Reuters, bloomberg and wall street journal
Introduction
New articles will be added to this section on a regular basis. Please note that although many of the offers presented are free of charge, there are also paid versions of many of them, which of course offer considerably more functions. We will limit ourselves to the free versions, but you are of course free to subscribe to the premium versions and benefit from a wide range of additional options.
Today I’m going to introduce you to not just one, but three websites, I’ll call them the 3 wise men or the 3 classics. They are not stock screeners or larded with pretty charts, but rather classic news sites that provide a lot of useful and, above all, high-quality and up-to-date news about the economy, politics and stock markets. There are different versions for each region (e.g. Asia / Europe etc.), but we are of course concentrating on the North American versions.
What’s more, all three portals presented here also have excellent apps on Android/iOS. Personally, I like the Bloomberg app the best, but that’s a matter of taste. They are all well done!
Reuters
Reuters is actually the classic for news, not only for stocks and the like, but for all kinds of news around the globe.
As with all other general news websites, this provider is more of a Joe Average. The website is clean, the information is up to date, and of course you get much background information about politics, economy, technology, military conflicts and much more.
You can also search for individual stocks and get a rudimentary overview with simple charts and the most important headlines.
No question, Reuters does not offer a lot of information as an aid to investing, it is more suitable for a general up-to-date overview of the world situation, i.e. more focused on macro events.
Wall Street Journal (WSJ)
The Wall Street Journal regularly offers promotions that allow you to get started very cheaply (such as $1 per month) for at least the first year.
The site is very similar to Reuters, but you get a little more information when you call up a company. The charts and financial information are more detailed and you also get some basic technical information.
But here too, the focus is more on the generally interested investor and reader, and not on very detailed information to really make an investment decision. It contains a wide range of articles about other topics like entertainment, sports, fashion and style, healthcare and so on. What’s noteworty is that with the subscription you can get also a package with includes Marketwatch, another major investing platform.
Bloomberg
The third classic news platform is Bloomberg. As with the others, Bloomberg also has an app for iOS and Android. The same applies here: lots of general information, hardly any in-depth information.
What is special about Bloomberg is that even basic information is not available free of charge. Even though I consider the quality of Bloomberg to be excellent, this is rather disappointing. The normal subscription is about 180$/year.
The background articles are of high quality and sometimes very detailed. Bloomberg is about in-depth journalism and goes a way to provide you with insider knowledge of the world. If that’s valuable for your everyday investing is a decision you have to make for yourself.
Conclusion
So do you really need those platforms as an investor? And do you really need the paid subscriptions? I guess not, because the plans are not cheap, and as an average trader, most information has no direct impact on your specific stocks. But if you’re a curious cat and want to know what’s going on around this planet, then feel free to visit the pages and maybe even pay for it.
