I've just recently signed up for Morninstar's premium membership, and man does it rock. Their new portfolio manager is so easy to get up and running, and unlike Yahoo Finance, 5-10 year corporate finances data is accessible with a simple click. As someone who values long-term stability and earnings and debt trajectories, their charts are really convenient. They've also done a great job keeping their in-depth analyst reports up to speed. Out of the first five I went through, only one was dated over a month back.
Importing portfolios from Yahoo is the only thing painful, but I can deal. I was very happy to see that my fair value estimates for the stocks I was interested in roughly matched theirs. From now on, it seems way more efficient to take their values over trying to number-crunch mine everytime earnings reports come out. They also have a review on stewardship, which is piece of the puzzle largely missing from Yahoo and Google.
Finally, there is an excellent portfolio X-Ray that I've used before (it's incorporated into T. Rowe Price's site as well), but I think for folks only using Yahoo Finance, it's a much better way to step back and take a complete view of one's diversification across geography, industry, market cap, and risk. Anyways, highly recommended.
Housing market kinda pulled up the current bear based on some shady conclusions that largely ignored how weak future construction prospects looked. I'm feeling like people are grasping at all sorts of straws at the moment. New home sales aren't half the story, resale volume has been plunging and been mostly underreported, and construction momentum seems to be built of fulfilling backlogs rather than new contracts. The rally also had some short covering behind it.
I am not changing my stance- interest rates will rise, but inflation will ignore it as oil prices soar, and eventually the dollar will crack under stagflating duress. There are few places to be domestically that won't be disasterous. Inflation hedges? Hard to time. Deflation hedges? Even harder. Emerging markets? Hit or miss, and subject to liquidity leaking out of the asses of the rich and irresponsible. My current aim is to go for U.S. companies with costs in dollars, sales in foreign currencies, and good stability, low low price. Dividend helps.
Gundam wants to know… are you protected?