Volatility in the energy prices got you feeling a bit loopy? Yeah me too, but looking through all the daily madness at the underlying industry fundamentals makes me feel much better. See through the smoke screen of the daily price swings and see the reality- where money is actually put to work to change the world, not just an investment vehicle or hedge. TransOcean (RIG) just signed another 5-yr contract for one of its deep sea rigs and the pricing power couldn’t be better. The 5-yr contract signed today is worth $1.19 Billion while 2 comparable contracts signed just 3 months ago (April 7th) were at $928 per ship for 5-yr: Read the rest of this entry »

To kickoff the launch of SuckingLess.com, I’m going to feature some of the best submitted resources SuckingLess.com users are recommending. We kick off earnings season today with Alcoa (AA) earnings, so EarningsWhisper might be the most useful site overall for the next few weeks to stay on top of the barrage of earnings to come. If you don’t know already, “whisper numbers” are the more up-to-date earnings expectations instead of the out-of-date analyst expectations you find on a Yahoo Finance. Companies and their businesses are constantly changing, and Wall Street analysts and fund managers are constantly in-touch with these companies. However, the updated expectations only exist on email correspondence between the companies, fund managers, and analysts and don’t make it into the public. So, when a company reports earnings “Better than expected” and falls or “worse than expected” and goes up, it is because those “expectations” were out of date. Rather, the company’s earnings and the stock’s move was probably more related to the “Whisper number”. Check out my listing of EarningsWhisper at SuckingLess.com to learn more.

**Disclosure: EarningsWhisper is an affiliate of SuckingLess.com**

Jim Cramer has always said, its not “buy and hold” but “buy and homework.” Too many “investors” do not know what they own when they buy a stock, which is just reckless, but I don’t think its completely their fault. Most people don’t now how to do proper research, or have the background to understand how to do it. Even my friends who work at mutual funds often ask me where I get my info for the analysis I put on this site. This is why I started SuckingLess.com - an investor research and education magazine/community.

SuckingLess.com is a collection of the best industry and company websites to learn about the companies you own. When you own a stock, you’re, in a sense, an owner in the company. So, you should at least understand the basics of the business or industry, which means you should probably read what someone who works in that industry would read. Still, this ISN’T you’re actual job and making it so would be too time consuming, so I’ve also tried to filter SuckingLess.com to have only the most relevant and easiest to understand websites.

I want SuckingLess.com to be a COMMUNITY, a tool for ALL OF US. So, I invite everyone to come and participate on the site, SUBMIT your favorite research resource to help others learn the way I’m trying to get this started with my own favorite bookmarks. Please RATE the sites you’ve used before to help others know what’s most useful, and leave comments on how you’re using the sites or anything you’ve learned. Again, to help others. I’m sure you’ll learn something from the site, so give back a little and share your investing knowledge and experience with us!  Sometimes its not immediately obvious what you can learn from a website, so give people a little insight too if theres a special way you’ve found to tap into the markets with a certain website.

For example, I don’t have many resources on financials, healthcare, or retail/discretionary because, as readers of this site you know, I focus on industrials, tech, and energy sectors. So, help me learn a bit too!

Finally, PLEASE PLEASE send me feedback on how to make the site more useful to you. This is a tool for all of us, so lets make this what WE need to do the best research. And get your friends and trading buddies to help build SuckingLess.com too. Thanks and hope this is what we all need to become better investors, i.e. Suck Less!

P.S. 90% of mutual funds underperform the markets…so sucking is not something to be ashamed of. We just have to suck less as we learn more.