Investing in the stock market can be a daunting experience. I spent years being put off starting my investing portfolio, simply because I was scared and didn’t know where to start. I realized after doing research and looking at investing advice websites the stock market wasn’t so scary after all. That’s why I wanted to put this list together of the best investing advice websites that helped me on my journey to financial freedom. I hope they can help you too!
With these sites, you can find out expertly research stock picks that might help you in your investment goals, improve your investing knowledge or just keep up to date with the stock market.
Motley Fool Stock advisor
The Motley Fool stock advisor is a well-respected stock picking service with a nearly 30-year track record. It’s a service I have used over the past few years and found it to be very informative and useful in my investing journey.
In my opinion, Stock Advisor is one of the best options for new and experienced investors since you’ll get access to several investing ideas as soon as you subscribe. It made my best investing advice websites list because I’ve just found it invaluable to getting started, 90% of my portfolio has come through this service.
What’s included in Motley Fool Stock Advisor?
Want to know more? Related article Motley Fool Stock Advisor Review
Stock Advisor Investment Philosophy
One of the reasons I joined Stock Advisor was because I believed in the philosophy, it isn’t a get quick rich scheme but long-term strategy. You will need to be comfortable holding a stock pick for the next three to five years, which is considered more for the value investor.
Each Stock Advisor pick recommends a company with multi-year growth potential. All stock picks are modeled after the investment philosophies of David and Tom Gardner, the co-founders of The Motley Fool.
Although you don’t have to buy every recommendation, you need to buy several of them if you want to get value from this service. In fact, they say you should have at least 15 in your portfolio at any given time.
Stock Advisor only recommends you sell a stock when it appears the company won’t outperform the market for the next three to five years. They will actually email you if they decide to sell a pick for unforeseen circumstances.
How much does Stock Advisor cost?
There are 2 options available for you to get the Motley Fool Share Advisor Service. First, you can get the monthly option of $39, but I would strongly advise against this.
From a financial perspective, the idea of this service is to bring you more wealth and the most back from your investments so a monthly fee of $39 is going to eat into your profits. If you are worried about the if the service is right for you then my advice would be to get the annual and take advantage of the 30-day money-back guarantee.
The normal price of the annual option is $199 however right now you can get the annual option 50% off through this link. The annual option for me was no brainier. I’ve been able to make back to the cost of the service 4 x over within months.
Of course, this is just my experience and as always depends on the amount you invest, etc. But for me $99 works out at less than $9 a month, I spend more than that a month on coffee! And this service makes me money.
Google Finance
Once I had a few stocks under my belt I found Google finance to be a useful tool to keep up to date with what’s going on. Its completely free to use and is simply a tool that provides real-time market quotes, international exchanges, up-to -date financial news, and analytics to help you make more informed trading decisions.
I also use it to track stocks I am considering investing in, and just to generally keep up to date and informed. It’s made the best investing advice websites list because it’s a great place to bring all of your investing interests into a one-pager!
How to use Google Finance
Simply to google.com/finance, make sure you are signed in to Google. If you don’t have a Google account you can sign up to one here.
Once you’re signed in its just case of creating your watch list of stocks. From this information Google will curate financial news content to match your stocks or just the most relevant news.
Then you have 4 tabs to work with:
- Market Summary – Where you can see a summary of everything that might interest you, Google will suggest stocks that you might be interested in.
- Your Stocks – Any stocks that you have decided to follow and and news that relates to your follow list
- Local Markets – this is specific to the country you are residing in and will give you local market news and trends on the total market you are in.
- World Markets – Everything thats going on across the globe, if you have stocks across different countries then you might find this tab useful.
In summary Google Finance is basic but its a great free tool that you can use on a every day basis to keep an eye on your stock portfolio, if you already use Google then it’s just integrated in to a system you already use.
Investopedia
Investopedia for me was and still is a fantastic resource. Whether you are a beginner or experienced investor you should definitely take advantage of the features Investopedia has to offer including an educational database, market news articles, and investing simulator. It has to be in the best investing advice websites simply because there is so much to gain from this site!
I know I appreciated the no-cost educational resources that many free investing apps don’t offer. You can learn about investing terms and strategies.
You also have the option to try the investing simulator where you can play with a $100,000 simulated investment for free. This is great as you can try some of the investment suggestions, you can see how they play out with these simulated trades first. You can also play this as a game and compete with other investors daily to build up your confidence
You can also read market news articles that tell you what’s happening in the stock market and select industries. These articles may also list stocks that are benefiting or hurt by market events. Of course Investopedia will never actually tell you which stocks to buy or sell, its there for information only.
If you are looking for which stocks to actually buy that have been vetted then Motley Fool is the site to check out, but Investopedia is still great to use as a base for learning.
Yahoo! Finance
Another free tool, both Yahoo! Finance website, and app are pretty good tools to have under your belt. With the Yahoo! Finance app you have the ability to add your favorite stocks to follow, Yahoo! finance will then send you notifications if the stock has reached a new high or low.
I must admit its quite a good day when I get a notification to say my stock has reached a new high.
Recommendation charts
Although this shouldn’t be the only way you value a stock, its quite a good feature that Yahoo! offer. You can see the financials of a company, who owns the stocks and analysts ratings. You just need to be mindful that some less popular stocks have not so many analysts look at them so you can’t really trust the data 100% – use it as a guide to compare with other sites you use.
Detailed statistics
Free of chart on the app and website, although I personally prefer to use the app (less ads) you can see income statements, balance sheets, cash flows. All of this data can help you decide if this stock is right for you.
Want to learn how to assess a stock? – check out some of these books
News
Yahoo! finance of course first and foremost is a news website, so on top of the stocks information you do get a news feed to keep you up to date on the latest news from around the stock market.
This is great just to keep you up to date and will help improve your knowledge over time.
Morning Star
Not what I have used personally but would be unfair to not include in this article to give you an overview of sites that many people use. Founded in 1984 Morningstar is an investment research and management firm based in Chicago, US.
This is a premium paid for service which gives you access to features such as:
- A collection of Premium-only stock screeners anchored by Morningstar’s industry-leading research from more than 150 independent analysts
- Premium-only ratings and valuations compiled by the Morningstar team
- Investment monitoring tools that help you assess overall portfolio quality and performance
What’s the price of Morningstar Premium membership?
Premium memberships are available at the following term lengths and prices:
$29.95 for monthly $199 for annual $349 for two-year and
$449 for three-year.
So compared to Motley Fool this is a lot more expensive, in fact, double the cost. So far I haven’t found a need to switch from Motley Fool Stock advisor as the service has served me well for half the cost.
The main advantage to Morningstar is you do have the ability to monitor your stocks which Motley Fool doesn’t do (you can monitor all of their picks but if not ones you do outside of the service) there is also the access to a 14 day trial.
Learn more about Morningstar here.
Wall Street Journal
You can’t do the best investing sites without mentioning the Wall Street Journal (WSJ for the cool kids). The Wall Street Journal is the financial industries leading daily publication.
I would say this is probably the most specialised and trusted financial news website you can get. Much of the content on WSJ is written by staff reporters who have decades of experience which is a contrast to other websites where the source is not necessarily verified.
WSJ’s real differentiator, though, is a growing portfolio of internally produced columns, such as Heard on the Street and Wealth Adviser. You shouldn’t base your investing strategy solely on WSJ staff projections, but they provide insights you might miss elsewhere.
Like a lot of websites if you want full access you will need to pay, WSJ offers full access for $14.99 a month.
Learn from about WSJ here
Atom Finance
Atom Finance really deserves a place in the best investing advice websites. The site/app powerful investment research platform that’s free to join and use, though the paid version (Atom Premium) has a trove of premium features designed to give active traders an edge. Atom’s mission is to provide unparalleled access to institutional investing resources and tools.
What’s special about Atom Finance is that if you have stocks that you quite fancy investing in the platform will help you make you own mind up by presenting you with the facts and figures about the company.
In Atom Finance free version you get:
- Breaking news and alerts
- Daily market briefings
- Real-time stock quotes
- Historical company financials
- Portfolio Account aggregation
- Chat with other investors
For $9.99 a month with Atom premium you get:
- Detailed price change explanations delivered straight to your phone
- Pre- and post-earnings commentary
- Analysis of formal and informal corporate actions, including M&A announcements and rumors
- Concise highlights from institutional research reports
- Regular price target updates
- A vast trove of stock and company data
- And much more
For a free to join platform Atom really does give you value for money and should be something you consider using. Even on the free version, you can get lots of value. And access to other investors to talk to and discuss your investing strategies.
Zacks investing research
An independent market research outfit known for detailed, engagingly written stock and fund picks that often go against the grain of conventional wisdom. Zacks is one of the largest providers of independent stock, ETF, and mutual fund research in the U.S
Investars, an independent rating organization, has named Zacks to the Top 5 in quantitative research from 2015 through 2020.
Zacks’ website has a pretty extensive archive of free content for casual investors, including articles, video commentary, and even podcasts covering a variety of topics.
Investors who become free Profit from the Pros members can access even more content and tools, such as a portfolio tracker, a customizable stock screener with 100+ criteria, and the Bull Stock of the day.
For investors who crave more powerful tools to do their own research, the good stuff is inside Zacks Premium, which offers a risk-free 30-day trial period.
Zacks Premium includes:
- The Zacks #1 List, a roundup of top picks that’s more than doubled the performance of the S&P 500 since 1988.
- Zacks Premium Screener, with 45 predefined screens created to outperform the market.
- Style Scores, which rank all stocks on the Zacks #1 list for Value, Growth, and Momentum.
- The Focus List, a 50-stock portfolio featuring stocks with high long-term earnings potential. For investors looking to build diversified buy-and-hold portfolios, the Focus List is something close to a one-stop shop.
- Industry Rank, because research shows that stocks in the top 50% of industries beat stocks in the bottom 50% by a factor of 2.
- The Zacks Earnings Expected Surprise Prediction (ESP) Filter, which identifies stocks with the highest probability of upside earnings surprises (and the accompanying stock-price surges).
- Equity Research Reports for more than 1,000 of the most widely followed stocks.
As of this writing, Zacks is ranked #2 in quantitative research over the past 6 years by Investars. On a pure performance basis, Zacks is hard to beat.
Zacks will give you more timely investing tips that Motley and probably more suited to those who want to trade longer term and short, it will however cost you more as the annual cost of the premium membership is $249.
CNBC
CNBC is the most-watched investing news channel. To save time (and the cost of a cable TV subscription), you can visit their website to read their numerous articles for free.
CNBC may be used as a research tool to understand the strengths and weaknesses of potential investments.
Like Yahoo! finance you can track your investment portfolio, the CNBC articles can help you quickly see if a stock remains a good investment.
Because CNBC is mostly news articles, make sure you take some prespective from what you read and do other research too. A news sites main purpose is to generate readership not investing advice so could cause you to make hasty decisions if you dont check the facts too.
AAii
You may have received envelopes in the mail from the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). Many people regard AAII as a respected source for learning how to invest in stocks, ETFs and mutual funds. You can also use their model investment portfolios as an example to build your own investment portfolio.
The American Association of Individual Investors is an independent, nonprofit corporation formed for the purpose of assisting individuals in becoming effective managers of their own assets through programs of education, information, and research. I have included this site as one of the best investing advice websites because it’s comprehensive and there is no real hidden agenda.
An annual subscription only costs $49 a year. This makes AAII one of the most affordable paid investment research sites.
AAII offers other newsletters that focus on investing strategies like dividend investing. If you like the basic AAII membership, you may want to consider adding these subscriptions later.
Even just using the free parts of the site AAII offers a trove of information that can help any investor.
Common questions
Are investment sites worth it?
Investments sites make buying the right stocks easier. For me they gave me confidence in the decisions I was making and have helped me build my knowledge up.
Using the best Investing sites can only help build better knowledge so that you make better decisions. If the investment site charges a fee, you must decide if the quality of research is worth the cost. When the answer is “yes,” you must decide if you will buy enough stocks to justify the fee.
For me personally I have been able to justify my subscription cost to Motley Fool not only have the educational resources helped me invest better but i have been able to make back the investment of subscription through the profits that their stocks picks have given me.
How to buy Individual stocks the right way
Since the launch of online brokers, its now easier than over to buy stocks yourself commission free. Unfortunately, brokers won’t provide individual advice, so it can be easy to make a risky portfolio. Here are some tips to help you take advantage of commission free trading without having a portfolio that looses money:
Build your knowledge
By the fact you are researching the best investment advice websites it sounds like you are already on your way with this one so congratulations! Keep going with this and it would pay off in profit later down the line.
I personally choose to read books and continue to do so. The 2 I would recommend initially are Rich dad, poor dad and Intelligent Investor. But there are many other ways to can keep topping up your knowledge so that you make better decisions check out some of the related articles below:
Related articles:
Best books on investing that everyone should read
Best ways to learn about investing
Invest for the long term
If you want to invest then do it for the long term to reap the rewards. You shouldn’t be dipping in and out with your money, this is how you make big losses.
Instead sound research first on the companies you are interested in investing in. A few questions to ask yourself at the companies you are looking at are:
Have a Diverse Portfolio
One of the reasons I believe I have been successful with my investments so far is that I have a diverse portfolio. Investopedia recommends having around 15-20 stocks to create a diverse portfolio.
So why should you take this advice? Well its all about damage limitation and playing the market. Some Stocks will be down whilst others will be up by having a good mix allows you to play your odds.
Sometimes unforeseen circumstances will happen even on the most reliable stocks so never put all of your money in one company. This is how people loose money on the stock market.
Want to see more tips check out this article on Investing for beginners
Bottom line
Whether you’re looking for a general guide and news to keep you up to date or someone to tell you which stocks to buy there are trusted investing websites that can help you.
If you’re looking for which stocks to buy and want someone to recommend you specifics then for me personally Motley Fool offers great value for money and has a great track record of delivering.
For keeping up to date with news there are lots of free websites that can help improve your knowledge and track your investment portfolio. Atom Finance and WSJ are some of my personal favourites!
What do you think? Are these your best investing advice websites? Let me know in the comments below!
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Thank you, new posts weekly 🙂
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Thanks, glad it was helpful 🙂