Tap the Power of the Internet
by David L. Brown and Kassandra Bentley from Cyber-Investing
The personal computer revolution of the past twenty years has shattered a lot of barriers, including the one between Wall Street and Main Street. A decade ago Wall Street had a lock on the kind of information needed to make a truly informed decision about trading stocks. It took a lot of manpower to research a stock and enormous computing power to manipulate that research into usable data. Few individual investors could afford to do it. Instead, they relied on stockbrokers at major brokerage house who had access to large research staffs and mainframe computers. The PC and the information explosion of the past few years have changed all that.
Today, from Sioux City, Iowa to San Antonio, Texas, from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, the information superhighway leads directly to Wall Street. With cyber-investing you can retrieve in seconds price and volume information for virtually any listed stock. You can plot intraday stock graphs or historical graphs for one week or one month, one year or twenty. You can see a company's earnings the minute they're released. You can obtain earnings estimates made by independent analysts for the next quarter, the next year, the next five years. You can read research reports written by professional analysts and inspect corporate financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). You can consult forecasts by experts on where they think a stock is headed. You can even learn which corporate insiders are buying or selling their company's stock, how many shares they bought or sold, the price they paid, and the size of their current holdings!
This is cyber-investing. Cyber-investing levels the playing field and makes it possible for an individual investor with a PC to do as well in the stock market as the experts on Wall Street. If you doubt this, listen to what Peter Lynch, the former manager of Fidelity Magellan Mutual Fund, has to say in his best-selling book, One Up On Wall Street:
The amateur investor has numerous built-in advantages that, if exploited, should result in his or her outperforming the experts, and also the market in general.
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