10 Ways I Keep Up With My Stocks
This post summarizes ways that I keep tabs on the companies I'm holding in my investment portfolio. I tend to hold stocks for a long time, regardless of stock price movements. It helps to see the whole picture, industry, customer mentality and metrics like free cash flow and profits. These are ways I try to glean insights into a company's future potential or lack thereof.
Here are 10 ways I keep up with my stocks:
- Use a Charles Schwab investor checking account to buy assets + make trades.
- Watch CNBC for free in the Charles Schwab mobile app.
- Track dividends received in Charles Schwab account.
- Use Google Finance to manage watchlists and monitor daily prices. Schwab also has a watchlist but I prefer Google Finance's UI for watching short term price movements.
- Observe the company "in the wild".
- If public, visit the company and observe what you see. Is it a well run operation? Are customers happy?
- Note the frequency you see people choosing the company's products day to day.
- Bonus points if you are the customer, you know intimately what value the company is creating.
- Earnings calls: listen to the call live or most companies post the call transcript online.
- Read investing blogs and books from the greats. I subscribe to my followed blogs via an RSS feed. Here are a few I recommend:
- The Reformed Broker, Josh Brown
- Of Dollars and Data, Nick Magiulli
- Benjamin Graham, Intelligent Investor
- Peter Lynch
- Warren Buffett
- Monitor sentiment with Twitter and Reddit. Read the Twitter cashtags for individual stocks and browse social media for overall sentiment monitoring. Beware there are emotional posters with an agenda, opinion or position that may contradict yours. I find it useful for gaining a sense of general feelings about the market or shares in a company.
- Use finance Python libraries, like yfinance to see more complex financial calculation about a stock. I wrote in depth about the endless tools you can apply for financial calculation here on my other blog.
- Talk to people about their investments. What are they investing in? What's working for them? What are they excited about? They have a perspective that differs from yours that exposes you to a new concept or industry.