News We Can Use

• Do you need an "extra" brain? Try Evernote at www.evernote.com . It acts as your digital file cabinet, recording everything from random thoughts – got a few of those! – to saved Web searches to scanned documents. It can find text in photos, so it comes in handy when you need to find that picture of the book you're trying to remember.
  
• Street Insider – www.streetinsider.com gives you updates on company events from a select group of ticker you've chosen. You get insider trades, mergers and acquisitions, new offerings and analyst upgrades/downgrades. You also get announcements of earnings, dividends, stock buybacks and splits, and C-level management changes.
  
• Green Signal stocks – www.greensignalstocks.com – delivers to the penny 12-, 24- and 48-day price forecasts for fast moving tickers. The site gives you recommendations, and identifies oversold or overbought issues susceptible to quick moves. For $10 per month, you get forecasts for up to 30 stocks. The system was created by Gideon Dor, a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Illinois.
  
• Gem Finder – www.gemfinder.com – finds the needle in the haystack that is SEC Edgar database. William Mitchell, a former hedge fund manager and founder of the site, has come up with this proprietary search engine which focuses on special situations – new rights offerings, spinoffs, patterns of net operating losses, exchange deregistrations and bankruptcy filings – that change the company structure and often prompt sharp short-term stock-price movements. You get these "special discoveries" for $29 per month, or you can use the same engine to search in the SEC's database yourself for $20 per month.
  
• Vestopia – www.vestopia.com – is a site where you can follow a portfolio manager who seems to know the ropes of the investment process. You can track about two dozens of Wall Street pros whose portfolios you can track and/or copy, if you'd like. You can get email notifications with alerts about what your selected investment manager is buying or selling.
  
• Hedge World – www.hedgeworld.com and www.hedgeworld.com/blog offers a plethora of information about the hedge funds world. If you're interested in hedge funds, this is the place to be. Of the website, you can connect to other blogs, such as Naked Capitalism (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/) , Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/ ) , WSJ's Deal Journal (http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/). From the latter, you can get lots of information about the deals of the day.
  
• Barron's has introduced a new, free, markets data center, very informative for the ones interested in numbers: www.barrons.com/data.