Which Financial Sites Should You Use for Online Trading?

Even after completing medical school, doctors have to keep in touch with the latest research as published in medical journals, not to mention the need to constantly question their assumptions about patients by cross-checking with others in the field. Political commentors can’t just sit on a pre-established set of viewpoints and keep on repeating them. They have to read what others are writing on their chosen topics, engaging with their ideas and learning from them.

One area of life where this rule applies is finance, where you have to develop a taste for improving your understanding on a constant basis. The need for this is especially pressing for young people in our times, who are left to make serious financial decisions that affect their entire lives. Taking on debt for college tuition and car purchases, managing credit cards, and paying for health insurance are just a few of the weighty issues they have to deal with. There has been a shift to greater independence in matters of money for the young, especially when wielding their newly acquired power to participate in the financial markets via online trading apps.

Those who exercise this power are, like the rest of us, regularly beset by a bewildering array of media items on topics like the latest crypto token that may shoot to the stars, instantly elevating (so it’s claimed) a number of savvy early movers into the ranks of the rich and famous. Add to this an apparently insatiable appetite on news channels for glorifying those who grow wealthy in extraordinary and inimitable ways. How is somebody supposed to make sense of personal or public finances in this crazy climate?

You may believe today’s youth have been trained to face all this financial responsibility effectively – to distinguish fact from fiction – but that is not the case. When asked to answer three basic financial questions on things like interest rates and inflation, only one-third of young adults can answer all three correctly. College attendees aren’t much better: over a third of them get at least one question wrong. This sort of statistic is not unique to America and applies across the spectrum of developed and developing nations around the world.

Anyone who’d like to participate in the financial markets should consciously embark on a program of self-education from the bottom up. The sources of your information, whether relating to general concepts or specific instruments, need to be reliable. The same goes for the price quotes you act on in setting up your deals. In this article, we’ll introduce you to three great financial websites that can help you move ahead with a clear head into a career of informed online trading.

finance.yahoo.com

Yahoo!Finance has a special section, titled “Build Your Wealth”, that offers guidance to both young and old in managing their personal finances. Besides this, there’s a treasure house of useful features and information at this address. Click “Research” to open up the currency converter, advanced charting tools, and screeners, plus many other handy things. The screeners help you home in on exciting stocks and funds with the specific guidance of hundreds of filter options. For instance, you can call up an exclusive list of aggressive small cap stocks or growth technology stocks.

On the homepage, you’ll find an extensive range of economic news articles, starting with the most recently published and going back in time. Gathered from selected sources like Reuters, Motley Fool, and Morningstar, the articles cover a variety of topics like company earnings reports, trends in asset prices like crude oil, and forecasts for sectors like tech or specific stocks like Alphabet or Nvidia. The quality of the articles is, generally speaking, very high.

In the “Investment Ideas” section, you can read through a list of the day’s biggest gainers and losers in the stock market. Click on the company that interests you to see the recent story of their prices, but also plenty of valuable data like average trading volume, 52-week price range, and a performance overview for different time periods. You’ll also be able to compare the company to its competitors using key performance metrics, and even read through analysts’ views on how their future is shaping up.

google.com/finance

When you land here, you’ll find the key indexes for the US market (like Dow Jones, S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Russel), the European market (DAX, FTSE 100, and Stoxx 50), and the Asian market (Nikkei 225, SENSEX, HSI). Try viewing a colour-coded chart of all of them together, so you can compare. As to the time period for the comparison, you can choose among a few options, from a day to a month to five years.

Under the “Market Trends” heading, you can find the most actively traded stocks for the day, similarly to Yahoo!Finance. Click on a company to open up their quarterly and annual income statements, cash flow, and balance sheets. While you’re there, check out all relevant news relating to the company in question, which is neatly situated there for your convenience. To get a schedule of the release of earnings reports for popular stocks, go to the Earnings Calendar.

At Google Finance, you can get something quite precious: real-time quotes for your asset. Plus, you can dig up historical data for the security and analyze it with price charts and your favourite technical analysis techniques. It’s also straightforward to compare prices of different instruments on your charts. These sorts of tools can go a long way in positioning you for successful deals, so make good use of them.

As to the financial news, it’s drawn from a wide variety of sources, including publications like Investing.com, Fox Business, CNN, and The Guardian. You might like this because it exposes you to a broad range of perspectives.

bloomberg.com/markets

Welcome to Bloomberg, where you can enjoy the benefits of an array of original news articles to get your financial thoughts flowing. These touch on really interesting topics like Florida’s home insurance market, the problems at Boeing, or China’s hidden debt challenges. The range here is truly impressive and trails back from an hour ago to several years in the past. The Big Take section delves more deeply into economic trends, taking on subject matters like the practical consequences of US trade tariffs on China.

Turning to the “Data” section, this is where you can find the info you need for stocks, futures, bonds, currencies, and commodities. Click on “Commodities” for a breakdown of price movements in agricultural materials like corn, wheat, cocoa, and cotton, but also precious metals like gold, silver, copper, and platinum, and, finally, energy commodities like crude oil, natural gas, and heating oil. Here you can call up relevant news articles for each commodity by clicking on them in turn. For instance, hovering nearby “crude oil”, there may be an article about the recent reaction of oil prices to tensions in the Middle East.

The economic calendar is pretty much as thorough as you can get, going through each day by the half-hour and reporting key economic events around the globe. These include unemployment reports, GDP data, ECB (European Central Bank) meetings, press conferences, retail sales prints, and more.

Wrapping Things Up

Financial literacy refers to the ability to understand and correctly use financial concepts in the real world. It’s a discipline like any other, which means it cannot be invented anew by the latest online community or their guru. If you’re going into the markets with the aim of making some money, it’s crucial that you ground yourself in true and tested knowledge of how the economic world works. Don’t compromise on the quality of the sources you utilize in forming your financial mind.

Faulty or deficient financial literacy can lead to your not taking full advantage of the resources that are available to you in life, holding you back from progressing economically. It also affects the broader economy because of the unnecessary debt it leaves in its wake. In many countries, this type of education is considered mandatory. Even if it isn’t in your part of the world, take it upon yourself to become conversant in money matters. You’ll only benefit from the effort you put in.

Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell conclude their 2023 article on this topic by writing that “Our research has… shown that financial literacy produces better investment outcomes”. There you have it: proof that trading success is directly related, not to chasing after newly minted crypto tokens, but the acquisition of genuine financial literacy.

When trading online with iFOREX, you operate from an environment that’s geared around enhancing your financial literacy in every sense. iFOREX trading enriches your experience with a library of educational materials offered in the form of PDF guides, video tutorials, and even one-on-one coaching. The interface on the platform gives you real-time quotes you can rely on for hundreds of tradable instruments in all industries. Visit the iFOREX website to find out more.

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