Among the liveliest personal-finance sites is smartmoney.com, the Web edition of the magazine jointly owned by Dow Jones and Hearst. It has all the features standard to the genre, such as market news, stock quotes, tax guides, retirement-planning aids and leading economic indicators. A premium tier offers, at subscription prices beginning at $4.99 a month, an easy stock screener, a stock-comparison tool and a portfolio tracker that can interact with Quicken or Money on your hard drive and provide automated updating on splits and dividends. Also available as a premium service is commentary from the likes of James B. Stewart. Nifty feature: “market maps,” which render current market activity in graphical form (we hope your stock is displayed in bright green). One cavil: the navigation is a bit confusing.
News, news, news and a basic financial resource are available at finance.yahoo.com. After registering with the site, you can view your portfolio, pay bills and keep track of your bank account and credit cards. The personal-finance section of the site offers help with taxes, loans and insurance, including a thorough insurance calculator. Many links and even lists of recommended readings. Stock, mutual-fund and bond screeners are clear and fairly easy to use. And for a monthly fee of $9.95 you can get real-time stock quotes. Analyst reports on individual companies can be purchased through Yahoo, though too often at prices not for the faint at heart. Don’t expect flashy design, though; Yahoo is the original bare-bones portal.
Don’t let the seizure-inducing blue stripes on the home page put you off premierinvestor.com. This site offers the serious investor plenty of useful analysis. Daily “Market Wrap” and “Market Sentiment” help you stay on top of things, while “Watch List” and “Play of the Day” give you specific stocks to watch and why. Subscribers are e-mailed detailed “intraday” updates and long weekend wraps. The site covers a wide range of information on subjects as diverse as stock splits, penny stocks and dividend-reinvestment plans (DRIPs). Incorporates four newsletters: SplitTrader.com, NetBulls.com, StockBottom.com and PremierMarkets.com.
As a general site for investing, managing your money, tax planning and retirement, moneycentral.msn.com has a lot going for it: a clear, easy-to-use stock screener, fund-search wizard and fund screener. There are calculators for such things as life expectancy (critical to any retirement plan). There’s even a tool to help you find a financial planner you’ll be comfortable with. Analysis, recommendations, and lots of news from its partners MSNBC, CNBC, Slate and others. (Full disclosure: NEWSWEEK.com is a partner of MSNBC.com.) There are also active moderated message boards. The Web site interfaces with Microsoft Money. But not Quicken. Gee: wonder why?
The Motley Fool is a well-known purveyor of witty, un-pretentious investment advice through books, newspaper columns, radio broadcasts and its Web site, fool.com. Although the founders have dropped some of their original investment strategies and retooled others, their advice has been invaluable to many of their fans. Their aim: “to educate, amuse and enrich.” The first two, at least, are sure things.
CBS.marketwatch.com is a visually interesting site that brings you business and world news as well as a full spectrum of personal-finance tools, columns and reports. The depth of the site’s staff of 100 reporters is evident in the selection of feature articles, which are both up-to-date and thorough. Cool interactive charting can show you the performance of a stock relative to indexes you choose. Also an easy-to-use stock screener that can be as sophisticated as you want it to be. Includes veteran Marshall Loeb’s practical, no-nonsense advice.
A complete investment portal, bloomberg.com offers stock-trading tools and charts of stock movements by industry and exchange. Also listings of commodities, currencies, rates and bonds. It has a large archive gathered by its own extensive news operation, and includes Bloomberg’s Personal Finance magazine. The site even has a quirky “Life” section, devoted to information about art exhibits, wines and cigars.
Kiplinger.com is the Web site of the venerable Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine, which has been offering advice on retirement planning, saving for college, buying an automobile, taxes and debt management since 1947. Good feature: a standing section on money and kids. Overall, the site is solid, thorough, tried and true. And it looks it–drab and reminiscent of an old-fashioned paper newsletter.
A valuable resource on stock performance and current prices is bigcharts.com. Just type in the symbol, and on one page, get most everything you need to know, including price, change, high and low, a graph of the year’s performance, news and search capabilities. You can print out the charts or e-mail them to friends. The site also contains links to online traders.
Morningstar.com is a serious investment site that specializes in stocks, mutual funds and variable-insurance investments. A source not only for individuals, but also for the media and institutional investors. The site offers an online “University” with courses in bonds, stocks, funds and creating portfolios. And it goes on from there, as detailed as you’d like to get. A valuable and dependable resource with active and varied reader forums.
When you need to drill down into a company for data like its SEC filings, try edgar-online.com. You can also download financials like income statements, balance sheets and cash flow in spreadsheet format. A “People Search” allows you to get information on directors and officers, including salary and stock options. A subscription service for the serious investor or eager student.
Some say women approach money matters in a different way. Both oxygen.com and ivillage.com, well-known portals for women, seem to think so. iVillage is a bit more specific about strategies and steps to take, but both address issues that mainstream money management often neglects. What happens to family finances during and after a divorce? How can you ensure your own financial health without expecting the help of a man? “A man is not a retirement plan,” claims one column in iVillage. Humor has its place here. “Love and Money” has subsections for “date, marry, fight,” with links for each. Both sites have chat rooms and discussion boards to share thoughts, bond and vent.
Quicken.com offers a bright, easy-to-decipher portal that interfaces with its widely used personal-finance software. The graphics help the user find his or her way around the site. Lots of tools for calculating tax consequences of selling stocks–when to sell or hold, how many shares to sell to cover taxes, etc. Stock charts are thorough, clear and easy to use.
