It is imperative perhaps now more than ever to do your due diligence and research on the companies you invest in. Indeed, with the financial crisis barely in our rear view mirror, most of us have not forgotten the feeling of seeing our money disappear as stock prices plummeted. While many people used to put their investing faith in brokers and big banks, these same people are no longer trusted to handle the money of hard working people still angry about losing their money and then bailing out the companies who lost it. With sites like ebuilder and Scottrade allowing people to make their own trades. Here are some sites you can use to make your own investing decisions.

1.) yahoo finance- Yahoo provides a great source for making your own investment decisions. In addition to providing key information on company financials, you are also able to look up historical prices over the history of a stocks life span. Also, yahoo provides a charting mechanism so that you can view stock prices by chart over the last 1, 3, or 5 year periods.

2.) footnoted.org- This is a wonderful site which will alert you to any noferous activity at a comoany you invest in. Often times a company will try and be sneaky when they don’t want the public and shareholder to know what they are up to. An example would be when a board’s compensation committee choose to grant stock options to an executive after they have already filed their proxy statements. By providing this information in a supplemental filing, it looks to shareholders like the company has something to hide.

Getting ahold of your own investing by doing your research will be great in the long run. It leaves you responsible for your own investments.