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1. Company websites - The websites of publicly traded companies may contain a wealth of information. The first place to go on the website is the investor relations website. This area of the website may be in a variety of places, such as behind the "Corporate Information" or the "About Us" links.
   1. The Investor Relations website will have a variety of corporate information usually including:
      1. Financial Information and charts
      2. The Annual Report to Shareholders
      3. SEC filings such as 10-Ks and 10-Qs
      4. Proxy
      5. Selected Financial Information
      6. Management, Discussion and Analysis
   2. The site may also have:
      1. Video or audio files of the annual meeting of shareholders
      2. Audio file or transcripts of conference calls with analysts
      3. Powerpoint presentations
      4. Calendar of upcoming events
      5. Notification of upcoming events by email
      6. Mini-sites addressing a merger or major issue
   3. News, Newsletters and Press Releases - Usually linked from the Investor Relations section is a link to the corporation's press releases, web news items and frequently a newsletter(s).
      1. Things to look for in news announcements include:
         1. Major new contracts
         2. Additions or modifications to present contracts
         3. Changes in accountants or accounting practices
         4. The sale of assets
         5. Paying off debt obligations early
         6. One time events such a restructuring or major layoffs
         7. The closing of operations
         8. Off-balance sheet arrangements, joint ventures and non-operating subsidiaries.
   4. Product Information
2. Financial News Services are everywhere on the web, including Reuters, PR Newswire and Businesswire, often playing prominent roles.
   1. Yahoo Finance has a tremendous amount of financial news. You can get the most recent financial news on any publicly traded company or you can create a My Yahoo portfolio that will give you the latest financial news on each company you add to your portfolio.
   2. Wall Street Research Net covers all publically traded firms and is a good mix of free and pay content. They create a limited amount of their own content, but link to a tremendous amount of information around the web.
   3. Bloomberg provides a variety of financial information.
   4. CBS Marketwatch
3. Message Boards - Sites such as Yahoo Finance, Motley Fool, Raging Bull and Silicon Investor can contain useful information on what is going on with a company and its finance. Be careful however, because these boards also attract both people trying to push the price up and shorts trying to talk the price down.
   One interesting feature of these boards is that they may contain information from company employees posting anonymously, as well as customers and vendors.

1. General and Business News sites - The web has a wide variety of general news sites including newspapers, magazines, TV and cable news websites, web only news and e-zines. The number of sites can be overwhelming, but luckily there are ways to help manage this. Search engines provide one way to find information that you are looking for (see below).
   1. Northern Light
   2. Clipping services
   3. Portal
      1. My AOL
      2. Excite
   4. Wire services
2. Search Engines
   1. Google has the largest databases and the most effective filtering algorithms, so it is an excellent place to start a general search. Other advantages:
      1. Google indexes not only web documents in HTML format, but also Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf), Adobe Postscript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Microsoft Powerpoint, (.ppt), and Rich Text Format (.rtf) files.
      2. The web can also preserve files that have been deleted either intentionally to hide what they contained or more often simply in the routine maintenance of a site.
         1. For example Google caches files that it indexes. So if a file has been deleted you can look at the cached version of the file on Google. The cached version also is handy, because it will often load faster, than the live page and your search terms are color coded so you can quickly scan the page for the appropriate color.
         2. The Way Back Machine at Archive.org is very useful if you are trying to find pages and even websites that have been deleted from the web or that have been changed. This site indexes many of the websites and most of the most popular websites. Using this site take a little effort, for example images don't appear or are compressed on many pages, but there is no better place to see what was up on a website months or years ago, for example here is the main index page for their files on the Enron website. Since 1997 they have indexed the site 97 times.
      3. Newsgroups - The Internet has several ways of communicating. Everyone on the internet is familiar with email and the World Wide Web, but not everyone is familiar with Newsgroups, also called Usenet groups. Newsgroups actually pre-date the creation of the WWW. Google indexes over 700 million Newsgroup messages going back to May 1981. There are over 20,000 newsgroups on a wide variety of topics.
         In newsgroups, one person posts a message with a particular subject line and then multiple people may reply and then reply to the replies. This is called a threaded discussion. Most people post anonymously under a screen name, so you should always be careful about trusting what you read on newsgroups. Some people are very knowledgeable and straight forward in their posts; others have their own agenda.
         Google also indexes newsgroups postings. Their sheer number can be useful in "signals intelligence"; that is, the source and timing of posts can be as useful as the content of the posts. Instead of looking at the body of the posts, you can see when when people first started talking about a subject, how many people have posted on a subject and what domains the posters are using. With this large number of posts you can get a feeling of the noteriety of a particular issue, the number of people effected and may be able to identify, at least by email address, someone with personal knowledge of the situation.
      4. Multimedia searches - You can search for pictures and even audio and video files on the net. Often when one of these files is included the site is reporting a major public event. Photos can be used to show connections, between people and organizations. They also are often associated with major news stories or public presentations, which may have been used to hype the stock or further some fraudulent activity. Audio and video files may have improper statements by an officer of a company and can be very valuable in proving fraud. For example, company officials may appear in audio or video programs archived on the web by the various news services such as CNN or ABC news.
         Government agencies also are starting to put their hearings on-line. For example, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has both audio and video files of its hearings. As an example here is the audio file from the February 14th hearing on the Enron collapse including testimony from Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins.
         More so than text searches, these searches can lead to irrelevant and unrelated search results, because the search engines' software can not "see" or "hear" the actual file, but looks at text associated with the file. Media searches, unfortunately, can also lead to adult material so you may want to use the mature filters where available to filter out such images.
         Google has a very large set of images that can be searched. Lycos has a multimedia search, which allows you to search not only images files, but also audio and video files all at the same time. Altavista also allows you to search images, audio and video files, but each search has to be done separately.
         
   2. Altavista
   3. Excite
   4. Yahoo
   5. Dogpile
3. Linking Sites - You can find out a surprising amount of information by looking at sites that link to a companies website. Hotbot has the easiest way to conduct a linking search; simply select "Look for links to this URL" from the pull down menu on the top left. In Altavista you type "link:" followed by the URL for the target page. In Google you type the same command, but unlike Altavista, you are likely to get hundreds or even thousands of pages from the same website as the target. For example, a search for links to Enron's investor relations page will generate 1,600 links, nearly all of which are from enron.com.
   1. Google
   2. Altavista has a page that describes how to do this kind of search
   3. Hotbot
4. Complaint sites - Someone once said that you can't be a very big company unless someone has a complaint site about you.
   Many of the complaint sites are put up by disgruntled consumers who feel that the company has not treated them properly. The sites tend to be highly opinionated and often contain many exaggerations and inaccuracies, but they can also provide valuable real-world information about current problems with a company. Look for the same topic appearing repeatedly or extra long discussion threads on a topic with many people participating.
5. Consumer ratings sites - Several sites rate companies on performance. Gomez.com provides ratings and consumer comments on financial, mortgage and insurance businesses. The Complaint Station has consumer complaints arranged alphabetically by company. Planet Feedback provides both consumer comments and ratings. You can find a list and ratings of these sites in an article in PC World: http://www.pcworld.com/features/article/0,aid,81997,pg,5,00.asp
6. Email Groups and Newsletters - Each email group and online newsletter has a list of subscribers, which is maintained on a computer running mail server software. When someone sends an email to the mail server, it sends a copy to everyone one the list of subscribers. Each person who receives the email can reply to the message and initiate a discussion on the subject.
   Unlike newsgroups, email groups by their nature are generally private, however, often some or all of the information and messages from the group are available on the web. Many email groups have information on the group and how to sign-up available on a webpage. Most groups, however, protect their posters' privacy and do not archive the postings on-line. Thousands of email groups do put the members emails on a web page and these postings can be a very valuable source of information. Often these groups attract a rich array of knowledgeable people interested in the group's subject.
   If a group's messages are posted on-line, they can often be found via a search engine like Google. If you are looking for a group you should look at Tile.net, which tries to keep track of email groups. Topica and Yahoo Groups both have thousands of groups. Each email group on these sites can decide to be private or allow anyone to subscribe and/or see their messages.

1. What you can find in a 10-K and a 10-Q
   1. The 10-K's and 10-Q's are the primary financial reports filed by a business with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A 10-K is filed annually and a 10-Q is filed quarterly. Below is a list of the items that you can find in these filings and how they may be helpful.
   2. Contents of a 10-K
      1. Cover Page - Tells you the name and address of the corporation, the period covered, the number and classes of securities outstanding, the tax id number and the state of incorporation. At the bottom of the cover page will be a note if portions of the annual report and proxy are incorporated by reference, which means you will need to get these publications also for those sections. You can probably get these from the company's investor relation site on the web.
      2. Part I
         1. Business - This is a good place to get an overview of the business and also what the company considers as major risk factors and significant changes that occurred during the year.
         2. Properties - Here you can check for major changes in properties owned and properties acquired through acquisition of other companies.
         3. Legal Proceedings - Check to see if the company has been accused of fraudulent practices or accounting irregularities. Whenever, possible check prior 10-K's in this area.
         4. Submission of Matters to a Vote of Security Holders.
      3. Part II
         1. Market for the Registrant's Common Stock and Related Security Holder Matters - This section will have information on recent sales of stock. The stock issuance to directors and officers is another area to check for fraudulent activity.
         2. Selected Financial Data - This area includes the past 5 years of financial information for selected items and is a good place to get information that can be plotted in the SFI Graphmaker and Calulator.
         3. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations - This section covers items such the result of operations, liquidity, capital resources trends, significant events, causes of any material changes in the financial statements.
         4. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data - This data generally includes two years of audited balance sheets and three years of audited income statements. Be sure to read the footnotes to the financial statements.
         5. Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure - Usually this section is blank, but it is very important if anything is here.
      4. Part III
         1. Directors and Executive Officers - Look for relationships and other factors that might indicate that the directors are not truly independent.
         2. Remuneration of Directors and Officers - Are the officers and/or directors remunerated in a manner where it would be in their economic interest to hype the stock price, inflate sales or minimize losses.
         3. Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management - Are big stock or options positions encouraging management to increase the stock price? Can outsiders exercise undue influence on the corporation?
         4. Certain Relationships and Related Transactions
      5. Part IV
         1. Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules and Reports on Form 8-K - 8-K items include significant events that have to be reported before the next 10-Q. They are usually worth looking at.
         2. Form 10-K Schedules (when applicable) - Another place worth looking since a great deal of information can be buried in these schedules.
            1. Investments other than investments in affiliates
            2. Receivables from related parties and underwriters, promoters and employees other than affiliates
            3. Condensed financial information
            4. Indebtedness of affiliates (not current)
            5. Property, plant and equipment
            6. Accumulated depreciation, depletion and amortization of property, plant and equipment
            7. Guarantees of securities of other issuers
            8. Valuation and qualifying accounts
            9. Short-term borrowings
            10. Supplementary income statement information
            11. Supplementary profit and loss information
            12. Income from dividends (equity in net profit and loss of affiliates)
2. SEC Forms - See the SEC forms page on this site for a review of the more important SEC forms.