You can get stock quotes just about anywhere nowadays and there is no shortage of finance information and business news to accompany them. The brokerages, stock exchanges, finance sites, news networks, online portals, and even search engines all want your attention and they will throw just about any information they can find at you to get it. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, I use half-a-dozen different sites just to keep up. I’ve rounded up my three favorite for a quick review.

Nasdaq.com - This is what I started using first and I’ve gotten pretty used to it. It has all the numbers and filings in a very quick and easy to use format. Balance sheets, income statements, financial ratios, consolidated analyst recommendations, and all the basic information is just a click away in their handy company drop down menu. When I want to check up on company financials, this is usually my first stop. They also have a real-time intra day chart of the market indexes on their front page that provides little useful information, but some days I just can’t look away.

Google Finance - Unfortunately this search engine’s dominance in everything online has yet to spread to its finance offerings. They miss the mark in a number of areas, but once you’ve seen a Google stock graph I dare you to ever use another. Their graphs don’t show anything the others don’t, but they do it in a way that I can’t help but play with for hours. I also use their portfolio tracker so I don’t have to sign in to my brokerages accounts every time I want to see a consolidated performance update. It’s mediocre at best and leaves a lot to be desired (splits and dividends are ignored and their performance calculations are less than perfect), but it fits in nicely with my other Google services and I don’t know of a better tracker (other than the one I wrote for this site, of course). It would be incredibly cool if their graphing utility worked with my portfolio instead of just stocks, hint hint.

Motley Fool’s Caps - The Motley Fool is no stranger to the investment industry, but their new caps site is leading the way in providing useful stock information. They have all the standard information but its presented in a way that gives Nasdaq.com a run for its money and they calculate more financial ratios than I imagined existed. The real value, however, comes from something else no other site has: the collective opinions of 40-thousand investors. The site tracks the stock predictions of its members and rates their performance before combining all that information into a rating for the stock that is weighted by the success of the investor. I think there are still some design issues in their rating algorithm, but they’re always updating it so it can only get better.

What’s most important isn’t actually the stock rating though, it’s the stock ‘pitches’ (either positive or negative) that every member can write to accompany their prediction. They allow anyone to peer into the minds of all kinds of investors and get an idea of what the general market is thinking rather than just what it is doing. That is invaluable information for someone trying to outsmart everyone else :) You can also check out all my stock predictions and pitches on my member profile.

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