conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Investing Online For Dummies about Research with the genre: Business & Money, Investing.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Research, trade, and track investments online
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first paragraph for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Investing Online For Dummies
  Most portfolio-tracking sites make it easy to download your stocks to a spreadsheet. Using Yahoo! Finance, for instance, you'd scroll to the bottom of your portfolio, click the Download Spreadsheet link, and then click Save.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After you get the stock's total returns for many years, enter them into Horton's Geometric Mean Calculator at `www.graftacs.com/geomean.php3`. (If you're not sure how to do that, refer to Chapter 8.) After doing that, Horton's Geometric Mean Calculator shows you how much you would have gained in the stock each year on average and also how risky it is. You can then compare the stock's returns and risk with popular indexes, just as you do with your portfolio in Chapter 8. If the stock's returns are lower than the stock market's and the risk is higher, it might not be a good fit for your portfolio.
  Don't get bogged down with all the scary math terms. Just know this: If the R is closer to –1, that means the stock and your portfolio are mirror images of one another. That's a good thing because it means if your portfolio sinks, this stock might rise and decrease your overall risk. If the R is close to 1, the stock and your portfolio move in lockstep, so you get no diversification benefit. Microsoft (`http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052090231033.aspx?pid=CH062528311033`) provides instructions on how to calculate correlations using Excel.
  If you're interested in finding out more about how a stock's risk and return are linked, you can consult several sites dedicated to the topic. The sites listed here are a good start:
  Valuation ratios are often the most popular ways to measure how pricey stocks are. But even proponents of valuation ratios acknowledge that such ratios do have problems. For instance, it's not unheard of for a stock with a seemingly high P/E ratio of 50 or more to go even higher.
  Sometimes investors get so wrapped up in the drama of online stock investing that they lose sight of what they're buying. As a stock investor, you're letting a company use your money to sell goods and services for a profit. If the company makes money, it will ultimately give back your fair share of the profits over time. Typically, that's done by paying a dividend. Even young companies that don't pay a dividend now eventually start to as their profits exceed their needs for cash.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Another thing to remember is that your home, although it can appreciate in value over time, isn't an investment per se. It's your shelter. You own your home as a place to live, and if you make money on it, that's a secondary perk. REITs, on the other hand, are purely designed to be investments. Cohen & Steers (`www.cohenandsteers.com`), an investment research firm dedicated to real estate, provides comprehensive details about REIT investing.