If you invest in anything, you want to know exactly where your portfolio stands at any given moment.  In this day and age of technological advancement, this is definitely possible.  There are many ways that you can keep track of your stocks at a moment’s notice.

The easiest way is to sign up for e-mail alerts for stock symbols.  This way, you can be notified daily of your stock’s performance.  If you have a smartphone such as a BlackBerry or an iPhone, you can check to see if the brokerage firm or financial institution that you invest through offers an app for that.  If they do, you can check your stocks at any time throughout the day.  Many of these apps will offer an option to check any stock symbol you want, and then check on your portfolio’s performance, usually in real time.

Of course, you can also check on the performance of stock symbols on websites such as finance.Google.com.  This site offers updated information every day that the stock market is open.

Why would you want to use any of these things?  If you invest your money into something, you want to know that it’s paying off.  If it’s not paying off, you also want to know so that you can pull your money  out of things that are performing poorly. 

Thanks to the Internet, it’s possible to know exactly where you stand at any point throughout the day.  This will allow you to make an informed decision as to which course of action is best: invest in more shares, do nothing, or stop investing in a particular stock altogether.  While it’s definitely illegal to use “insider” information, it’s perfectly legal to use the tools available to all people, those tools being up-to-the-minute activity, and e-mail alerts. 

The bottom line is this: it’s your money, so you have the right to have tools available to you that make it possible to act intelligently and quickly.  If a stock is performing poorly, you want to sell immediately, and not the following day, when you may lose even more money.  This is possible by staying informed about your stocks on a daily basis.

Even today, stock symbols and their performances are still available in newspapers, but that information is out of date by 9:00 the following morning.  That doesn’t happen when you check in via the Internet.  You can check on symbols free of charge, which bodes well for you as an investor.  The more informed you are, the better off you’ll be.  For example, if you see that a stock you invest in is suffering a major loss, you’ll be able to sell your shares before you lose your proverbial shirt.  On the flip side, if you see that a stock you invest in is performing exceptionally well, then you may invest in even more shares.