Stock market research is a highly intricate process and requires lots of time, expertise and experience. You have to learn to do fundamental and analytical research in order to study price movement of various stocks. While fundamental research involves studying the financial documents of the company whose stock you are interested in, the technical research involves analyzing the charts and graphs that try to predict the stock movement within a specific time frame.

All this work requires lots of time, attention and perseverance, which is not every one's cup of tea. Most stock traders do a part of the research themselves and also receive expert's guidance from their stock broker as well.

It must be clearly understood that the job of your broker is not limited to just executing your orders instantly. He also provides you the appropriate and efficient research facilities and tools through research section of his website that enable you to take important trading decisions fast and efficiently.

Some of these facilities include latest stock market price quotes and charts, news headline, symbol finder, stock screener, market scanner and so on.

When you think of trading a particular stock, first of all you need to find its trading symbol. This symbol identifies the stock. You enter the symbol on the relevant page of the website and get its price latest to the second. You can find whether the price of the stock is going up or down and also by what percentage it is doing so. The interface provides the opening price of the stock on that day, the high and the low levels the price reached, its bid price and ask price, the 52-week highest and the lowest price, the average trade volume and so on. You may also see a graph showing the price movement of the stock in course of the trading day. All this information is of crucial importance for an investor and even slightly wrong information can play havoc with trading prospects.

News headlines are another cardinal feature of the fundamental stock market research. The latest news flashes point to the overall market scenario of the trade and industry at local, regional, national and international levels. The news flashes provide every piece of information that may be necessary in formulating your trading decisions. The newsflashes contain information about the important companies whose stocks may appear interesting to the investors. You get to know the opinions of important government functionaries about the trade and economy of the country. For example, your anxiety about the effects of inflation on the country economy may be reduced by the news flashed on 3rd June, 2008 at 8.49 a.m that said: Fed Talk: Bernanke Sees Inflation Moderating Next Year.

The newsflashes too are updated by seconds.

Yet another important tool which may be called by any name, say stock screener, provides information about hot stocks in various industrial sectors. You can get the required information in three simple steps in a matter of seconds. You need to choose the name of the industry from the pull down list, then choose the sector and click on the View Results button to see the position of the stocks under the chosen sector. You also find the names of the most active stocks on a particular day.

If you are interested in investing in ETFs, you can look for ETF Center on the relevant page of the Website. You can get a snapshot of the overall ETF investment scenario. Here too you can get the latest price of a particular ETF, the percentage change in price whether it is going up or down along with the total trade volume at a particular time on any working day. The page also contains the open price, last price, day change, day high and low, 52-week high and low price position, average daily volume, shares outstanding, premium/ discount amount, premium/discount percentage and so on. This information is followed by the daily performance chart of the fund. The page also provides the dividend payment details. The portfolio data contains information about the average P/E, average P/B, average market cap, average turn over and so on.

The latest to the second information can be provided only if the website of the broker is backed by the latest state-of-the-art technology.