Research to Riches, Part 1

Financial magazines.

Chapter 6 of The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing opens as follows:

6. Research to Riches

It’s time for you to learn how and where to conduct research, the most critical part of investing. Every master investor swears by it. Your returns will be directly proportional to the quality of the companies you buy. That quality depends on your research.

Have no fear! There is more information available to you than you can use. Peter Lynch wrote in One Up on Wall Street, “I can’t imagine anything that’s useful to know that the amateur investor can’t find out. All the pertinent facts are just waiting to be picked up.” After reading this chapter, you’ll laugh at people who say they can’t invest because they don’t know where to get information. I submit that it is now more difficult to avoid investment information than to get what you need. It’s everywhere: from your Christmas list to your library to the magazine rack at your local grocery store, investment research is there for you to snatch up, file away, and turn into profit.

This chapter shows where to get the information. The next chapter shows what to do with it.

From the in-depth discussion that followed, let’s check in on a number of featured resources, from magazines, newspapers, and newsletters to Value Line and web sites.

In this Part 1, I’ll focus on magazines.

One of my old favorites, SmartMoney, which was a sister publication to The Wall Street Journal, disappeared. September 2012 was its last paper issue, with subsequent material that might have gone into it going instead to the MarketWatch website. I’ll get to that in another installment.

Two others I highlighted are still going concerns:

Kiplinger

From personal finance to taxes and retirement, Kiplinger has you covered. Its flagship magazine, Kiplinger Personal Finance, still delivers its traditional “sound, unbiased advice in clear, concise language.” These are its subscription options:

For free, you can sample a PDF of the May 2024 issue here. It’s the one with the yellow cover in the “PRINT + DIGITAL” box in the image above.

It also publishes several newsletters, which you can see by clicking the dropdown at the upper right corner of the menu at Kiplinger.com, including The Kiplinger Letter, which looks like this:

If you subscribe to the letter ($99/yr print + digital) they’ll toss in the monthly magazine for free.

The Week

I wrote in the book that The Week “condenses the best-written stories from the US and international media into a tidy magazine that you can read in a single sitting.” Years later, it’s still at it and I still like it, turning to its pages each week for a bird’s-eye view of the goings-on. Here are the covers of its November 15, 2024 issue and the previous four issues:

The November 15, 2024 cover story fit onto a single page of the print magazine, as is usual in The Week. It looked like this:

These are its subscription deals, from the website:

The Economist

This did not make the cut in the book, but would now, especially since I have become more interested in macro trends than micro analysis. My best-performing plans react to price change only, nary a thought about fundamentals, freeing the mind to focus on information sources that broaden one’s understanding of the world.

Here are the covers of its November 9, 2024 issue and three previous ones:

Articles are formatted as follows:

On this page, it offers digital-only and digital + print subscriptions, as follows:

Coming in Part 2: Financial Newspapers.