Studies suggest that between July, 2000 and July, 2007 Internet users increased worldwide by over 3 times from approximately 360 million to 1.1 billion users, and increased in North America by over 2 times from approximately 110 to 235 million users (Source: Internet World Stats). This suggests that at July, 2007 approximately 17% of the current world population of some 6.6 billion people were Internet users, and that approximately 70% of North Americans were Internet Users. Prior to developing StockResearchDD.com, we were given a private study that suggested that in late 2005 approximately 50% of all retail stock market investors did at least some stock research on the Internet, and that the number of investors doing this was growing each year by between 1 - 2%.

In January, 2007 we conducted surveys in both the U.S. and Canada that among other things ask how much time Respondents spent researching stocks on the Internet. The results, derived from respondents with more than $100,000 invested in publicly traded securities, were:

FusionCharts.

We expect the number of retail investors that research stocks on the Internet will increase due to the ever increasing number of computer literate, well educated, and ‘business informed’ investors who want to take more greatly influence, or take more control of, their own financial security. That said, while many of the financial websites currently available contain a great deal of relevant information, statistical comparators, stock screens, and so on, in our view many are not particularly well focused, are somewhat awkward and hence time consuming to use, and do not order the information provided in the way a corporate acquirer would organize a data base for an acquisition target. These are things we found (and found time consuming and frustrating) when doing our own Internet stock research. That in part led us to develop the StockResearchDD.com website. Readers are invited to comment on their own experiences and views as to whether they believe currently available financial websites are as ‘user friendly’ as they might be, what readers consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of existing financial websites, and what currently unavailable features readers would like to see in financial websites. Comments with respect to how many hours per week (or month) readers are spending researching stocks on the Internet and whether their time doing this is increasing are particularly welcome.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 9:27 am and is filed under Stock Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.