The first thing to decide on when creating Google Alerts for investment tracking is whether to use the stock symbol or company name. If you use the stock symbol, you will only get financial news. That is useful, but it misses all types of general news that might be more revealing. One solution is to use both the symbol and name by combining them with an OR. Google Alerts insists that OR be capitalized, or else it is ignored:
microsoft OR msft
If the company has a multiple word name, you should put the entire name in quotes to make sure you don’t get alerts for part of the name:
“general electric” OR ge
One place where the stock symbol is useful is when searching within the URL of Web pages. A lot of serious financial sites create pages devoted to a single stock. In these cases they often include the symbol in the URL. These pages can be found with the inurl: operator:
inurl:msft
You can watch for any changes in the status of a company’s CEO by creating an alert for their name and words like fired or resigned. I also like to watch for the ever-popular decision to spend more time with his family:
“steve ballmer” (fired OR resigned OR retired OR “more time with his family”)
This can be made more general by creating an alert for to watch for any CEO who has met an untimely fate:
ceo (”more time with his family” OR “abruptly resigned” OR fired OR indicted)
If you are investing in drug companies, you can watch for signals of either good or bad news with words like FDA and recall:
merck (fda OR recall OR trial OR lawsuit)
Finally, in the post-Madoff world, it makes sense to keep an eye on your mutual find and the name of your investment advisor:
“fidelity investments” (fraud OR sec OR investigation OR failed)
“bernie madoff” (charged OR indicted OR fraud OR alleged OR sec)
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