One can easily become overwhelmed when first getting started with investing in individual stocks. It can be difficult to find good and useful information, especially when it comes to learning the basics of investing and the stock market.

It took me several years of trial and error before I built up the courage to sell my mutual funds and create my own self-directed portfolio.  Seven years later, I’m still continuing to evolve and learn as an investor.

Fortunately, I found some excellent mentors who were willing to answer my questions and help me along the way. I’ve also discovered useful tools and websites that offer good information on dividend growth investing and research for the market.

Here is an index of those items that I’ve found useful in learning about and practicing self-directed investing.

Seeking Alpha is a platform for investment research whose insight is provided by investors and industry experts rather than by sell-side analysts. The site offers a robust dividends and income community, with many articles generating hundreds of comments from readers. Additionally, the site offers portfolio tracking, free conference call transcripts and SEC filing info for publicly traded companies, and some excellent dividend history information under the “key data” tab for each ticker.

Chowder is the person I consider the “Godfather” of dividend growth investing on Seeking Alpha. He’s only penned a dozen articles on the site and hasn’t published a new one in more than twelve months, but the discussion that continues in the comments following them is a gold mine for those interested in learning about investing and the stock market. If one truly wants to get to the meat and potatoes of DGI, spend a week or two reading through his over 18,000 comments on the site; you won’t be disappointed.

The late Joni Repasch, along with help from fellow community member gabby1945, compiled and categorized a three-piece volume of Chowder’s insights and created mini-books with the hopes of sharing his wisdom with new investors.

I wrote three articles on Seeking Alpha highlighting those documents, and sharing my favorite quotes from the works. Here are links to those articles, as well as links to Joni’s original work:

Chowder’s ‘Lost Works’ Preserved By Longtime Reader Joni Repasch includes thoughts from Chowder on initial portfolio construction, building up positions, maintaining proper weighting of positions, and the mentality you should have when investing in the market.

Here is the PDF document that accompanied Part I:

Chowder’s ‘Lost Works’ – Part 2: Older Folks Portfolio includes Chowder’s thoughts for older investors, and provides guidance on how to build an income stream that is reliable, predictable, and increasing. It also describes how dividend income is a ballast for your portfolio, why utilities should be a part of your portfolio, and why income should be your priority at retirement.

Here is the PDF document that accompanied Part II:

Chowder’s ‘Lost Works’ – Part 3: Portfolio Construction And The Valuation Scam shares Chowder’s additional insights on portfolio building, managing positions, and how to avoid the “valuation scam” when considering investment ideas.

Here is the PDF document that accompanied Part III.

This three-part series was one of the most challenging and rewarding projects I’ve ever done. I’ll be forever grateful that Chowder asked me to participate in sharing Joni’s work with the investing community.

In addition to the “Lost Works” articles, I’ve written a few other pieces on Chowder’s investing methods and theories.

Chowder Rule Breakdown – High Growth vs. High Yield In Your Portfolio explained the theory behind the Chowder Rule and how it impacts total returns over long periods of time. It also provided some real-world examples to show the effect in action.

The Downfall Of Using The Chowder Rule As An Investment Guideline discussed how the Chowder Rule is a good screening tool for finding potential investments, but is not necessarily a good forecasting tool, as it is looking at historical dividend growth rates rather than future growth expectations.

For even more info, Seeking Alpha member Yields4Travel has been collecting his favorite Chowder comments and posting them to his instablog “Chowder’s Comments Corner” to save them for future reference. This provides another place to learn more about his approach to dividend growth investing and how to build and manage a portfolio.

Yields4Travel also maintains another very helpful blog, “Resources and Links“, where he’s posted links to articles and sites on all sorts of investing-related topics.

F.A.S.T. Graphs is the only monthly pay site that I subscribe to and is the site I probably use more than any other in my buy decisions for investments. The basic version is reasonably priced and gives you access to the earnings and dividend history for every publicly traded company as well as analyst earnings estimates and growth projections, and company performance over time. It also provides FFO information for REITs and cash flow information for MLPs.

The premium version gives you the ability to screen stocks, adds portfolio tools, and provides additional evaluation metrics.

Here are some examples of the information it provides:

Chuck Carnevale is the creator of F.A.S.T. Graphs and is another of my favorite authors on Seeking Alpha. Known as “Mr. Valuation”, Chuck does an excellent job of teaching the relationship between earnings and price and explaining how to use F.A.S.T. Graphs to determine fair value for a stock. With over 500 articles published and 40,000 followers, he is one of the all-time greats on Seeking Alpha.

He also is an active contributor on YouTube, where he posts videos on how to use FAST Graphs for fundamental analysis of stocks.

Dividend Growth Forum is a message board where investors can hang out and discuss their personal portfolios, share investment ideas, and discuss the general stock market. It’s a nice place to post your thoughts and bounce ideas off other investors or ask any questions about investments.

The U.S. Dividend Champions List is the go-to source for finding all the top dividend growth stocks in the market. The late David Fish was the creator of this resource, and Justin Law now maintains and posts monthly updates to the spreadsheet on Seeking Alpha.

Also known as the “CCC List”, this document groups 800+ companies into Dividend Champions (25+ years of dividend growth), Dividend Contenders (10-24 years), and Dividend Challengers (5-9 years). The spreadsheets also have other important information like dividend growth rates, debt metrics, payout ratios, earnings projections, and ex-div and dividend payout dates.

To me, the Champions List is an invaluable resource and has been a huge benefit to me in finding the best dividend growth stocks in the market. I’ve literally spent hundreds of hours over the years poring over this document for my research in creating my sector-based watch lists.

Dividend Channel has an excellent DRIP Returns Calculator that shows what your total investment returns would be by investing through different time periods with each stock and allows you to compare those results against the market benchmarks: DOW Jones, S&P, and NASDAQ.

Stock Split History is a handy little website that shows the split history for publicly traded stocks. A tremendous help when trying to research historical returns for a company, as this information can be difficult to track down.

Daily Trade Alert is an investment website that posts regular articles from some excellent contributors. David Van Knapp, Mike Nadel, and Jason Fieber are three names you may have heard of from Seeking Alpha, and they now contribute regularly to the site.

Dividend Driven is a site with a ton of info for those interested in discovering new blogs to follow. One of the prettier sites out there, the site’s creator does an amazing job of presenting his portfolio and detailing his plan. He also has a leaderboard page showing the monthly dividend progress for 90 different investment blogs and a blog roll of 150+ blogs related to dividend growth investing.

The Single Best Investment is the book that first got me interested in the dividend growth strategy. It provides an excellent summary of how investing in high-quality and predictable businesses and then letting the compounding work as your dividends grow is a better path to wealth than speculating on earnings and focusing on capital gains.

Finally, I’ve been asked by several people over the years to provide a copy of the Excel document I used to track my portfolio. I created a slimmed-down version of the spreadsheet that people can download from Google Docs and edit as they please to suit their needs.

The Portfolio Dividend Tracker Spreadsheet is a document in Google Sheets format that is very similar to the one I use for my personal public portfolio. This document has dedicated tabs for recording your monthly dividend income and dividend reinvestment. It also calculates portfolio weighting by sector, has a chart for tracking quarterly value and income progress, and tabs for inputting sales and purchases made.

Have any other great resources I may have missed?

Leave a comment below and let me know about it!