Using Free and Fee Based Online Investor Databases

Online investors have their choice of searching free or fee-based online databases. One advantage of both types of databases is that they’re constantly open. That is, you can access them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s a no-brainer that savvy online investors should start with the free databases. If the information you desire isn’t available in the free databases, try fee-based databases. If you carefully select a fee-based database for your well-constructed query, you can often get the information you want without paying big bucks.

Totally free databases The Internet is a network of networks linking millions of computers worldwide for the purpose of communicating. The Internet was originally developed in 1969 for the U.S. military and gradually grew to include educational and research institutions. These colleges and universities have never charged for the Internet they assisted in creating. Consequently, many free reference sources exist online. Here are a few examples:

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (www.stls.frb.org/research/ index.html) provides links to high-quality economic research such as FRED II (Federal Reserve Economic Data), a historical database of economic and financial statistics, and FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research), a new collection of scanned images of historical economic statistical publications, releases, and documents. Sign up for the mailing list and be notified about late-breaking data or new publications.

The Federal Web Locator (www.infoctr.edu/fwl/index.htm#toc) is a service provided by the Center for Information Law and Policy and is intended to be the one-stop shopping point for federal government information on the World Wide Web.

Government Information Locator Service (www.access.gpo.gov/ su_docs/gils), shown in Figure 1-2, contains records of public information throughout the U.S. government. Government Information Locator Service (GILS) records and describes the GILS holdings of a particular agency. However, the GILS database is updated irregularly. Each GILS document is available as a downloadable ASCII text file and as an HTML file.