The Lemon Fool

What sources of info do you use to keep up with financial news?

Do you use free sites/news or paid subscriptions?

First thing that I check in the morning is the BBC's Market Data: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/market-data
I assume that US/Asia will influence London for the day.

I have a subscription to the Telegraph (mainly for the Money/Business sections).
I have foolishly followed some of Questor's suggestions in the past (hence my REITs).

Many thanks in advance

I don't track as much as I use to. Mostly via podcasts.

FT daily news briefing.
Investors Chronicle, both podcast and paid Magazine.
A J Bell's Money & Market podcast.
MoneyMakers podcast (Investment trust news).

I use to visit the BBC news website, but have stopped doing so. Useful for "mood music".

I have become less interested in stockmarket investment, so am not looking to invest in fast moving companies.

But then I'm in the de-accumulation phase, having given up work.

My main source is http://www.investegate.co.uk where I scan the RNS posts each morning, to see if any of the companies that I hold has made an announcement.

There are plenty of other websites which put out frequent emails updates, like ADVFN, Citywire, etc. The use of selective notifications can also help.

TJH

I forgot to mention that the Shares Magazine from AJBell is a useful read: https://www.ajbell.co.uk/sharesmagazine

I think that AJBell is quite informative: Market News: https://www.ajbell.co.uk/markets/latestnews

The AIC website has useful info for investigating ITs: https://www.theaic.co.uk/research-tools

tjh290633 wrote:My main source is http://www.investegate.co.uk where I scan the RNS posts each morning, to see if any of the companies that I hold has made an announcement.

I thought that was what Ian was for? C.

I second signing up to Investegate for getting emailed when companies you follow issue an RNS (it's free).

Seeking Alpha for American and Canadian shares. My best source for ideas by a long way.

CNBC TV often has good interviews with CEOs about their company's results. These are usually put up on their website

Investors Chronicle and The Economist are good places for ideas (companies and trends respectively).

Ian King on Sky News' financial reports is very good.

I often have Bloomberg TV on when I'm having my morning coffee and toast just to get a flavour of the mood in the market.

I use https://www.sharecast.com/news/ in the evening to catch up. I quite like the daily Market Close for that.
and a newspaper roundup in the morning: https://www.sharecast.com/news/press-round-up-short-premium

It also has daily and weekly tips (sorry, recommendations), which are always humourous to read
https://www.sharecast.com/news/broker-recommendations-
https://www.sharecast.com/news/tips-round-up-premium

sharecast is what used to be (or took over) http://www.digitallook.com/

(I have no connection with sharecast other than as a reader)

ukmtk wrote:What sources of info do you use to keep up with financial news?

Do you use free sites/news or paid subscriptions?

First thing that I check in the morning is the BBC's Market Data: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/market-data
I assume that US/Asia will influence London for the day.

I have a subscription to the Telegraph (mainly for the Money/Business sections).
I have foolishly followed some of Questor's suggestions in the past (hence my REITs).

Many thanks in advance

I think you first need to ask yourself what value such news adds to your investing? Most financial journalism is of truly dreadful quality, no matter whether on the BBC website or broadsheet newspapers. Most have no financial training and offer a useless cocktail of subjective opinions mixed with facts and, very often, the gross misuse of statistics. Unless you’re a day trader, what difference does it make any way?

As others have suggested, I would concentrate solely on news being reported by companies in which you have a direct interest using Investegate (if it works these days) or preferably, direct from the LSE website. Read what the CEO says in company statements and then judge him by his actions. I would then spend the rest of your time reading books, using a good source of company data for analysis, and learn to read a cash flow statement and balance sheet. Everything else is pretty much noise.

simoan wrote:

ukmtk wrote:What sources of info do you use to keep up with financial news?

Do you use free sites/news or paid subscriptions?

First thing that I check in the morning is the BBC's Market Data: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/market-data
I assume that US/Asia will influence London for the day.

I have a subscription to the Telegraph (mainly for the Money/Business sections).
I have foolishly followed some of Questor's suggestions in the past (hence my REITs).

Many thanks in advance

I think you first need to ask yourself what value such news adds to your investing? ...

Couldn't agree more. It's your time to waste of course but having worked in the City for 25 years (and I hold the same view in my new career/industry) what you see as news is in reality merely "noise". Very little that was reported had any value to me.

I don't bother to follow the financial news in any dilligent way. It usually doesn't mean much or help someone who just buys and sits on the shares for a long time.

I glance through the paper on Saturday, hear the Radio 4 business news fairly often and keep an eye on the things posted on Lemon Fool - and that's about it.

csearle wrote:

tjh290633 wrote:My main source is http://www.investegate.co.uk where I scan the RNS posts each morning, to see if any of the companies that I hold has made an announcement.

I thought that was what Ian was for? C.

Need a filter for that, so only the posts on companies of interest appear.

SalvorHardin wrote:I second signing up to Investegate for getting emailed when companies you follow issue an RNS (it's free).
.

Email may be the least-bad available but is the wrong medium for that. What I want is to be able to subscribe to a feed where I remain in control and pull relevant (as defined by my own filter) news, rather than have someone push it at me.

Investegate offered exactly that until about a year ago. Could've been improved by the ability to refine ones filter a bit better, but pretty useful and I miss it.

dealtn wrote:

simoan wrote:I think you first need to ask yourself what value such news adds to your investing? ...

Couldn't agree more. It's your time to waste of course but having worked in the City for 25 years (and I hold the same view in my new career/industry) what you see as news is in reality merely "noise". Very little that was reported had any value to me.

Well...

I didn't work in the city but as an Engineer. Some of the best value "financial" news that I read, came from trade journals. Of course reading how there was increasing use of a companies products in such a trade journal might be regarded as slightly different.

Sure most of the stuff in the "financial" press is noise.

However "control systems" often deal with noisy information. The simplest "filter" is to extract a historic average. So, is the reported story consistent with what it has been. Another "filter" is to compare the input with a predictive model. I'd argue that works less well with investment as the world changes. However it can work if you recognize that and investigate if the model (your understanding) needs to be changed. You may be familiar with the concept from DCF (discounted cash flow). News often causes that model to be revised.

UncleEbenezer wrote:

csearle wrote:I thought that was what Ian was for? C.

Need a filter for that, so only the posts on companies of interest appear.

If you select FTSE100 or FTSE250, it is easy to scan down the posts to look for companies of interest. You are only looking at titles, so the myriad of "Dealing in own shares" can be passed over as can other irrelevant posts. If one of your companies is involved in a takeover, you will be inundated.

You may be happy with that. I am not and prefer to do it my way. Cue for a song.

TJH

For my holdings, I have created a portfolio at ADVFN (https://uk.advfn.com/common/portfolio - free registration required). This shows if there are any RNS announcements for the holdings on the summary tab and there is a news tab which lists all of the announcements for the portfolio.

For general financial news, I mostly use the Guardian website. Their business coverage is pretty decent and their finance editor Nils Pratley is generally spot on with his analysis.

I use Yahoo finance where you can set up a portfolio of funds and indices to watch, as well as market news and a sub-menu of different financial subjects.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/

2 useful tools:

RSS, with an RSS reader of course, it allows you to monitor lots of sites with very little overhead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss

I check several hundred sites this way every few hours. By inspecting sites it's possible to see if they have a hidden rss feeds. I even suspect some sites don't know they are publishing an rss feed. Others publush their rss feed details.

Change dection io, monitoring web sites.

https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

If find this useful for fixed intrest intruments, where the news flow can be more opaque, and where I want to monitor the web sites of portfolio companies that are private/unlisted (of collective vehicles).

My scanner looks for changes once a day.

Both are useful if you don't want to get email updates or over share your email details.

It's possible to subscride to LSE RNS feeds via email, have your RSS feeds and output of changedetection all flow into an email client if you want to have something concise.

Myself, I use neomutt for my RNS, newsboat for RSS and firefox for changedetection and as my web browser for this set up.

I also use this all day:

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/new ... s-explorer

LSE news explore, lists all the RNS as they are published.

formoverfunction wrote:2 useful tools:

RSS, with an RSS reader of course, it allows you to monitor lots of sites with very little overhead

Exactly. RSS is the ideal medium for RNS announcements. Investegate used to provide it. So did the LSE, though their feed seemed prone to throwing too many wobblies.

It's possible to subscride to LSE RNS feeds via email, have your RSS feeds and output of changedetection all flow into an email client if you want to have something concise.

Erm, what? Is someone currently making RNS announcements available via RSS? Of course I could subscribe to them by email and then convert that to my own RSS feed, but having to subscribe to email defeats the purpose of that!