Guide to getting your daily dose of free financial news
Whether it’s the boom of bitcoin or the squeeze of AMC, it’s easy to say that an enormous volume of financial news circulates through the investing community today.
If you care about financial markets and have taken up investing, such information would be of great value to you. The problem is there are just too many platforms providing such information nowadays – paid and free alike.
Some platforms are excellent in providing accurate and timely financial news, but to find these among the countless ones available is like finding a needle in a haystack. In this article, I’ll be sharing with you the different platforms I’ve encountered and used, and what I feel about them.
Just to clarify, most of these platforms will be targeting general financial news and the US stock market.
The famous sources
These are the platforms that often pop up right away whenever you search for anything finance and stock-related. Some prime examples are Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool, Bloomberg Business News, etc.
Most of these sources offer subscription plans, which you need to have before you can have full access to these platforms. Such platforms either have an ‘article wall’, where there is a fixed quota of articles you can read every day (like in Seeking Alpha). Others have ‘premium features’ that are only accessible through a premium membership such as Bloomberg News.
I understand that this may not appeal to most of you. This amount of money can be a substantial sum to a lot of people – myself included, and it would be great to find platforms that offer similar services but at no cost.
I don’t spend a cent to get my daily dose of financial news, as there are many other ways of obtaining good and reliable financial news without breaking the bank.
I will, however, give an honorable mention to The Motley Fool, as it does provide free articles with no quota; you’re just unable to access premium articles, and certain advanced stock picker functions unless you have a subscription. From experience, the free stock articles on The Motley Fool are actually of pretty decent quality, and they’re pretty up-to-date as well.
Stock brokerage platforms
While brokerage platforms aren’t exactly made to provide financial news, many of these platforms offer such services anyway. They may not be writing the articles, but they do a thorough screening of articles on the internet and compile their basket of offerings in a pretty neat ‘News’ section.
Some of these platforms which brokerages sourced their news from include CNBC, The Motley Fool, Dow Jones Newswires, Reuters, and many more. Below are two examples, Tiger Brokers and Moomoo, for your reference.
Tiger and Moo Moo
When you click on the article, it either leads you directly to the article text in the brokerage platform interface, or it redirects you to the original news site itself. Sometimes, you may get redirected to a site that requires a subscription.
However, the diversified options in investing platforms offered by these brokerage platforms mean that more often than not, you’re reading your news for free, and in the rare case that you stumble upon an article that requires a subscription (like a Seeking Alpha article after you’ve exceeded your daily quota, or a Motley Fool premium article, etc.), you can take a pass on it and simply use google to find an article about that particular piece of news which you can read for free. At least that’s what I do.
Another plus side to using such platforms is that you’re able to do your reading and investing through the same platform, as opposed to getting your news from some external site in your web browser and then moving over to your brokerage platform to invest.
Another really handy feature is the ‘News’ section for individual stocks. This is normally accessed by searching for the company’s stock inside the brokerage platform. Once you’re on the page for that stock, you’ll see a ‘News’ tab or section, from which you can access all relevant financial articles about that company.
As you can see, you’re able to find all the articles that are relevant to a specific company, which is extremely helpful as you don’t need to sieve through the thousands of articles that appear in the general News section.
The convenience of using brokerage platforms to read up on financial articles, coupled with the fact that this particular service provided by the brokerage platform itself is completely free, makes this a great method to keep up-to-date with today’s financial news. The fact that you can even ‘filter’ the news by company, and interact with the investing community, makes these brokerage platforms an ‘all-in-one’ source to stay informed.
An up-and-coming brokerage platform for retail investors – USmart
Tiger and Moo Moo are currently the two most popular platforms with millennial and Gen Y/Z investors due to their intuitive mobile platforms and low commission costs structure.
A new brokerage platform, USmart, was recently launched, looking to also grab a share of the Singapore market. Its “news” segment is being hosted on its platform which makes it a lot more reader-friendly vs. one where users are being directed to the news source platform.
I will be doing a more detailed write-up on USmart in the coming days to explain the features and key selling points of this up-and-coming brokerage platform in Singapore.
Social media platforms
Okay, I know that social media platforms are not formal sources of news, but bear with me. There are many ways you can leverage the use of social media to stay informed about financial news. These methods are especially useful if you’re a frequent user of these platforms.
Believe it or not, there are very effective ways to get your financial news through Reddit. While it is a platform where just about anyone can voice an opinion or make a contribution, certain threads have very strict posting guidelines. This means that the information posted on such threads is generally more reliable. It’s not surprising that many threads that are related to financial news do indeed enforce such guidelines to prevent the spread of misinformation. Let’s dive into a few threads that are worth our while.
r/investing
We can observe that the thread itself has pretty strict guidelines when it comes to contributions, and there are loads of posts about finance and wealth management. This includes posts about financial news and articles, with their sources, cited properly.
The content moderators also have zero tolerance toward unrelated and/or unreliable content. If you’re a frequent user of Reddit, this is a great thread to follow to get your daily dose of general financial news.
r/CryptoCurrency
Source: redditFor those of you who are interested in cryptocurrency, this thread could also be something to consider. There is a large volume of moderated posts that provide cryptocurrency news, discussions, and analysis, all of which may be of great interest and value to you.
Telegram
This popular messaging app does surprisingly well in providing financial news. We can capitalize on pretty decent Telegram groups to stay informed. One group that I particularly like is @news_finance.
As you can see, this group provides timely updates about financial news and even links you to the relevant articles so you can read up more about any updates that you’re interested in.
The ability to receive such updates in a messaging app makes it very convenient for investors to stay informed, as they don’t have to go out of their way, on a separate platform or website, to read financial articles.
While I’m sure there are other options, these are two ways I stay informed about financial news through social media.
The Stocktwits platform
“Whenever I want to know why something is happening to a company, the first thing I do is check out the real-time feeds on Stocktwits.” (Herb Greenberg, CNBC) Now, what exactly is this ‘Stocktwits’ that he speaks of? Well, it’s a platform that helps investors like you and me stay informed about anything and everything about a stock, or a cryptocurrency. As the focus of this article is on financial news, I’ll be delving into the relevant functions of Stocktwits that make it one of the best platforms I’ve used to date.
Real-time feed
The ‘Feed’ section of a stock or cryptocurrency shows you real-time posts about that stock/cryptocurrency, and it is updated every second – I am not even exaggerating about it. I’d dare say that there is no better gauge of market sentiment. You can interact with fellow investors, and discuss any relevant topics with them. The volume of messages and the number of users on this platform makes it easy to engage in any kind of user interaction.
Financial news
The ‘News’ section gives you everything you need to know about the stock and the company. There are multiple articles from various sources that you can choose from to stay informed.
What’s neat is that after you’re done reading, you can even repost an article on the same platform within seconds to ask fellow investors about their personal opinion of the said article. Sometimes, we don’t know what to feel after reading a financial article and would love to discuss it with other investors. The ’Post About This Story’ function allows you to do just that, and you’re able to interact with the huge community on this platform about any kind of financial news.
Yahoo Finance
Although it’s been around for quite some time, Yahoo Finance is still one of the best ways to keep informed about financial news. Not to be confused with Yahoo Finance Plus (which is a premium subscription service that provides advanced trading tools), Yahoo Finance provides global coverage of financial news.
Just like the other platforms, the stock or cryptocurrency page would also contain all the news related to it.
There’s also a ‘Conversations’ section, which you can use to engage with the investing community. However, the community here is not as active as compared to Stocktwits, and there are often many advertisements, promotions, and spam posts plaguing the conversation platform. As such, you may want to stick with reading the financial articles here.
Another great function provided on Yahoo Finance is the ‘Analysis’ tab, which shows you analysts’ price targets for the company. This may give you a better idea of the relative valuation of the company.
Do note, however, that a price target is not a hard and fast rule for anything. That being said, it’s good to know the perceived value of the company’s stock, as analyzed by professionals in the finance sector.
Stoxy App
This is a very simple and easy-to-use app that serves as an excellent platform where you can get many financial news articles that are typically “hidden” behind a paywall, like Reuters and Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg News used to be more easily accessible in the past through apps such as Google News where one can scout around the “paywall” issue but Bloomberg seems to have plugged that “loophole”.
This app is one where I am still able to get stock-specific Bloomberg news articles for free which is pretty welcoming.
Conclusion
Nowadays, the difficulty of finding free financial news cannot be understated. Platforms across the globe are starting to monetize their services, and the number of platforms that offer full functionality without any cost is getting smaller and smaller. I hope that through my article, you’re able to find a platform that works for you without spending a cent!
However, if you do have the budget, I would recommend going for Wall Street Journal as well as Barron’s for some market-related and stock-specific news.
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