Using Your Library Card Makes Financial Sense

By Travis Brink, Librarian I

Like many people across the country, you may own stocks and bonds. But are you making informed decisions about them? There are those who may find their portfolios over-weighted in certain stocks or funds and need to diversify. Some people hire a broker to make the process easier, but others are finding the excitement and personal satisfaction of investment researching, making stock choices themselves, and watching their investments succeed.

Demand for investment information may be even greater this year. It’s all due to the exceptionally volatile market we’ve been experiencing. Things probably aren’t going to settle down anytime soon either, not with a jittery housing market and a presidential election around the corner.

The Rapid City Public Library can help you make informed decisions quickly and easily. Visit the library online at www.rapidcitylibrary.org and click on “Resources” at the top of the screen; there you’ll find a link for our business and investing resources, including Morningstar Investment Research Center, theStreet.com Ratings Guides, and the Ebsco Business Source Premier.

Your information gathering could begin with Morningstar and the user-friendly database to lead you to a few good starting points. After digging though the Industry links from the home page, you can choose your stock, for instance, Black Hills Corporation (ticker symbol BKH). That’s exactly what I did.

After looking up BKH in the Reports section, I found that the information was extensive and a little overwhelming, yet the explanations and definitions included by each term made it easier to understand the financial language. Furthermore, with comprehensive data comes the credibility of a Morningstar analyst. The research report on Black Hills Corporation, based on fundamental analysis along with the list of industry peers, competitors, and many other essential facts, allows patrons to comprehend the overall picture about the company within its industry.

Morningstar Investment Research Center is not only for those patrons who are interested in finance, but also for those without a financial background (like me).

But your search for investment information doesn’t end there. The library also offers TSC, or theStreet.com Rating’s Guides (formerly Weiss Ratings), which has staked out a very unique position in the marketplace for insurance, banking and investment ratings. Their methodology, product line, and product content demonstrate that serving the consumer is our highest priority. TSC Ratings is a great source for accurate unbiased ratings that you can rely upon to make sound, informed financial decisions through a complete product line designed to educate and direct both consumers and professionals alike toward avoiding unnecessary risks that may lead to financial losses. It also gives a clear, easy to understand rating system that recommends whether to buy, hold or sell a particular stock.

TSC is different from Morningstar in that it is designed to be a consumer rather than broker oriented. It also features many stock and bond funds that are not listed by Morningstar. Mutual Fund information is fully updated every 90 days so you get a clear idea of how they are performing. Their conservative methodology is also based upon risk and performance whereas Morningstar is based primarily on past returns. Using both of these unbiased, trustworthy databases together will bring you a clearer picture of the financial health for whatever stock or bond you’re following.

In order to fully round out your information, I recommend using the Ebsco Business Source Premier, the industry’s most used business research database, which provides full text articles for more than 2,300 journals and more than 1,100 peer-reviewed business publications, including Harvard Business Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Industrial & Labor Relations Review, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Marketing Management, and Journal of Marketing Research (JMR). Admittedly, these aren’t the liveliest of publications, but they are a solid source of business information that you can’t find anywhere else.

Journal ranking studies reveal that Business Source Premier is superior to the competition in full text coverage in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, accounting, finance and economics.

The database also includes other sources of full text information such as country economic reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit, Global Insight, ICON Group and CountryWatch along with detailed company profiles for the world's 10,000 largest companies.

Additional full text content includes market research reports, industry reports, country reports, company profiles and analyses that are updated daily. Business Source Premier contains full images for most of the journals, and many of these images are searchable.

Armed with these databases, you too can research your way to making wise, informed financial decisions - just by entering your library card number.