My daily fix of Markets Live

Neil Collins has become addicted to alphaville’s interactive forum for stock-market watchers

There are thousands of websites for anyone interested in markets. You can spend whole days shunting from one to another, blitzed by irritating ads, looking at share prices anywhere in the world, reading opinions expert and stupid, blud-geoned by analysis. Where on earth do you start? Can you sift the wheat from the chaff? More importantly, can you avoid being bored to death?

The small, resolute band who still read the print version of the Financial Times have long since become used to skimming past what we in the trade call a ‘house ad’ — a puff for something related to the paper, or owned by its proprietor. On the back page of the FT, inserted into the stock- market report, is a box. Framed by mugshots of a couple of dubious-looking characters, it urges readers to log on to Markets Live every weekday at 11 a.m.