Women’s Money reader, Jennifer Wilson, gives us her pick of the services that offer sharetraders a helping hand.

When you decide it's time to start investing in shares, there are two options: the quick fix or give me a tip and I'll make a fortune (you wish) or the slower route where you can learn as you invest, and become a wiser investor as a result.

After a few lousy tips, you either decide to forget the share market all together, or you realise you need a better understanding of what's important, and why.

		So, what is important, and how difficult is it to put that together? There are a few services around which can provide you with the specific elements to help you make sense of the markets, with a focus on the Australian market. The Inside Trader (www.theinsidetrader.com.au) offers two useful services: a review of up to 45 broker recommendations each week (which saves you from having to read all of these in 22 different places); and asingle share recommendation based on these, along with in depth information on the selected share each week. They also provide a list of which Directors and Officers are buying and selling their own shares. We all know that insider trading NEVER happens, but surely if you think your company is going places you want to buy stock, and if you think it isn't, you might want to sell.
It is curious how often a really strong movement in shares by those in the company will presage a movement in the market.

Cl provides data on both the US and Australian markets (depending on your subscription). They then let you set specific Buffett like parameters to help assess the company.

These are aimed at locating companies that are essential solid companies, with good returns proven over several years. Cl then provides tools to help you determine the right price. There are some in build charts which provide information on how good the management of a company is (return on equity, return on capital), how reliable its past performance is (PE ratio over previous years), and what its growth has been.

You can also set scenarios where you enter what you think the share might do and see what impact this has on the projected returns. There are tools to help you find companies to investigate further from a tool which lets you look for shares in specific sectors by their performance to on line forums with seriously experience investors.

Along with the software comes background information from Aspect Huntley who provide additional up to-date information on the company to let you do your own research.

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