Businessweek’s New Company Insights Center

If you do much investing and are looking for new sources of information, check out Businessweek's new Company Insights Center. It has all the usual financial information, news, and analysis you would expect to see in a tool like this, but everything is very slick and easy to use. Plus, there is information about employees and compensation that I haven't seen in most free tools. If you are like me and lean towards a focused portfolio and value investing style (I only own six stocks in my main account), then you probably spend lots of time on research. This is an excellent tool for that. It's much more useful for fundamental analysis than for technical analysis.

Other recent stories

WallStrip: Brokers Gone Wild

If you don't watch WallStrip regularly, you should make an exception and watch this very funny episode about Dow 13,000. The show plays off of the "Girls Gone Wild" theme with "Brokers Gone Wild." Wallstrip has done some very creative…

Eddie Lampert Creates a New Type of Security

When I was in business school, one of my professors told me that Coca-Cola was the most recognized brand in the world and, as such, could lose all their physical assets and still take out a $1 billion loan against…

Has Warren Buffett’s Management Style Goosed Returns?

I've been reading The Warren Buffett CEO and there was an interesting chart about the yearly returns for Buffett, Peter Lynch, and Lou Simpson. I uploaded the data to Swivel (YouTube for data, as they call it) to play with…

Want a Good IPO? Research Says You Need a Simple Name

I keep waiting for someone to tell me this is a hoax. The ease of pronouncing the name of a company and its stock ticker symbol influences how well that stock performs in the days immediately after its initial public offering,…

Irrational Exuberance…Again?

Are we still irrationally exuberant? One of the most important lessons you can ever learn about markets is also one of the easiest to forget: Just because prices are more reasonable than they were doesn't mean they're reasonable. I'm sorry to…

Is Globalization Impacting Value Investing?

Interesting post about value investing and globalization. Lots of comments there, but they are worth reading through.

Can Brain Damage Make You a Better Investor?

Interesting article in the WSJ today. People with certain kinds of brain damage may make better investment decisions. That is the conclusion of a new study offering some compelling evidence that mixing emotion with investing can lead to bad outcomes. By linking…

KMart Stock Scam

Do movies encourage people to engage in violent behavior? I don't know, but they can definitely encourage people to engage in stock scams. Companies worry about whether their employess have their hands in the till. Then there's the scheme cooked up…

TradeStation and BackTesting

I saw an advertisement today for TradeStation. Overall it sounds like a very good platform for trading, but one of the key points of the ad made me laugh. TradeStation offers you the ability to develop a rule based strategy…

The Importance of Quality Earnings

Forbes has a nice piece about looking beyond earnings to see whether or not they are hiding potential problems. Krispy kreme doughnuts is the latest illustration of the fact that stunning earnings growth can mask a lot of trouble. Not long…

Human Behavior and Investment Activity

Here is a nice piece about some irrational decisions by investors and the way they affect the markets. Understanding human behavior is crucial for investors, according to Alliance Capital Management CEO Lewis A. Sanders, who talked about behavioral finance and its…

Google IPO

Businessweek Online is getting in on the Google action. Read all about how it works, and what the experience is like.

Buffett on Dividends

David Foster has some thoughts on Kerry, Buffett, and dividends. Warren Buffett has signed on as an economic advisor for Kerry. One of Buffett's arguments is that the dividend tax reduction is "class welfare--for my class." If Berkshire Hathaway were to…

Google Tells Wall Street to…

As you all probably know by now, Google file for an IPO today. What you may not know is that they still refuse to pander to Wall Street. "Google is not a conventional company," wrote co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page,…

Business Notes

The NYT reports that the minimum wage was just increased. Inflation, anyone?

Congress may approve "the biggest overhaul of mortgage financing since the New Deal."

The government is acknowledging the suffering of business owners everywhere by raising the gas deductible by eight cents.

The Metropolitan Money Store defrauded potential foreclosure victims out of millions of dollars by setting up fake loans and inflated appraisals. Ouch.

The Fed, in a determined effort to control inflation, said today it would "strongly resist" inflationary pressures on the economy. Translation: interest rates are going up in the not-to-distant future.

... More Biznotes

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