How to Evaluate and Buy Stocks
Too many people spend time clipping coupons to save $.50 or drive across town to save $.10 per gallon in gas but then spend thousands of dollars of their hard earned money buying a stock based on a tip from a friend or a so called expert on television.
Why Yahoo Finance Is The Best Financial Website
Yahoo Finance is the best free solution for analytical Finance data on the internet. When I was a young Investment Banker, I used to use Yahoo Finance all the time to check on daily stock prices. It is absolutely great for young poor college professionals who don’t have much money and would like to learn more about Finance. If you cannot afford expensive data services like Bloomberg and still want to conduct basic financial analysis, then Yahoo Finance is for you.
Yahoo Finance can totally help you with many different tasks. You can get all the latest news on companies that you are interested in. Simply punch in the company’s ticker and get all the latest information about that particular company. It even works for mutual and index funds. If you are looking to study macroeconomic data or country specific currency data, Yahoo Finance can provide you with exchange rate data as well.
If you are looking to do financial modeling, you can get excellent historical data on Yahoo Finance about any company or mutual fund you choose. Then you can download the data in csv format to use with any spreadsheet program of your choice. This is a wonderful feature because it provides you with the very raw data you need to make a price graph. Then, you can use the graph to figure out future price movements, trends and shapes. This is incredible for any up and coming technical analyst.
Because Yahoo is strong in a lot of different countries around the world, you can even access international data concerning many emerging economies. So, if you are studying Asian or South American economies, you can now get good reliable data about these countries as well. Also, get historical currency exchange rate data that can be of great help when charting forex graphs and predicting prices.
The best feature in Yahoo Finance is the ability to create your own mock portfolios. You can now pick companies that you think will do well and create your own portfolio. Then, you can see if you would have made money using those decisions. You can buy and sell as many shares that you want depending on chosen price points.
You even get customized news alerts for the companies in your portfolio. I would recommend that you create as many portfolios as possible to learn as much as you can about different types of investments. This is also an excellent learning tool for those people who are looking to learn more about the stock market.
Yahoo Finance can be an absolute boon for anyone wanting to start out in Finance. If you are looking to learn how to go about conducting yourself in the market, then getting to learn the ropes is a breeze on Yahoo Finance. I would recommend the site to any newbie. It is truly an excellent offering from Yahoo and it comes at a great price: free. So go ahead and register yourself, get your own user name and password and you can be off on your own Finance adventure.
How to Read a Stock Quote
Frustrated by all the symbols in a stock quote? Here’s a basic overview to reading a stock quote on Yahoo Finance.
If you’re like many new stock market investors you are learning all sorts of new things, one of the many things you need to know is how to read a stock quote.
Yahoo Finance has a nice stock quote page, please follow along and go to this web page http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=msft and find out what everything means.
Near the top of the page it will tell you that you are looking up Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) this tells us what company we are looking at. You will then see the last price (which is delayed 20 minutes) and you will see how much the stock has gone up or down for the day.
If you scroll down the page you will find a table with a bunch of data.
Last Trade: This is the last trade that happened on this stock (delayed 20 minutes)
Trade Time: This is the date or the time of the trade
Change: Amount the stock traded up or down in dollars and percentage
Prev. Close: The amount the stock closed at the last day it traded. Generally the day before, unless holiday or weekend
Open: Price the stock opened at today or if weekend or holiday last day it traded
Bid: What various investors are looking to buy the stock for at the current moment
Ask: What various investors are willing to sell the stock for at the current moment
1 yr Est: Estimate for the stock’s price in one year’s time
Day’s Range: The range in price the stock has traded that day
52wk Range: Stock price from low to high over the past year of trading
Volume: Number of shares of stock traded so far today
Avg. Vol (3m): Average number of shares traded each day for the past 3 months
Market Cap: This is the market price for the company take the number of shares outstanding and multiple by the price of the stock
P/E: Price to earnings ratio
EPS: Earnings per share
Div & Yield: The dividend (if any) that you could receive from the company for owning stock
Those are the basic items on that Yahoo finance page; you can also find charts, headlines and some more background information on the company.