Research

I have a couple of friends that are interested in investing and the main question I always hear is: Where do you find high quality stocks to research and invest in? I'm not going to pretend to be a professional investor with unlimited resources. Professionals have team of analyists researching every stock imaginable. Lets be honest no one reading this has these kind of resources. I use 4 main sources; Books, Magazines, Internet, and TV.

I use the books to learn what type of stocks would be good to invest in. Some authors that come to mind are:
- Jim Cramer - Worked at Goldman Sachs and owned Hedge Fund
- Peter Lynch - Said to be best mutual fund manager of all time. 17% annualized for 20 years.

I also read a couple magazines. These keep you up to date on the newest tech and business stories and you can usually find a couple good stocks to invest in and some good economic commentary. I subscribe to:
- Business Week
- Popular Science
- Wired
- Money

CNBC is the best business/investing channel on TV. My favorite show is Mad Money with Jim Cramer @ 6pm Eastern. Their whole line up is based on investing and many of their shows are hosted or interview professionals, so just watching in will give you a lot of ideas. Also, watch the ticker at the bottom of the screen. If you see a stock that keeps showing up day after day and the price is going up, then thats a good sign that institutions are buying the stock and will usually be a good investment.

The last and most important resource is the internet. There are so many investment websites that I can't list them all. The ones i use are:

--TheStreet.com- This is owned by Jim Cramer. This guys amazing ok. Just do what he says and you'll make a lot of money. They have Mad Money recaps and blogs by Jim Cramer and many other investors. They also have ratings of stocks, which would be a easy way to check if your investments are sound.

--StockPickr.com- Subsidiary of TheStreet.com. This site is an "stock idea" website. It gives you access to what all the major mutual funds, hedge funds, and stock gurus are doing. So if you can't beat them- Join them.

--Caps.Fool.com- This is a stock community. The idea is that everyone rates stocks if they believe they will outperform or under perform the market. The old saying goes "two heads are better than one," well in this case there are thousands.

There are also many screeners, or programs that search for stocks based on your entered criteria. I haven't had any luck with these, but in theory they should work very well.

Well here are where i get most of my ideas. I'll probably have separate posts on all of these sources later on so i can give you more information on how to effectively use them. Remember, always make sure to do your own research before you buy a stock.