Free financial guides = Site improvements

Monday, 4th August 2008 10:51 - by Resident IFA

You may have noticed that you can obtain free guides on a number of financial topics and products via lse.co.uk. The guides offered tend to be intuitive, based on the page you are looking at i.e. Share price page = Share trading guide, ISA article = ISA information, and so on. Why am I mentioning this? Well, the company that send out the guides has introduced a secondary, more obvious way of selecting guides. Instead of clicking through to a ‘Choices’ screen, you can see three titles straight away. If you click on any company’s share name or the share chat or share trades pages, you will see these about 20cm down on the right hand side. One that intrigues me is the ‘Free guide to recession investing’…perhaps I will have to order a copy! These guide orders provide income which helps toward paying for the upkeep of lse.co.uk and enables us to think about making improvements – mainly through adding new research tools. A good example of this is the ‘Stock-picker’ that is close to fruition. This will enable our users to search for shares via parameters such as Market capitalisation, P/E ratio, Dividend, etc. – 18 in all. The great thing about the Stock-picker is the ability to save searches and share them with other people. This helps in that: 1. Who would want to have to re-select their criteria each time they visit the site? and 2. The chat forum is vibrant, ‘GedW’s Hotties’ being a particular community favourite. This openness is perfect for sharing your stock-picking wizardry with your fellow lse.co.uk Members! Other items we are working hard to include are Sector and Constituent data (i.e. Oil shares), Broker tips, and offering a share/CFD/spread-betting/etc. platform. We are furthest along with the platform, but the big companies who offer these types of information and services are terribly inflexible. I put my crash helmet on and persistently chip away at their walls with my little axe at regular intervals! So, our commitment to improving and growing lse.co.uk intensifies as time passes. We still have a large wish-list of additions and improvements and will keep working towards making these a reality – time and money allowing. To this end, I have to mention one of the Directors who was working over the weekend on the Stock-picker. I checked my e-mails when I arrived at the office this morning and received one from him timed at 1.12 a.m.! As Roy Castle used to say, “Dedication’s what you need”…or perhaps medication in the case of the aforementioned Director! Until next time…