Below you will find a collection of clickable links, helpful web resources that will assist and hopefully improve your trading. The number one goal of providing these links is to stress the importance to all traders of situational awareness.
Situational Awareness ?
“Complete situational awareness in equity markets is impossible.”
- Michael Slattery
because:
“Not everything that can be counted counts; Not everything that counts can be counted.”
- William B Cameron
Situational Awareness is paying attention to what’s going on around you. It's the ability to scan the avalanche of online information available to all of us and determine how it is affecting our trading environment and thus our trades. From this virtural window into our current trading world, we need to learn to sense challenges, opportunities and danger.
There are thousands of sites with varying degrees of usefulness, but about 150 of my favorites are provided on this page. Easily the most useful is Google. Some online tools will immediately become important to your trading success. Google is an incredibly valuable investment tool that I constantly go to during the trading day. It's usefulness is limited only by your imagination. Any time you see a dramatic increase in a stock's volume that you are following, Google it! Often it's the quickest and most effective short-cut to determine whats going on! If a crystal ball exists for traders within the Internet, it's Google.
Yahoo Finance and Google Finance, both provide you with access to a great deal of current financial and technical informational resources.
Yahoo's message boards can provide you with insight into what traders are currently thinking about an equity or option. It should be noted that many of the individuals here are expressing what they want you to think, not necessarily what they truly believe about the stock. You will need to wade through and discard significant amounts of malarkey. With this provision behind us the message boards often contain relevant information hours to minutes before any other source does. Entering a ticker symbol into Yahoo Finance and then clicking “Message Board,” on the left hand side of the page allow you to access the Message boards.
Google Alerts lets you set up real time text alerts or emails when any news hits the Internet relating to a stock you are tracking. You will come to view this one feature as a valuable gift from Google.
Many of the sites below offer several levels of service with most if not all offering a basic level of free and valuable information to the trader. This vast array of informational and trading resources underscores that you are entering into a very dynamic, even chaotic system and as such there are no obvious or simplistic solutions to trading success. Situational awareness is your only defense.
Trading in today markets is no longer local or even regional. It's Global! Global because the world is now the market place for every major, industrial, technological, financial, energy-related, healthcare or service industry. The Internet and global communications networks have not shrunk the world, but they have transformed the 7 billion individuals living on this planet into one market place that can and often will affect your own stock transactions. Late at night, about 2 AM my time on the West coast, European markets open. If the European market is down there is a greater probability that when the Asian markets open a few hours later, they will be down also. If both of these market’s closes are suppressed in the most recent trading session, it becomes very likely that the US markets will be down as well. All major markets have an effect on our markets, just as ours affects all of the others.
It does not stop there. If our markets are up or down, the segment or industry that your stock resides within can easily follow suit. That will affect your stock for better or worse.
This global dynamic could easily make maintaining situational awareness a full time, 24/7 job for all stock traders. A great deal of research has gone into producing the following links to assist you in rapidly grasping a very broad understanding of exactly how and if global economic situations are affecting your investments and then narrowing that focus incrementally until you have your own stock or equity under a microscope. Starting with a Macro view, Finviz provides many excellent tools, but the first three links below, allow you to determine how the global markets are performing, how US markets are performing and finally what is going on in each of the market segments and industries that your stocks reside within. All of this can be accomplished in a few seconds utilizing the four links under the GLOBAL & Local Markets header. You will easily learn to navigate between these links within the Finviz site. The four links below are simply a convenient shortcut to direct you to each page the first time.
Determining how markets are being affected by current events is a critical component of situational awareness. A large number of links are provided here and they represent just the tip of the iceberg for financial news resources, technical analysis and social feedback. Choose the ones that most appeal to you and add them to your browser's bookmark tool. The goal here is similar to the process above. You want to obtain a global impression of the current market environments and narrow and refine the focus so you are obtaining a micro view of your individual holdings. As you acquire a focused impression of where the markets are moving and how trader's attitudes, sentiment or emotions are being affected by these events, you are also positioning yourself to acquire new targets of opportunity guided by this recent research. The question you repeatably want to ask yourself is: how are news events affecting my trades and what opportunities might this change in the environment expose?
Brokers provide a large number of informational services and resources. This is important to attract new customers as well as keeping their existing ones. I have accounts at both E*Trade and Charles Schwab. They both provide a slightly different experience that provides me with the tools and information feeds important to my trading style.
• Most of the sites listed below have excellent Technical Analysis Dictionaries.
The Twitter universe is very dynamic and as such you are better off finding feeds that are specifically targeted to your kind of investing or your specific equities. Google it! StockTwits provides it's own stock oriented twitter environment that allows you to see and post charts and text.
Wish to add a link you find useful to this collection? Just forward your suggestion to us through the contact link at the bottom of this page and we will add your favorites.
