Being a Better Investor

A lot of information is available on the internet, but this might be more of a hindrance than actually assisting with your investment goals. It's best to stick to the core tools that an investor uses, which are the tools available from your online broker which allows you to set up your portfolio and watch lists of the shares you are interested in.

These brokers will also report the most updated news on the company. In addition to company specific news, it might be useful to read publications from the Reserve Bank of Australia, however when these publications are released, they are usually summarised in newspapers and investor magazine, which are also good forms of information.

For a beginner investor, brokers reports are a useful resource to have, as they are good in breaking down information and have access to the companies management, which other investors can not gain. These may be hard to find and quite expensive to get access to, however if you employ a broker to trade your shares, they will have access to these reports and they are able to advise you of how other brokers are

How are my investment going?

Professional investors are usually benchmarked against other investors and also the indexes. You can see if your investments are doing well by how they compare against the All Ordinaries, which is all movement in the ASX or you can measure it against the top 200 stocks on the ASX, in the ASX200 Index, or you can measure it to the specific industry index.

Another good way of checking the performance of your shares is to calculate the dividend yield. Dividend yield is the percentage return provided to the investor on the stock. It is calculated by dividing the annual cash dividend per share, by the stock’s market price at the time of purchase.