6 Easy Ways to Keep up With the Stock Market

By
Angie Mohr
Full Bio
Angie Mohr, CPA, CA, and CMA, has 18+ years of experience as a freelance finance writer. She is the author of Money$marts and Piggy Banks to Paycheck.
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Updated April 19, 2022
Reviewed by Margaret James

Being a smart investor means keeping up with current events and how they might impact the stock market. In today's environment, we have news available to us 24 hours a day, on television, computers, and probably most importantly, smartphones.

Even if your investments are focused on companies in one country, the connected global economy can mean that events across the world can impact the stock market. Or you might find that local regulations and changes can impact much larger, national companies. The difficult part is sorting through all of the available news to get to the updates that are most salient to your life. To keep up with the stock market, use these six means of keeping up with news on the go.

Key Takeaways

  • No matter where you hold investments, they can be impacted by global, national, and local changes.
  • Investors must keep up with current events to protect their investments and financial security.
  • To receive immediate news relating to your investments or the markets, combine customized alerts with regular news coverage.
  • Follow companies' social media accounts to learn about important changes or updates that impact investors.

News Websites

There are thousands of news websites you can follow or subscribe to in order to stay informed. Many also have social media presences and daily, topical newsletters you can subscribe to.  You can choose homegrown sites or English-language news sites from around the world.

The most important stories will be listed first. Examples of sites that offer 24/7 news coverage are CNN, BBC, The New York Times, Reuters, and The Globe and Mail.

Most sites allow you to personalize your page so that you see important categories first.

News Aggregators

Sites like Google News and Street Sleuth gather news and financial data from all over the web and organize it for you. The major benefit of these sites is that you can discover new online sites and blogs that you may not have been aware of before, particularly those focusing on international news and markets.

News Tickers

Several news websites give you the option of downloading a program to your computer that runs a news ticker along the top or bottom while you are working. If you are an active trader, this news feed often appears on your brokerage trading pages.

You can customize many of these tickers to only include certain types of news, such as business or celebrity news. This allows you to passively monitor news headlines while you are working on something else. Clicking on one of the ticker headlines will bring you to the news site for the full version of the article. On Investopedia, you can create your own watchlists for the stocks and ETFs you want to follow and we'll send you e-mail alerts when there is news on the companies you care about.

Podcasts

If you prefer hearing your news and current events rather than reading them or, for example, if you have a long commute, you can load up your smartphone with audio updates of breaking news and investing trends and listen to them on your own schedule.

News podcasts can include replays of interviews and newscasts, or they may be a daily or weekly summary of recent events. These are usually better for longer-term investments, as the delay between the news, recording, releasing, downloading, and listening is well beyond the time allotted to make a quick trade. Many of these podcasts focus specifically on financial news.

Customized Alerts

If you want to get all the news about a certain subject regardless of the source, you can sign up for a service that provides customized alerts, such as Google Alerts or Feedly. You select the subject or keywords that you want to follow. Using a combination of algorithms and AI, these sites then constantly scan multiple spots on the internet for news relating to those topics. Places that these sites can include news websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media.

For example, if you want to keep up on the ongoing drought around the world and its impact on food prices, you can set up an alert on the keywords, "drought food prices," and you will get updates on articles with those three words in it. You can also restrict your alerts to certain types of content, such as images, video, or news.

For Google Alerts, you can set your preferences to get updates as they are found or in a daily journal format. Feedly allows you to see your topics in an online account or through their app. These alerts can be used in combination with any of the news sources listed above to keep you regularly informed about breaking news and important changes that may impact your investments.

Social Media

Many companies will release important news on their social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. You can follow these accounts for updates and changes that may impact your investments.

You can also use social media to follow experts in finance, the stock market, or specific industries where you invest. Often, these experts will predict changes or notice trends before any information is released by the companies themselves.

How Can I Start Investing in the Stock Market?

You can start investing in the stock market by opening a brokerage account. If you are a beginner, focus on mutual funds, which can help you diversify your portfolio, rather than picking individual stocks. You don't need much money to begin; micro-investing apps allow you to start investing for as little as $5.

Should I Pick My Own Stocks?

Stock picking is also known as active investment management. While some people can use it successfully, it is often prone to human errors and biases that make it a less profitable investment strategy in the long-term. Stock picking regularly underperforms a passive investing strategy that simply tracks broad stock market indexes.

What Does It Mean to Be a Smart Investor?

A smart investor isn't necessarily someone who can make money instantly or always pick the newest hot stock. Instead, a smart investor is usually someone who watches for overall trends and invests with a long-term strategy. Smart investors use their financial resources to invest continuously, diversifying their investment portfolio to build wealth over many years.

The Bottom Line

Any investments can be impacted by current events on a global, national, or local scale. Keeping up with the news is an important part of being a smart investor. You can use a variety of news sources to monitor what is happening in the world, including news sites, aggregators, and tickers. Combine this with customized alerts that aggregate news related to keywords or topics that you choose to help you keep track of what matters to your investments.

An immediate way to keep track of individual companies is to follow their social media accounts, as this is where they disseminate immediate information and keep investors updated. You can also follow industry experts who provide valuable insight and predictions.

Article Sources
Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work. These include white papers, government data, original reporting, and interviews with industry experts. We also reference original research from other reputable publishers where appropriate. You can learn more about the standards we follow in producing accurate, unbiased content in our editorial policy.

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