As someone who has to write multiple financial articles every week, I have to consume a lot of financial news. This week I want to share with you the main sources of information I use for keeping up to date with financial information, and for researching new ideas.

Every weekday starts with a routine. I wake up, put on the coffee to brew, hop on my exercise bike, and turn on CNBC. I like to multitask, so here I can boost my metabolism early in the morning while priming my brain with all of the important financial news.

On CNBC, I can see how the markets have opened. I can see oil prices and hear about important acquisitions and mergers. I can find out which meme stocks the traders are bidding up. That was in fact how I found out a few weeks ago that Bed, Bath, and Beyond (NSDQ: BBBY) shares had soared (See How Meme Traders Handed Me a 1,000% Profit in Three Days).

After 10-15 minutes on the bike, I finish getting ready for work and head into the office. There, I might do some additional research on one of the story ideas from CNBC. Otherwise, as time permits I will run a series of stock screens designed to highlight companies of interest.

I primarily use Fidelity’s stock screening tools. They also have good fixed income screeners. In fact, I moved my brokerage account to Fidelity specifically because I liked their research tools. However, I know others who are just as happy with their own brokerage.

If I just want to make a quick comparison of performance between two companies. Google Finance or Yahoo Finance can quickly do the trick. For example, it took less than 30 seconds to generate this 1-year comparison of ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) to the S&P 500 Index.

Source: Google Finance

When drilling down for more detailed financial information on a company I have identified, Yahoo Finance is a quick source of basic information. For example, you can find detailed information on a company’s income, cash flow, and balance sheet at Yahoo Finance.

To do a deeper dive, I rely on the data provider FactSet, via a subscription through Investing Daily. FactSet can provide far more detailed information, but it’s probably overkill for most individual investors. I have built spreadsheets that can pull in financial data from FactSet for numerous companies and compare them.

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Finally, once I have identified a company and feel like it would be a worthwhile recommendation, I will cross-check stories on the company in case I have overlooked an important item. My personal preference here is to use the financial site Seeking Alpha, which has individual authors writing on every company imaginable. The quality of the articles varies greatly, as do the authors’ opinions of any company in question. But all it usually takes is a quick skim of the articles to see if I have missed a significant piece of information regarding the company I am about to recommend.

That is the typical process I go through each week for keeping up with the economy and coming up with new investment recommendations. Sometimes that gives me ideas for this weekly column. But, given that I have to come up with 52 ideas a year for this column, sometimes it’s hard to think of what I will write about for a given week.

That’s what happened to me this weekend. In that case, I will scour financial groups on Facebook, as well as personal finance sites, searching for a topic I can address. But even that didn’t work this week. I searched in vain on Saturday for a topic, but then I slept on it and upon waking on Sunday morning, immediately realized what I would write: The column you just read.

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