Top Five Investing Web Sites

If you go into my workshop you will see that I have tools on the wall, on the workbench and on various shelves. The tools I use most frequently are the ones I can easily reach. That is also true of my investment tools.

My Chrome browser is set to open a set of seventeen different websites when I start Chrome in the morning. These include GMAIL, Fidelity Investments, Facebook, WhatsApp and Google. But I also have a set of nine pages to get various bits of investment information. Today I will review the first five, and then in a future post I plan to talk about another four.

The five today are really three different websites, but I have three views that I use for my Seeking Alpha subscription. The first is Weiss Ratings. Although I no longer pay for the Weiss Subscription, I like to see their “Stock of the Day.” The following image shows today’s pick for CorEnergy Infrastructure Trust, Inc. Weiss rates it as a strong buy (A-).

A quick way to get an investment idea – Weiss Ratings.

I’ve talked about the REITNOTES tool before, and as an investor in REITs, I want to review the score and the elements that make up the score. Because I invest in Realty Income (O), I want to see a good score and the AFFO payout health and trend. I also like the ability to quickly get to the properties owned by Realty Income. This REIT has 5,876 properties in 49 states. Their occupancy rate is very high and includes tenants like Walgreens.

This is just a small portion of the great information at REITNOTES.

My third set of go-to web pages is Seeking Alpha. I have a premium subscription so that I can get more information than is available on the free service. The three pages that open automatically are my Portfolio Positions EARNINGS page, the Portfolio SUMMARY page and the Dividend Scorecard page, defaulting to Target (TGT). I chose these as my starting point because: 1) The earnings page shows me which positions in our portfolio will be reporting earnings during the week. 2) The summary page shows me the percent change and high-level ratings information and 3) The dividend page gives me the key elements a dividend-growth investor wants to see to determine if a stock is a good candidate as a long-term holding.