Technician Online

Current Issue:

Technician Online Blogs

October 2nd, 2008

For the economically illiterate, tips on keeping up with Wall Street

By slbrinkl on October 2nd, 2008

The economy is in trouble. Serious trouble.

I’m no economist. Sometimes I don’t even know what happens to my last dollar bill. (The vending machine ate it? Probably.)

But with all the money trauma in the last couple of weeks, it’s become more and more apparent that I should know what’s going down on Wall Street.

Luckily for my economically-illiterate peers and myself, there are a few places online that can help keep us in the know without making us feel too stupid.

The Wall Street Journal has a myriad of resources on its Web site. The number one economic newspaper has links to many things that are useful to both the stock-savvy and the stock-illiterate. In addition to its news stories and constant updates, you can also check out the Dow, Nasdaq and international stock markets at a glance, before the closing bell chimes, as well as up-to-date bonds, credit markets, mutual funds and exchange rates. You can also, of course, find these same things on the home pages of the Dow, Nasdaq and international markets, but the WSJ puts them all in one place.

For the investors out there, you can use Cake Financial to store all your stock information in one place. Individual investors can follow and analyze their historical performance up to 10 years. The site offers a range of high-security features so you can keep your financial information as private or as open as you’d like. The Cakedex also offers a forum, where users can blog about their buys and sells, ask for and give advice from fellow investors. Also, you can find similar tasks on the competing socioeconomic networking sites SocialPicks, MarketGuru and Covestor.

You can also test your stock market skills at Inspectd, which offers a fun, addictive and educational stock game. The Web site presents you with a stock chart from the past, and you must guess whether the stock dropped, rose or stayed the same. You can fiddle with settings and learn a little more about how the stock market works.

And even if you’re not interested in what the stocks have in store, you might be concerned about gas prices. To find the cheapest gas in your area, check GasBuddy, which does its best to present readers with a list of the nearest petrol stations with the lowest prices.

While there isn’t a light at the end of this dark financial tunnel just yet, at least the Internet is there to guide those (like me) who have little knowledge of what’s going on with the economy.