How to Monitor Stocks

Video Transcript

"My name is Julie Asti. I'm a certified financial planner with Asti Financial Management. And I'm here to talk about how to monitor your stock portfolio. There are a few ways that you can monitor your stock portfolio. If you own stocks through a brokerage account, a Morgan Stanley, a Smith Barney or even a Schwab or a Fidelity, you could access your account online and they will a listing of all of the holdings that are in your portfolio, that will be updated with market prices. If it's a mutual fund it'll be updated once a day when the market prices posts. If it's a stock portfolio, it will be updated throughout the day based on the current market value of the stock. So that's a way for you to get a quick snapshot of what's in your portfolio, and what the market values of or your portfolio on a daily basis. There are other ways that can get a little bit more information. Some of the brokerage firms will provide you with in depth analysis, analyst reports, earnings reports, research reports on the stocks that you're holding, from their sites that you can click through on the stocks and you can do research on your individual holdings. Other - there are other tools that provide you with more stock monitoring, stock analysis tools. Some of the companies that do this would be MSN Money, Yahoo Finance or Morning Star. Those are three good sites. What they will allow you to do is online you can go ahead and enter in your mutual fund or you stock ticker symbols, and you can create a customized portfolio that you would name Stock Portfolio One, Mutual Portfolio One, and you'd have a whole - a listing of a all of your different holdings that would be updated with all the market prices at the end of the day, and for stocks throughout the day. But then they also provide you with a variety of tools where you can chart the performance of your chart portfolio against a chosen index, you can do, look backwards and do what the portfolio - how it would have performed over the last year, the last three years, five years, there are a lot of different analytical tools that you can use in your portfolio to get a lot more information. You can also do some forward charting as well. So those are three good sites that you can check out that will help you do a lot more in depth stock research and analytics, if you're just looking for monitoring of your portfolio just to get a snapshot of the current value and the current market price. You can usually do that through your brokerage firm's website. My name is Julie Asti, I'm with Asti Financial Management, I'm a certified financial planner, and you can learn more about my company or my services at www.astifinancial.com."