We had a great time building the Stockal Chrome Plugin for Yahoo Finance, Google Finance and MarketWatch. It’s sorta like taking a plain landscape or a bland dish and a dash of razzmatazz to it. A lot of people are still uninvested or under-invested and some of you might think that the boom time is over with the last year having gone relatively well for the markets. But, in fact, if you are looking at a mid-to-long-term investing horizon (which is what you should have anyway if you’re just getting started as an investor) then this is a good time to be looking at stocks with the following broad expectations: (a) as a source of additional income through dividend payouts from stable cash rich companies that have a history rewarding their investors with dividends, (b) long term capital growth on the back of high-growth companies that are likely to shape the future.
Knowing, smartly, that this is a good time to be in the markets, if you are already a user of popular finance websites such as Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, MarketWatch and others, we have created just the tool to add a nice flavor to your experience on these sites – Stockal Chrome Plugin. And this piece is about how you can make the best use of Stockal Plugin to uncover great investing opportunities and make better investing decisions.
Ideas are at the core of a successful investing life
An area where destinations like Yahoo/Google Finance, MarketWatch and MorningStar don’t quite live up to expectations is discovery of new investing opportunities. A lot of stock lists you see there show up once those stocks have already moved significantly – useful sometimes but not always and certainly not enough. If you know what you are watching, then these are good places to get aggregated news and data but what if you didn’t know which stocks to follow!
Stockal’s Plugin constantly shows two pieces of data that are useful in this context. It has a running feed of trending stocks that gets generated based on what other investors are talking about and trading on, and how analyst opinion for them is shaping-up. It’s more holistic than systems which surface stocks just on the basis of trading volumes or social chatter. The other thing this plugin does for you is show you stocks that you might find interesting based on whatever stock you are looking at. Kinda like Amazon showing you additional products for every product you browse through.
Best decisions are made with holistic data
Neither your broker nor Yahoo/Google Finance gives you enough investing intelligence to help you make a well rounded decision. Ok, they all give you price and news but is that enough? We’re not talking about premium account holders who may get access to analyst reports, human advisors and other support services here. We’re talking about investors who are young and fresh and do not have a lot of money invested. Yet. Stockal’s Plugin adds three critical pieces of intelligence to your Yahoo/Google Finance or MarketWatch stock pages – (a) Expert Opinion – this is a unique investing parameter called Confidence Meter, which is based on what various Wall St analysts (the likes of Jefferies, Goldman Sachs etc.)are saying about the stock (b) Social Media Pulse and Sentiment Index – these parameters include what almost all other stock trackers ignore .. your peers! What are other investors saying about the stock you’re interested in, how they feel about it, are they really interested in the stock and the company. (c) Revenue Prediction – what better than to know how a company is likely to perform in the future, especially you are looking at a long-ish term investment.
As you can see, much as we hate to boast, Stockal completes these websites! Add the Chrome plugin and use it to discover more stocks and make smarter decisions. And you’re set. Happy investing!