Morningstar Research Investment Center, Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage, and Value

Line Investment Survey

Library Resources for Stocks, Bonds, and Mutual Funds.

• The Barrington Area Library has three databases that are great for following stock market trends.

• These databases are Morningstar Research Investment Center, Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage, and Value Line Investment Survey.

• They are free with your Barrington Area Library card.

To begin, go to balibrary.org and click on “research”

Click on “Business, Careers, Technology”

In “Business, Careers, Technology”, you will be able to find all of the business and economic-related databases. They organized alphabetically. Let’s first look at Morningstar Research Investment Center. After clicking on it, you will need to enter your Barrington Area Library card number.

Morningstar Research Investment Center

This is the main page of Morningstar Investment Research Center. You can start by simply entering in a ticker number or name of a company.

The “Companies”, “Funds”, and “ETFs” tabs all have similar features. Once you know how to navigate one tab, you will be able to navigate the others. Let’s look at “Companies.”

After clicking on the “Companies” tab, this is the page you will see. Let’s click on “Stock Analyst Reports” first.

The Stock Analyst Reports page consists of Stock Names, Sector, Industry, Market Cap, and the date of the report. Click on the Stock Name for additional information.

Read the analyst note and click on the different tabs for guided research.

In the tabs, if you click on Stock Screener, you will be able to input data to screen your own stocks, or simply click on “Morningstar Screens” to view pre-made stock screeners.

The “Portfolio” tab lets you find out how your own portfolio shapes up, find out about asset allocation, and use Morningstar calculators. You can also read newsletters, and attend classes by clicking on the “Help & Education” tab, as well as the “Newsletters” tab.

Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage

Back in the “Business, Careers, and Technology” database page on the Barrington Area Library’s website, click on “Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage” and enter your Barrington Area Library card when prompted.

On the main page, find links to screeners for stocks, corporations, mutual funds, bonds, and private companies. You can also read the latest financial news and commentary, as well as see stats for today’s market.

If you click on the “Companies” tab, you will see links to different snapshots, investment ideas, and S&P stars. You can also search for companies and executives by name.

When you click on the “Industries” tab, you can find reports that are updated regularly by S&P that let you know how an industry is doing. Simply click on HTML or PDF to read the report. You can also choose “Sub-Industry Review” for additional reports.

The “Mutual Funds/ETFs” tab will allow you to do Fund Research, access a Fund Screener, and also see top-rated domestic and international funds.

The “Directories” tab lets you find key information on Security Dealers of North America, as well as a Register of Corporations, Executives, and Directors.

Click on “Financial Education” for different interactive classes on a variety of subjects.

Value Line Investment Survey

Back on the Barrington Area Library’s database page, click on “Value Line” and enter your Barrington Area Library card when prompted.

This is the main page of Value Line. You can look up stock information by company or you can look at the latest Value Line Investment Surveys are updated and published weekly. Additionally you can screen stocks.

To look at a company’s financial page, type in the name of the company or ticker symbol in the top right corner. A drop-down menu will appear so you can click on the company that you want to research.

This is an example of a financial page for a company. If you scroll down, you will see there is a section for commentary, rankings, valuation, 3-5 year projections, sales, score ratings, industry analysis and more.

At the top of the page, you can also view the PDF reports for each company. These reports are published every 3 months. Simply click on “PDF Reports” and select the date you wish to view.

This is an example of a PDF report for a company. You can print it out or save it to your computer.

Back on the main page, if you click on “dashboard”, you can view featured commentaries, the stock market today, and current publications. The latest Value Line Investment Surveys are updated and published weekly. You can download them to your computer and/or print them out. The most popular tend to be Ratings & reports, Selection & Opinion, and Summary & Index.

Clicking on the “Selection & Opinion” tab will give you a PDF of this week’s economic and stock market commentary.

When you click on “Summary & Index”, you will get a PDF that gives you key market statistics for the week. Note that there are separate Summary & Index reports for small and midcaps.

If you want to screen stocks, click on the “Find Ideas” tab and then click on “Screener.” You can select criteria from the left-hand column to set up your screener.

All criteria selected will be loaded in the center of the page. You can make further adjustments or simply reset the criteria.

The Investment Education tab includes educational articles, glossary, and tool guide for using The Value Line database.

Want to learn more?

• The Barrington Area Library’s Slide Share account has tutorials on other business databases available with your Barrington Area Library Card.

• Access these tutorials here.

Questions?

• You can visit the Adult Services Reference Desk, call us at (847) 382-1300 x 1, text is at 66746 (type code askbal the first time you send a text), or send us an email.

• Thank you for using the Barrington Area Library! For more information on our business resources, check out our business page at balibrary.org/business