Friday, March 8, 2013

Morningstar Investment Research Center

On this the 8th day of March in the 196th year of the New York Stock Exchange, I thought I'd blog a little bit about the Dick Smith Library's Morningstar database. It's our #1 database to go to for NYSE information, and, if you're a Finance major, you'll definitely be using it quite often.

This database can be quite overwhelming at first, especially if you're a beginner. However, Morningstar has a very useful tab that will help you navigate the database more easily. It's too easy to just jump in too fast and too soon and find yourself lost in the middle of a ton of information that is not easily understood if you're not careful. I suggest looking at Morningstar's Help & Education tab first. They have user guides and quick guides as well as online tutorials and glossaries to help with specific investment terms. They also provide database training webinars and online courses devoted to specific areas that only take up about 10 minutes of your time and have a quiz at the end.

Morningstar provides individualized company profiles showing the status of a company's stock through the years as well as providing specific articles from financial analysts predicting a company's future and giving a heads-up as to what is going on within that company. Morningstar also rates each of these companies based on a comparison between a stock's current market price and Morningstar's assessment of that stock's fair market value. This makes it easier to choose which stocks you may or may not want to invest. It also provides comprehensive financial information on mutual funds, and it allows you to create your own Portfolio as a test-drive. So, if you just want to practice investing to get the hang of things, it allows you put together your own portfolio and track it over a certain amount of time.

Check it out if you're interested. It's located on the Library's A-Z Database page.

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