Juicy RSS feeds for financial awareness?

Getting a little off-topic but...you said "ads" and "Firefox" - did you install the AdBlock Plus extension? It's a tiny add-on that turns most of the ads into grey rectangles, by blocking the servers that provide the ads (it updates that list on its own). Really cleans up sites like the WSJ though occasionally you hit delays with page-loads. It's also interesting to see how many links on a site like Yahoo finance are served up by an ad server. Look up extensions in the Help menu of FF.

I haven't dug too deep with RSS feeds, but I did set up a MyYahoo page with a bunch of the feeds Yahoo lets you select automatically (many financial). Plus the weather in SF & the Sierras, and my calendar. You can add a lot more including your own RSS feeds, by URL.

-Tad

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Here are some example financial RSS feed URLs that I guess aren't browser dependent. They would be uniform and exceptionally efficient to browse if installed right on Firefox bookmarks, but I guess the cluttered mess you get otherwise is better than nothing. Any better RSS content on taxes, investment, personal finance?

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RSS feeds are not only browser-independent, but they're actually meant to be read by what's called a "news aggregator". Some browsers are able to read rss feeds and, usually, present the headlines as if they were a list of bookmarks. I find that format to be entirely worthless.

On the Mac, there's an absolutely excellent aggregator called NetNewsWire, which presents the content of the rss feeds very much like reading e-mail - list of feeds down the left, headlines across the top, *content* under the list of headlines.

Google provides similar functionality via their "Reader" web application, which works in most browsers. I often us it within FireFox - or whatever browser I happen to be using at any given time. The especially nice thing about Google Reader is that I can use it from anywhere and my feeds are all in place and up-to-date. It's accessible at

Those seem mostly to be news organizations, which may or may not be helpful to investors. I find that I get most of my investment news from normal news pages (ie. news.google.com) - and also some great picking and choosing amongst the news by having a portfolio set up on Yahoo Finance - the portfolio does contain stocks I own, but also symbols which cause it to grab news articles related to a wider field (a couple of ETFs, the ^DJI and a couple of other indices and interest rates), etc. The News and Recent Financial Blogs sections beneath the portfolio full of quotes is very very helpful.

I'm more likely to be reading various economists and political commentators via the RSS reader.

Another thing worth knowing about if you us RSS readers - Google can construct a custom RSS feed for you which is constantly updated with the results of a news search of your choice. For example, a constantly updated search of the news with the search term "Bernanke" is generated by the following link:

Be careful out there. It's easy to get information overload. RSS readers may make it *too* easy to get too much...