where do i find help for the average (small) investor?

Question

also the relative strength ratings for stocks

Answer 1

Yahoo! Finance (there, I plugged the sponsor :-) has a good suite of tools you can use to get a fair amount of background data, including historical prices, various calculations about the stock's valuation, and more. Their newest charts are very useful, because you can compare several stocks (and the major indices as well) to look for trends, track prices, and the like.

If you use Quicken, you can use their proprietary Quicken.com Web site which includes some useful tools for small investors, including the Stock Evaluator. This walks you through the process of looking at growth trends, the company's financial health, management performance, and other measures of the stock's strength.

Even better is their "One Click Scorecard," which compares a stock you select against several industry leaders' criteria (Warren Buffett, Geraldine Hagstrom, and the Motley Fool). You can learn a lot not only about individual stocks, but also about how some of the more successful investors judge a company's performance and how they make decisions about investing. The One Click Scorecard is interesting at least in part because the three investment "experts" often disagree, sometimes radically, in their opinion of the same stocks.

Finally, you can subscribe to the Motley Fool Web site. Signing up is free and you get a useful weekly e-newsletter, with a not-too-objectionable ratio of useful information to ads for paid services. (They offer the usual amount of reports, seminars, books and the like which purport to give you inside information on new stocks, how to invest, and more.)

You can also get a good deal of historical information and charting data at the NASDAQ site, for stocks traded there; I haven't done this in several years but it was useful when I worked for a company that gave me stock options, traded on NASDAQ.

In the spirit of full financial disclosure, I have several memberships at various Yahoo sites (obviously including this one) and at the Motley Fool, and I used to work on Quicken.com. NASDAQ's site is free.