While there are many different resources out there to help you find information about common stocks, we only touch on a few here. The first place to look for information is the financial pages of your newspaper. These pages will carry a list of stocks, alphabetically, of all publicly traded stocks. On any given day, here is how the information for XYZ Corporation might appear:

Reading from left to right, we see that the highest price that XYZ Corporation’s stock has reached in the past 52 weeks is $66, while it has been as low as $42 during that same period. Its P/E ratio (on a trailing basis) is 14, and 150,000 shares traded hands during the business day. XYZ’s stock price opened at $58.50, its high price of the day was $62, its low price was $58, and it closed at $59.75. The net change from the closing price on this day as compared with the previous day’s trading was $1.75 (therefore, the previous day’s closing price must have been $58).

Also listed in the stock pages are the closing marks for the market indices, such as the Dow Jones averages, Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index, the NASDAQ, and the Russell 2000. There are four Dow Jones averages, which are: (1) 30 industrials, (2) 20 transportations, (3) 15 utilities, and (4) a composite of the 65 stocks.

Some of the financial newspapers and magazines that carry stock information include The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Standard & Poor’s Outlook, Fortune, Business Week, The Economist, and Investor’s Business Daily. However, print isn’t the only medium which carries stock information and analyses. A few good places to find stock information also exist online. Yahoo! Finance (www.quote.yahoo.com), Dow Jones Market Monitor (www.dowjones.com), and Microsoft (www.msn.com) are also good places to look. Finally, if you are looking for extensive financial data for just one company, check out their annual report. These will be available in print, and sometimes online at the company’s corporate home page.

Many of my clients believe that a good source of information about the stocks they hold is a financial cable station. They think that since this station has different analysts on to talk about what stocks are good and bad, that they should turn there for their financial information. There are two schools of thought on this. First of all, I believe that they do a good job of presenting financial information about various types of stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and other investments. They always have the running stock ticker going across the bottom of the screen so that investors can see what trades have gone through and at what price. They also do a good job at having analysts from different companies come on to discuss the current state of the markets. In that sense, they are a fine source of information.

However, there are also negative aspects of relying on television for your information. Until recently, stock analysts didn’t have to disclose which stocks they held individually. This meant, for example, that Joe Smith from the XYZ Firm could go on television and tell people that the Fly By Night Corporation was a good buy without telling those same viewers that he owned stock in that company. Theoretically, analysts could give out any information they wanted to without publicly acknowledging what their personal positions were in the stocks they were talking about. For the public, that posed somewhat of a danger. How are average investors to know whether the information they are hearing is truly accurate? While I’m not saying that this is the fault of the financial television networks, it is something that investors should behold with caution.

One more thing about relying solely on networks for financial information: Do you ever think that instead of just reporting the news, they want to try and shape it? It seems that I am constantly seeing the financial networks tout some upcoming warning about profits or earnings from companies. When you see these, do they affect the way you look at your portfolio? If one of the companies that you are invested in issues a profit warning, do you consider selling? Generally, after a company issues this type of warning, there is a sell-off by investors of that company’s stock. The networks then report that, too. Yes, it is their job to report what companies are doing and how they are doing, but sometimes it seems like they are overemphasizing what is really going on, all for the sake of reporting something else later.

As a rule, I recommend that my clients, and others, not rely solely on financial networks for all their financial information. Today, there are so many different places to get information. To ignore these outlets in favor of just watching television is doing a disservice to yourself and your portfolio. If you like watching these stations and think the information you are getting is good, then continue. But try tempering what you are hearing with something else. Just think of it as double-checking your facts.