American Association of Individual Investors: www.aaii.com
The stodgy look belies an excellent collection of articles on investing strategies for neophytes as well as veterans. The best stuff is accessible only to those who pay $39 for an annual online membership. Another $25 per year buys you access to lots of investing screens and downloads.
America Online: www.aol.com or quicken.aol.com
Reams of good financial information for AOL members; a more limited menu is available to the rest of us. Members, check out the 14
areas of the Personal Finance Channel. Especially strong are the mutual-fund info from Morningstar and the selection under business news.
Briefing.com: www.briefing.com
A site for those interested in following the stock market's twists and turns minute by minute. Forget the $25-per-month package; the free service is good enough for just about any investor. Avid day traders should opt for the $9.95-per-month package of real-time and archival info.
ClearFuture: www.clearfuture.com
A relatively new offering from Morningstar, this site aims to meet the growing demand for 401(k) retirement-planning advice. The main sales pitch is to corporate sponsors, which provide it to employees, but individuals can tap the service for a modest $7.95 fee per quarter.
ClearStation: www.clearstation.com
This site has a big following among tech-stock and momentum traders, who love a stock as long as it's going up. Schematic design is way cool, to the point of being off-putting if you traded stocks in the good old days. Amateur investors tout their stock picks. Owned by online broker E*Trade.
Company Sleuth: www.companysleuth.com
Type in the names of companies you want to track, and this site does the digging. Company Sleuth scans Websites, including those for government filings, litigation, patents, and stock message boards, and then gives you a daily update. Beware a flood of message board postings.
CyberInvest.com : www.cyberinvest.com
A "site of sites" that aggregates free investment information, making it possible to follow your interests through myriad links. CyberInvest is useful if you are seeking personal-finance information that is slightly off the beaten track. A free weekly newsletter alerts you to the latest interesting sites.
eBondTrade: www.ebondtrade.com
Opens up the arcane world of municipal-bond trading to individual investors with a minimum of $25,000 to invest in bonds. Investors can surf the online inventory to see what's available. Spreads are usually less than the 2% to 5% paid by individuals buying through conventional brokers.
E-Loan: www.e-loan.com
An "e" name that actually connotes meaning, this is a popular site with first-time homeowners looking for a mortgage or those who want to refinance. E-Loan checks for the best rates available among nearly 70 lenders. You're notified by e-mail when E-Loan matches you with a lender.
eSignal: www.esignal.com
Casual investors may want to take a pass on this site, which has the latest in stock quotes and technical analysis tools for serious investors. Some active investors can't get enough of such stuff, but others are likely to find adequate substitutes on more general-interest sites.
Excite: www.excite.com
Excite exudes an Avis-like hustle to Yahoo's No. 1 aura. Excite can easily be customized, enabling you to track real and paper portfolios, and there's extra analytical oomph thanks to a tie-in with Quicken.com. Plenty of news feeds and links to chat areas covering particular stocks.
FinanCenter: www.financenter.com
Other sites offer online calculators, but this is ground zero for aficionados. Want to calculate the rate of return you'll need on your current assets to match your income today in 20 years, assuming a certain rate of inflation? You've come to the right place. Plenty of links to related sites.
Financial Engines: www.financialengines.com
Founder and Nobel laureate William Sharpe and his partners clearly want you to pay for additional services, but the most amazing aspect of this site is the "tornado" graphic that highlights estimates of how much you'll need to retire on, based on financial information you supply.
Fortune Investor: www.fortuneinvestor.com
The magazine's investment site offers a useful selection of financial news, market information, investing tools, and portfolio tracking. Investors can search for stocks using sophisticated financial ratios or by activating "Quick Search" to look for stocks under categories such as "high growth."
Gomez Advisors: www.gomez.com
Gomez made its name rating the performance of discount brokers and has added banking, insurance, and several nonfinancial offshoots. Other ratings, especially those by Barron's, have eclipsed these, yet the site still provides a useful look at discount brokers from a number of perspectives.
HomeAdvisor: www.homeadvisor.msn.com
A subset of Microsoft's MoneyCentral, HomeAdvisor offers well-organized information on house buying and financing. Graphics help rather than hinder. Microsoft hopes to build a nationwide database of home buyers by capturing data you enter. Does this give you that homey feeling?
iExchange : www.iexchange.com
A quote from this ClearStation competitor's Website: "At iExchange.com,
you don't need any professional investing experience or accreditation
to be an analyst. Anyone with online access and an investment idea is invited to post reports." Caveat emptor.
Investing Online Resource Center: www.investingonline.org
An industry-backed antidote to online-investing fever. Plenty of cautionary advice about the potential pitfalls of the "invest first, ask questions later" school of online investing. Quizzes are designed to get investors to examine their tolerance for stomach-churning volatility in stock prices.
Investorama.com: www.investorama.com
Too much ain't enough? You're in the right place. This site holds a mind-numbing 14,000-plus links to financial Websites. Former broker Doug Gerlach has managed to impose order. A "power search" function further breaks down sites located by search requests into handy categories.
iOwn: www.iown.com
Another site aimed at home buyers. Easy to use, iOwn offers more than 600,000 nationwide listings, including houses listed for sale by their owners--something industry leader Realtor.com doesn't do. A weekly e-mail service will send you listings likely to fit your interests.
MoneyCentral: www.moneycentral.com
Microsoft continues to make a good site better by offering loads of
personal-finance information in a very usable format. Lots of basic how-to backgrounders can be found here, plus more advanced info on investing as well as retirement and estate planning.
Morningsta: www.morningstar.com
Required reading for mutual-fund devotees. Excellent mutual-fund analysis and news items are still free, but a membership for $9.95 per month provides real-time analysis of funds, news via daily e-mails, portfolio updates, and end-of-the-day market updates. Four stars.
The Motley Fool: www.fool.com
Sooo 1990s. The "fool" schtick is getting tired, and the stock message boards are a must-skip. That said, interesting commentary on the day's events still appears, and the basic investment primers are a good antidote to the momentum-investing mania that dominates many investing sites.
Multex Investor: www.multexinvestor.com
Wall Street research for $5 to $15 per stock; insomniacs may favor the $150 tomes analyzing entire industries. Multex proves that you get what you pay for. The free research used as a come-on tends toward boilerplate commentary. An exception is a free weekly Internet analyst newsletter.
Quicken.com: www.quicken.com
You don't need to use Quicken software to tap the useful financial-
planning information on this site. But it can feel like a giant ad, because of the ubiquitous touts for personal-finance software called Quicken 2000, which these folks are convinced you can't live without.
Raging Bull: www.ragingbull.com
Momentum investors rule, baby! Despite the testosterone tone, Raging Bull offers lots of thoughtful market commentary. The editors also highlight some of the most interesting postings on the site's message board, which can save you hours of scrolling for the occasional online insight.
S&P Personal Wealth : www.personalwealth.com
Standard & Poor's is a registered investment adviser with the SEC, not just another vendor of someone else's ideas. It shows. S&P maintains 40 model portfolios from which it draws individual stock recommendations. The site also recommends asset allocations within individual portfolios.
SmartMoney.com: www.smartmoney.com
A surprise success, given the difficulty many magazines have in translating hard copy into e-copy. The trademarked Map of the Market remains one of the coolest applications of mathematics to market watching, and has to be experienced to be appreciated.
Stockpoint : www.stockpoint.com
This well-organized site has a live stock-ticker and plenty of features catering to a broad range of investing interests and talents. Ask questions of the author of Investing for Dummies or scroll through the latest SEC filing made by one of the companies in your model portfolio.
Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition : www.wsj.com
The Journal's interactive edition is the king of online financial news sites. Could be stronger on intraday analysis, but Elvis wasn't much of a day person, either. The annual fee ($59; print subscribers pay $29) makes sense if you're a serious investor. Access to Barron's is part of the deal.
worldlyinvestor.com: www.worldlyinvestor.com
International investing is the sole focus here. Easy-to-use site with a great deal of concise commentary, as well as Q&As with readers. Lots of good, hard-to-find information on ADRs. Receive free e-letters that cover the basics on foreign markets. Also good foreign-currency information.
Yahoo: www.yahoo.com
The granddaddy of portal sites suffers from bloat. But buried amidst the overwhelming number of links are some compelling sites and features, including FinanceVision--a live Webcast from Silicon Valley featuring interviews, morning brokerage calls, and news and commentary.
American Express: www.americanexpress.com/banking
Why leave home? Amex offers attractive interest rates on deposits, as well as refunds for ATM charges--up to $1.50 four times a month. Info on lines of credit and lots of personal-finance information, as well as links to online trading. Follow the link to the brokerage site.
bankrate.com: www.bankrate.com
Message boards offer customer complaints about mortgage and credit-card issuers. That's enough to give this site an edge over the rate-
comparison features on other sites. Good background on how rates are calculated and on leasing vs. buying.
Citibank : www.citibank.com
It's probably only a matter of time before you'll be able to find nearly any financial service or product you'll need here, given parent Citigroup's expansion into insurance and stock brokerage, among other fields. For now, early adopters are the primary online-banking clients, not the masses.
CompuBank: www.compubank.com
This tiny Houston outpost topped giant Citibank in SmartMoney
magazine's April 2000 ranking of the best online banks. Its site gets
kudos for detailed account information and security. CompuBank is also among the low-price leaders in fees.
ebix.com : www.ebix.com
User-friendly home page with information on auto, health, home, life, and other types of insurance. It's easy to request quotes and checklists of frequently asked questions. The portion of the site devoted to insurance salesmen gives you a feel for why brokers push the products they do.
eHealthInsurance: www.ehealthinsurance.com
Aimed at individuals and small businesses, eHealthInsurance offers a wide selection of health insurance plans. Users can compare prices and plans from most major insurers, and apply for coverage online. There's a Medicare supplement section for seniors.
Quotesmith.com: www.quotesmith.com
Quotesmith.com has made its name with insurance quotes on a broad range of products--life, health, auto, and more--from more than 300 insurance companies. It helps if you've done your homework first; there's not much news or background information here about insurance.
WingspanBank.com: www.wingspan.com
Though slick and easy to use, this online bank is suffering growing pains after its first year. Troubled parent BankOne may sell it off, and officials say more online customers deal directly with BankOne than Wingspan. If Wingspan flies, it will be despite BankOne, not because of it.
Legal Survival Website: www.friran.com
Created by the law firm Friedman & Ranzenhofer, this site couples estate-planning information with recent articles on tax law and relevant court decisions. Especially useful are the free, downloadable forms for appointing a health-care proxy and planning a will. Ditto FAQs on executors and wills.
National Association of Financial and Estate Planning: www.nafep.com
A good source of general information on estate planning for anyone who needs an overview of the issues but is leery of getting hidden sales
pitches from companies that favor specific estate-planning vehicles. The association that sponsors the site is in Salt Lake City.
Nolo.com Self-Help Law Center: www.nolo.com
Nolo Press, publisher of law books for laymen, is a well-organized online purveyor of free estate-planning and related information. Plenty on probate, executors, living trusts, and taxes. On-site legal encyclopedia is a big plus. Remember: You're not a lawyer, you just play one online.
Robert Clofine's Estate Planning Page: www.estateattorney.com
York, Pa., lawyer Robert Clofine provides well-organized information on transferring wealth to the next generation while minimizing trouble and taxes. If there is a bias here, it's in favor of living trusts, which are used to avoid probate; one section debunks "myths" about living trusts.
