Check Your Portfolio Every Morning on These Sites
Lifehacker Financial Jedi Alicia Adamchik would caution against this practice – and that’s good advice – but it can be hard to resist the temptation to check the stock market every day. You don’t need to do anything with this information; sometimes it’s just nice to watch the world burn, because someone said or did something, and the whole market got a poop of 1000 points.
(It’s also interesting to watch it go up 1,000 points for seemingly no reason.)
It’s been over a year since Google cut a ton of functionality from its super-useful free stock tracking tool, which I would recommend to casual and ambitious investors looking to get a little more insight into what the market is doing every day.
Fortunately, there are many other reliable alternatives for getting your daily dose of financial depression (or abundance). Here’s a quick recap of some of my favorites – let’s start with a quick reminder that Google Finance is n’t actually dead, just different.
Google Finance is still alive
I, like many of you, assumed that Google Finance was over when the company announced in late 2017 that it was making significant changes to its free service. I quickly started looking elsewhere for my financial situation, but I may have left this site too early. If you only want the most basic information about your portfolio, Google Finance is still a viable free service. Also, now, after the changes, this is a much more Spartan approach – for better or for worse.
On the Google Finance homepage, you will see a small box that displays a subset of the stocks on your watchlist – not all because it would be too useful, but a few of the stocks that you are tracking. You also get a quick look at the stocks you’ve recently searched for, a field that shows stocks that might interest you (ha!), And a quick look at the major indices for the US and global markets. (Currencies too.)
You can add the stocks you are interested in to the aforementioned watchlist, and you can see everything from that list in a separate Your Stocks tab. Clicking on any stock opens the old familiar price chart and you can compare the performance of that stock to any other stock you want. While you don’t have a data window that displays a company’s financial metrics such as its dividend yield, market capitalization, or P / E ratio, you can at least quickly see how its most recent quarterly report is doing.
I probably wouldn’t use Google Finance for day-to-day trading – especially since it killed off a separate tool that you could use to find companies by market cap, P / E ratio, and other criteria – but Google Finance isn’t terrible. if you only need to quickly glance at your portfolio from time to time (or all the time, even if you’re going to drive yourself crazy).
Yahoo Finance is a good alternative to Google
Even if I don’t like anything about Yahoo, sorry, the free-tracking service of the fantasy football fan-company has become one of my daily go-tos. However, since this is Yahoo, its financial site is starting to get news coverage rather than numbers.
I appreciate that you can create your own list of stocks you want to track, and Yahoo gives you tons of categories to browse if you’re trying to find new stocks to add to your list – whether you care about regular companies, cryptocurrencies, and T. The most active stocks of the day, commodities, ETFs, etc.
You will need to be signed in with a Yahoo account to build your portfolio, which at least gives you a reason to revive it (if you’re not a Yahoo Mail fan). You can also link your Yahoo account to an external broker, which is useful if you’ve already created a portfolio with Fidelity, Coinbase, Robinhood, or other similar organizations.
I also think it’s great that Yahoo Finance gives you a good amount of information about individual stocks – actually the company – when you click on them to view them. You will get all the basics:
Plus, you can compare stocks against each other on a large-scale chart, view any other Yahoo users’ oofs, and get full company statistics (including P / E, stocks outstanding). , operating margin and other interesting information about 10-Q, as well as dividend yield and payouts). Plus, you can view all-time highs and lows, view analyst estimates, and check out institutional holders. That’s a lot for a free service; Hope this makes you rich.
Alternatives: Investing.com , MarketWatch
TradingView is similar to advanced stock mode
Now it gets interesting. I love that TradingView really focuses on numbers and not news, which becomes apparent the first time you load a page and see a giant real-time stock tracker covering the top of the site. And this is just the beginning of the fun.
Select stocks. Any stock. Enter it in the easy-to-use search bar and you’ll instantly get a giant zoomed chart to look at, along with useful data – daily range, volume, earnings per share, P / E ratio, market cap and dividend yield. – right above the graph.
Getting better. Click on that “full featured chart” button to turn your monitor into a giant trading terminal – well, at least the look of the trading terminal:
I won’t go into the basics, as Tradingview allows you to do it all: create watchlists, compare stocks, quickly view all kinds of markets, and search for new stocks based on a variety of technical parameters. It costs nothing to create a standard account, allowing you to maintain and track your portfolio (and, among other things, set up a single alert for stocks). If you want to do more , you will have to pay at least $ 10 per month.
Stockrow perfectly suitable for charting their own hands , but it is not cheap
I wanted to name it Stockrow , in part, because I like the spartan design of the site. It’s not full of glaring annoyances, just plain text and hyperlinks to relevant corporate news, which are presented with quick headlines and short summaries, although the sentences may look a little garbled.
I would not use Stockrow to track my portfolio as you will need to register for an account (registrations are closed at the time of this writing). You will also have to pay Stockrow $ 14 a month for a membership, which allows you to do things like view a portfolio or get real-time stock prices.
However, if you want to get an insight into stocks from time to time, I love the charting tools on the site. Click on the “Chart” link on the home page of the site and you will be taken to a tool that allows you to select the options that a chart must have before it is generated. You can add multiple companies you want to track at once and choose which metrics – stock price, P / E ratio, dividend per share, debt to equity, etc. – you want to focus on the chart on. Heck, you can have several if you don’t mind a confusing diagram.
If you want to stick to the basics – and only research one company at a time – the site presents charting tools in a clear and easy-to-understand manner. You can even hover your mouse over various company data points for a quick description of what that really means (saving you from Google if you’re still learning the finer points of finance). In addition, the handy Snapshot button gives you a wealth of key information about a company’s earnings, balances and cash flows all at once, organized as a series of charts that you would otherwise have to create yourself on other sites.
Alternatives: Gurufocus if you want nice charting bars so you know how the company’s various indicators perform in comparison to the industry and its own financial history.