The Investment U E-Letter: #341
Thursday, May 27, 2004

12 Resources We Rely On
What we’re reading to stay a step ahead of the masses
By Dr. Steve Sjuggerud
 President, Investment U

I’m often asked what resources I check every day to stay on top of the markets as there’s so much information out there and yet so little knowledge.

Today I’ll share what we read in the office every day and every week (the non-book stuff, in other words) so we don’t miss a thing

 On a daily basis, nothing beats the Financial Times (www.ft.com) – the peach-colored newspaper out of London. You know what’s going on in news, business, and investing, from an international perspective. We also thumb through the Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com) and read a few stories. As an individual investor, if you can read each of these at least once a week, you’ll have a huge advantage over the investing herd

Or you could just read these weeklies On a weekly basis, The Economist magazine (www.economist.com) is exceptional when it comes to knowing what’s going on in the world. For investments, we flip the pages of Barron’s (www.barrons.com), mostly enjoying the interviews. On a monthly basis, we generally thumb through Fortune (www.Fortune.com) and Forbes (www.Forbes.com). We don’t read that many newsletters in our office, believe it or not. And the ones we read are not the ones you might expect

Popular letters in our office are Richard Russell’s Dow Theory Letters (www.dowtheoryletters.com) and Marc Faber’s Gloom, Boom, and Doom Report (www.gloomboomdoom.com). We don’t really read these for the advice but more for the long-range perspective. These are not essential for you.

One daily letter that is particularly useful is The Gartman Letter. Anyone trading in the short-term without it is trading at a severe disadvantage. Dennis Gartman somehow is able to deliver a full newsletter to my e-mail inbox every day around 5:30 in the morning with tidbits and insights that very few are reporting on. It’s not cheap but if you’re trading in size, it’s worth it.

For tracking your stocks and for following the news on them, Yahoo! does a great job, for free. The guys in our office use it (http://finance.yahoo.com).

For tracking our trailing stops in the office, we use XLQPlus, which you can try for free for 45 days (www.qmatix.com). For daily information and news on gold and precious metals, use Kitco (www.kitco.com).

Well that should be plenty to keep you busy. And (with the exception of the newsletters), these things won’t cost you an arm and a leg most of it is probably available for free at your local library

We’ve talked a lot in the past about the great books to give you investment perspective. But we hadn’t talked about what we look at every day, to stay on top of the markets. Now you know

By sticking with the information-resources above, you’ll be focused on the best research and writing out there. You won’t waste your time reading things that aren’t useful, or worse, things that could lose you money. I’ll let you get to your reading

Today’s IU Cribsheet

• Above I mentioned the Gartman Letter. For more information, and a possible free trial, contact dennis@TheGartmanLetter.com

Good investing,

Steve

Related Articles:

• Stock and Investment Resources: What I Rely On Every Day

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