Advanced Research
If you’re a junkie for investment research and have a love of hard arguments and sophisticated mathematics, these sites are full of good stuff. But don’t be embarrassed if you can’t make head nor tail of what you see there!
Most people don’t really need to understand all this technical stuff, although it can be lots of fun for anyone with a nerdy streak.
Social Science Research Network
If, like me, you’re a hard-core researchivore, you might be interested in subscribing to an academic service, the Social Science Research Network, that sends e-mail notification of new “working papers” by economists, psychologists, historians, and other scholars. For propeller-heads only.
National Bureau of Economic Research
A leading institution that funds and publishes academic research in economics and finance is the National Bureau of Economic Research. These guys even have what passes for a sense of humor among economists: a recent paper documented that there’s a correlation between the price of alcohol and the rates of violence on college campuses. Among the broader areas covered: behavioral finance, stock and bond valuation, business history, international markets, pension and retirement issues, questions in public policy.
William Bernstein’s Efficient Frontier
William Bernstein, a neurologist who moonlights as a financial planner, has an extraordinarily informative site covering asset allocation, market efficiency and portfolio theory.
Will Goetzmann At Yale University
Will Goetzmann, professor of finance at Yale University’s School of Management, has a terrific home page full of thought-provoking research on mutual funds and financial markets worldwide.
Terry Odean At The University of California At Berkeley
Terry Odean of the University of California at Berkeley has done groundbreaking research showing how well individual investors actually fare in the real world. (Hint: We’re not as great as we think.) He shows definitively that those who trade less outperform those who trade more — and that women outperform men as investors. If you want to learn what the experience of other people can teach you about your own likely performance, this is an excellent place to start.
Investor Home
InvestorHome, maintained by financial analyst and advisor Gary Karz, is one of the best landing places on the investing Internet. Karz spends zero time gussying up the site to make it look nice, but he has made it encyclopedic. Hundreds (thousands?) of topical links take you to comprehensive sources of objective information and original research. If someone is trying to get you to invest in some new technique or “strategy,” start your research here.
Abnormal Returns
Tadas Viskanta, a former portfolio manager, runs the best financial linkfest anywhere. Every day, he rounds up whatever is worth reading and presents it all without any fuss or favor. To stay current on what matters, and to tune out what doesn’t, this is the place.
Calculators
It’s still a good idea to keep your pocket calculator handy and a fully-loaded version of Excel on your hard drive, but the Internet makes lots of good calculators available for free. Here are some I’ve found especially useful.
Inflation Calculator
A link list of inflation calculators compiled by Roy Davies, a British science librarian and son of an eminent financial historian. Here you can find the current value of such things as spices in London in 1438 or the Norwegian krone back to 1865.
Financial Calculators (Miscellaneous)
Concisely annotated, this exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) clearinghouse site may be the most complete directory of financial calculators anywhere on the Web. I recommend it as the finder of last, not first, resort; chances are, whatever you’re looking for is here, but it’s best to use this site for searching only when nothing else has worked.