Keeping track of your wealth can be a simple matter of looking up the bottom line on a bank deposit book, checking a share price in the newspaper, or it can be a more complicated affair, like meeting with brokers and bankers and financial advisers who can provide a breakdown of every stock, share, pension fund and property portfolio you own. The richer you are, the more time-consuming the process. One of the attractions of direct share investment is that share prices are among the most transparent of all financial products, and their value can be established on any given day. If you are a big client that is, an institution which deals in large volumes of shares, or have a large personal portfolio, a company or a financial adviser can receive (on their client's behalf) the hefty weekly or monthly share price reports that the major stockbrokers send out. These reports provide an enormous amount of material about stock movements, trends and prices, but the Internet in the form of the Internet means that stock checking is no longer the prerogative of the rich: anyone with an office or home PC and access to the Web can check the daily activity of their stock portfolio and even set up a programme that gathers this information into a private, on-going progress report. First, about the equity reports sent out by the Irish stockbrokers: the big four Irish brokers publish regular detailed reports on the Irish market, usually including brief reports and analyses on international markets and major events that influence market movements. Davy produces a weekly book, NCB a fortnightly one while ABN AMRO and Goodbody produce monthly books. Apart from the commentaries at the beginning of these books, they are of limited use to anybody but the specialist investor who is comfortable with price-earnings ratio, dividend yields and the other mechanisms for evaluating whether a share is cheap or expensive. A bit more useful to the nonspecialist is the weekly note from Dolmen Investments, which dispenses with the technical stuff, and usually takes an emphatic approach to stock recommendations. Sometimes these are on the ball, sometimes the recommendations are best forgotten.
Dolmen's recent recommendation to sell Smurfit shares all the way down to 195p was hardly the greatest call. But at least Dolmen was prepared to use the unmentionable word "sell". Most brokers run a mile to avoid using the "sell" word usually camouflaging it with ridiculous jargon like "underweight", etc.
One reader with a portfolio of US stocks has asked how he can easily keep track of the share price movements. Given that this query came on email, this reader is well equipped to keep tracks of his US stock investments on the Internet, especially as the US markets are well served by the various net search engines.
From this reporter's experience, the Yahoo! finance Web page is probably the best for keeping track of stocks on the US markets, including the Irish stocks like Ryanair, Elan, CBT, Esat, Iona and newcomer ICON which are opting for Nasdaq listings.
The amount of information available on the Yahoo! site is mind-boggling. Apart from being very easy to use getting a stock's ticker symbol (the abbreviation used for Ryanair, for example, is RYAAY) is the simple first step. The site also provides far more than just the latest share price.
Do you want to graph your share movements over the past day, week, month, year? Want to get a list of the most recent company announcement and filings with the SEC? Or which brokers are recommending the stock? Some of the more popular stocks, including Irish ones, also have bulletin boards, where gossip can be swapped. The Smurfit bulletin board was deluged with gossip and rumours before and after the JS Corp/Stone merger was announced recently. More's the pity that this kind of information isn't available about the Irish stock market: by comparison to London and Wall Street, Anglesea Street is still in the technological stone age.
