Briefing.com

This site provides minute-by-minute news updates on thousands of stocks. It’s one of my best sources for:

• Insider buying
• Earnings calendars
• Past stories on companies
• Summaries of quarterly conference calls
• 13-F filings
• Option activity
• Earnings
• Economic calendars

Thomson-Reuters

Here you’ll find institutional research reports from research firms like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank—i.e., the providers of Wall Street estimates. If you can find a crack in their research, you could generate huge short-term profits.  

S&P Capital IQ

One of the best fundamental platforms in the world, this site allows me to use hundreds of different data points to screen for thousands of stocks. In seconds, I can find:

• The debt structures of companies (how much debt is due, the maturity dates over the next five years, and credit ratings)
• The largest holders of a particular stock
• Which hedge funds are increasing / decreasing their positions
• Profiles on each of these money managers and funds

StockCharts

This is my favorite site to find charts on every stock, sector, commodity, ETF, and currency. It’s easy to use, easy to annotate, and has just about every tool for individual investors who use technical analysis.

Wall Street Journal

WSJ is still one of the best financial resources for individual investors. It’s usually the first to report on groundbreaking stories (especially on politics and the economy) that could impact some of the stocks in your portfolio. It also has a good mobile app that will send groundbreaking news directly to your phone the second it’s published.

Finviz

Finviz allows you to perform basic stock screens for free. You can also find:

• Insider buys and sells
• Charts on every commodity, currency and sector
• News from some of the most popular blogs

Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! Finance gives you the fundamentals of any stock for free. This includes the market cap, P/E ratios, balance sheet information, and growth in sales and earnings. It also provides free tools to track your portfolio, and a cool chart feature that will give you the basics of technical analysis.

Benzinga

Benzinga is good free source for news and individual stock stories.

ZeroHedge

This is a great blog that publishes market-moving news. While the content is useful for investors (and it’s rarely published in other media outlets), it tends to have a negative bias towards stocks and the economy.

FactSet

FactSet is one of the greatest sites to find everything during earnings season. This includes the percentage of S&P 500 companies that beat earnings and sales for the quarter, how many companies offer strong earnings guidance, and the sector that grew earnings the fastest (and slowest) for the quarter. The research is updated every few days, and you can get the latest in-depth earnings report (with analysis) by simply typing “FactSet Earnings” in Google.