Help me to Retire

Interested in a free investing education?  One that you can take at your own pace? Then Morningstar’s Investing Classroom is for you.

You can choose from 172 different courses on stocks, funds, bonds, and portfolio building and monitoring.

Course Catalog:

• Stocks
• Funds
• Bonds
• Portfolio

What a great opportunity for beginners, intermediates and more advanced investors to increase their knowledge.

All you have to do is head on over to MorningStar  and sign up as a free member to keep track of your progress. You can also accumulate credits towards great free gifts their rewards catalog.

So what have you got to lose?  Head over there now!

I recently purchased an Apple iBook Mac laptop to let myself be more mobile around the home with my wireless network and when out and about and traveling. The problem I came across after purchasing this was the lack of software support for Mac’s in the Charting area. I tried running my PC charting packages on my new laptop via Virtual PC, but it was so slow and kind of defeated the idea of getting a Mac in the first place.

So after a bit of searching around I came across Trade Strategist. This charting package was built from the ground up for Mac’s.

It features:

• Can use downloaded stock data, with no fees or subscriptions
• Access to non-US stock data
• Access to free Foreign Exchange rate data
• Calculates around 40 basic functions and indicators and 40 advanced ones
• Export data to other applications, such as spreadsheets
• Combine functions and indicators into trading strategies
• Runs backtests for multiple strategies and stocks together
• Generate signals from strategies to guide real-life trading

This is a great product for all you Mac users out their I definetly recommend it. So whats it cost I hear you say? $67 for the Pro version and $40 for the Standard version with no ongoing costs and online support. Pretty damn cheap as compared to most others!
Check it out.

This list has been compiled by Colin Twiggs from Incredible Charts.

They are the top ten trading books that have influenced him in his life so far. Some are serious reference books, while others are narratives recording a persons trading experiences.

Here they are:

1. Stan Weinstein: Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets
2. Mark Douglas: Trading in the Zone
3. Alexander Elder: Trading For A Living
4. Edwin Lefevre: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
5. Thomas Bulkowski: Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns
6. Thomas Dorsey: Point & Figure Charting
7. Nicolas Darvas: How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market
8. Jack Schwager: Schwager on Futures - Technical Analysis
9. John J Murphy: Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets
10. Edwards & Magee: Technical Analysis of Stock Trends
11. Van Tharp’s Trade your Way to Financial Freedom - New version out soon!

Colin Twiggs has reviewed all these books over at The MoneyBags.com.au site, where of course you can part with your beloved money and purchase all these books on line.

So go on, get reading!

Wise Owl is yet another company that provides investment advise on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Wise Owl Provides:

• Every Sunday, you get at least two equities recommendations for the week.
• These are accompanied by a concise strategic summary.
• You also receive more detailed information such as insights into the Quantitative and Fundamental Analyses behind each recommendation.
• If you want even more, you can also access Wise Owl’s Technical Analysis information, as well as Open and Closed Portfolios which you can use as a trading tool.
• Underlying all of the above are risk management strategies to maximise your sustainable, long-term wealth creation.

Prices for a yearly subscription to Wise Owl start at $790 a year.

For Christmas if you sign up for the free 2 week trail of their equities report you are put in the draw to win a Veuve Clicquot travel pack, a Panasonic Plasma TV, or a delicious Xmas hamper. One lucky person will also win a day learning the secrets to success in the markets with Senior Analyst at wise-owl.com, Phillip Shamieh.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over and sign up for this great offer. 

If you open a CFD trading account with CMC Markets before the 22nd of December you will be gifted with $1782.00 worth of free training CD-ROMs.

What do these CD’s  cover i hear you say?

• Trading Australian Share CFDs
• Technical Analysis
• Short Term Trading Strategies
• Psychology of Trading
• Foreign Exchange CFDs
• Trading International Share CFDs

The 6 CD ROMs will give you over 20 hours of information regarding CFDs and contains full course notes on each topic covered.

This is a great opportunity to get yourself into the markets and get a free education that you can refer to anytime you need. If you already have an account with them, get a friend or relative to sign up. It’s a $1000 minimum account opening deposit.
Remember you can take your cash back out at any time you want.

Check out the offer here.

The Lore Report is a bi-monthly value investing newsletter produced mainly by Jeremy Britton (DipFA SA(Fin)).

Other than the many under and overvalued ASX stocks that the Lore Report talks about every couple of weeks the best thing is, as long as you don’t mind being 2 weeks behind, you can get all these reports for free. That’s right, just sign up with your email address as a free member, and every couple of weeks you are notified that there is a new back issue available for you.

If you find these reports extra valuable, then you don’t have to wait, you can get the latest issue every 2 weeks for $183 a year. Compared to some of the other reports on the internet this one is pretty cheap.

Anyway check it out and see if it suits your investment plan

Continuing on from yesterday’s something for nothing theme, I thought I’d share with you a great place to get your self some free end of day data for the Australian Stock Exchange. The data is in the correct format for your charting program such as Metastock and many others and can be delivered to your email box every night.
Also if you log onto the site you can get past data as well.

Okay, so how do you get this you say? Well first up you will need a standard Yahoo account set up to get site access. Then you will need to join the Metastock End Of Day Data for Australia or metastockproau group. You can subscribe via this email metastockproau-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or you can use the form below. Good luck with your trading / investing and enjoy!

It’s not often you get a decent give away like this. Fat Prophets are giving away two of their recent Reports, 302 and Mining report 48. All you have to do is head on over to the site and read em! No need to even give them an email or phone number.

Fat Report 302 covers:

• The US Dollar
• SP Telemedia
• BHP Billiton
• Lion Selection Group
• Caltex

Fat Mining 48 covers:

• Heron Resorces
• Lihir Gold
• Rio Tinto
• CBH Resources
• Jabiru Metals

Get over to the site while you still can and grab these free reports. They could make you a decent return over the next few years!

• Highly motivated
• Always looking for better opportunities
• Has a strong interest in the markets and enjoys it
• Has and uses a trading plan that suits their personality
• Persistence and resilience
• Experience / in-depth knowledge / understanding of markets

www.sharereview.com.au is  a site dedicated to helping you manage your current share portfolio. With the help of this site you can:

• Cut your losses and let your profits run
• Track your tip sources
• Create and view your portfolios from anywhere, at any time
• Real-time or delayed data
• Get a quick quote
• Receive real-time alerts
• Set upper and lower alert points
• Create Watch Lists
• Calculate your returns
• See your trade history

These are all great things that every investor/trader should be doing and keeping track of. The problem with the Share Review site is that they charge you a lot of money to do all this.
12 Month Subscriptions for 20 minute Delayed data feed for Ordinary Shares are $199.00 - for real time prices it is $679.00 a year.
Alerts are 11 cents each for email or pop up alert (using their alert software) and 35cents each for an SMS alert.

Overall this is quite an expensive service. There is nothing really there that you can’t do yourself either using a spreadsheet, your brokers online trading platform or free websites elsewhere.

My advise: don’t waste your money!