Thursday, September 07, 2006

Using the Internet to Aid Your Investing

The world of investing can be daunting to those who have just begun to learn about the subject, and for those who have yet to begin. Indeed, with the multitude of terms to learn and concepts to understand, a guide to get you started on the basics will certainly be very helpful. Thankfully, there are various resources on the internet to assist you in your quest to invest. Here are a few helpful links:

Investopedia.com is an excellent place to begin, and will be a website that you return to many times. A great page to start is their Learn the Basics page, where you can pick up basic investing concepts and learn, for instance, what stocks and bonds are. An especially useful feature of the website is their investment dictionary, where you can search for anything from “Tenbagger” to “Reaganomics”. This is one of my favourites and a site I constantly reference from time to time.

The Motley Fool is another great site to learn to invest. It is slightly less encyclopaedic than Investopedia.com, but no less useful. Indeed, with its motto being “To Educate, Amuse and Enrich”, the founders of the website seem to be spreading “Foolish Investing” very effectively. Check out their Fool’s School to start picking up investment tips.

Ever wonder about what ‘technical analysis’ is, or what the whole hullabaloo about stock charts is about? Well, to introduce the world of forecasting using charts is Chart School that explains, with many diagrams, the basic concepts of technical analysis like chart patterns and technical indicators. Find out what the “Head and Shoulders” pattern is, or what the “Cup with Handle” pattern tells you, and then decide for yourself whether these patterns really work, or whether they are figments of the human imagination.

Closer to home, the Singapore Exchange has its own investor education website. Its FAQ answers questions about how to begin investing in shares, gives an introduction to the stock market as well, and also tells you many things you should know before you begin investing. The site is also home to free web casts, which consist of videos of talks given at investment seminars. Each of them is 3 hours long, so there is plenty of content to keep you occupied.

To keep up-to-date on local business news, visit The Business Times, the online version of our local newspaper. For a more regional point of view, visit the Financial Times Asia-Pacific website. Bloomberg also constantly updates readers with top stories.

Finally, as a Warren Buffett fan, I cannot fail to mention Berkshire Hathaway’s Shareholder Letters, provided nicely on the Berkshire Hathaway site. Do not be fooled by the spartan layout of the site; these pages contain much investment wisdom, and are not to be ignored.

Of course, this is just a beginning, and there are countless other sites on the internet for you to peruse, from the basics of finance to the complexities of investment analysis. I hope that this article aids you as to where to begin.

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