Tracking Markets

I was recently asked how to track markets when you are not yet a market participant.  Those of us connected to the markets pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for up-to-date news and user-friendly interfaces.  If you can't spend a few hundred thousand dollars a year for data feeds, are you toast?  Well, yes, if you're actually trying to day trade off that crap data then you're screwed.  If you're a student just trying to track markets and maybe doing a bit of personal trading on a day-over-day basis, then there are lots of good free sources.

My personal favorite datasource when I was a student was yahoo finance (finance.yahoo.com).  They actually have a very good database of historical prices, historical financials, current financials and slightly delayed prices.  You can track all sorts of market from here.  Their news may not be the most timely, but there are better places to find news.  There are lots of free stock tickers out there you can download to set up a personal set of tickers to track daily.  Beyond whatever equities you decide to track, I would suggest tracking the following on a day to day basis:

• 2y notes
• 10y notes
• S&P 500
• FTSE
• Nikkei
• 30y mortgage rates
• 3m libor
• fed funds rate
• EUR
• JPY
• GBP

This should be enough to get you started.  There are some more obscure things to track, but these will give you a general idea of how the US markets are moving and a peripheral view of the rest of the world.  

For news I'd use www.cnn.com, www.bloomberg.com and www.wsj.com.  The most timely of these sources may be cnn and bloomberg, but if you're checking once a day the wsj actually does a great job of synthesizing the important parts.  Generally speaking, you really don't start caring about the daily specific moves of securities until you have some skin in the game (i.e. you're actually involved in the market and are dependent upon it for your livelihood).  One way to get involved is to have a small (SMALL) speculative account to keep yourself in the game.  You can do this as a stock portfolio or as a futures portfolio (I tend to like the latter, but that's because I'm a derivatives guy who does this stuff professionally--don't do this unless you really understand futures.  Taking delivery by mistake can be a bitch).  For most people I'd recommend just having some stocks in a small spec account (couple thousand) and tracking them daily.  I would tell anyone who isn't a professional trader NOT to be day trading and NOT to be leaving limit orders in the market.  

As a student, I tried to get myself involved in markets, and I think it helped a bit.  One of the old-fashioned things I used to do (and still do in a modified form) is writing down the closing levels of the various indicies and securities I tracked every day.  Then you have a personal record that you are forced to look at daily.  The physical act of writing them down makes you reflect on them.  You start to notice patterns and you notice trends in the market as well as stories that the market reacted to.  

Good luck.