After writing my last post on the Fed I thought it might also be helpful to include some current market data for the economy. So included in my links section on the right side of the page is one called Market Data. This link leads to the Wall Street Journal’s market data center where you can easily look up several different and important current market indicators.
Some of the most important listed are the current DJ Industrials, S&P 500, Treasury Bills, futures for commodities such as oil, currency exchange rates, and of course the federal funds rate from my last post along with the prime rate. These are not even close to the only data listed on this page and I hope you will find some of it useful for decision making.
Categories: Economics · Finance
Tagged: Economics, education, Finance, government, life, market, money
After researching the many different available online brokers I have reached the decision to open an account with TradeKing. Although TradeKing may not be the best choice for everyone, I do think that it will be the best choice for me and the majority of other people wondering what online broker to go with. In choosing an online broker I tried to find the cheapest one with the most features and ease of use. TradeKing has all the available features of any of the more expensive ones out now allowing you to buy/sell stocks, funds, ETF’s, and also allows you to reinvest your dividends which I believe will be a key part to a lot of my portfolio strategy.
The other brokers that I looked at were E*Trade, Ameritrade, and Scottrade. Of these, Ameritrade appeared to be the most comprehensive and I believe it is the largest online broker in the United States, however, it does cost more than TradeKing or Scottrade. Scottrade has no fees that I could find and looked like a good choice until I realized you could not buy/sell ETF’s or reinvest dividends. E*Trade just had a mix of fees and higher prices and I really did not look at it for that long. If you are unsure about what broker to use I would recommend looking at Scottrade because it does look like good value if you are not planning to use all the tools that TradeKing comes with.
Categories: Finance
Tagged: Economics, education, Finance, life, money, online, thoughts, trade, Web
