Profit / Personal

Personal Finance


If you're trying to maximize your personal wealth--and who isn't?--there's an ocean of information on-line, and it's growing all the time. Many of the sites are just advertising, but you'll also find solid sites with investment information and research, quotes and data, and financial education. Here's an overview.

The Best

Wells Fargo Personal Finance page is primarily a promotion for Wells Fargo services, but you'll find a lot more here than advertising. It offers a number of services for customers, such as encrypted access to account information, as well as information for investors. A section on asset allocation includes a questionnaire that determines your attitude towards investment and risk. The evaluation following the questionnaire doles out advice that's not so general that it could apply to anyone. It prompts you to make sure you're not just sticking money into investments willy-nilly, encourages you to consider asset allocation, and offers some direction for future investments. Novices can learn about asset allocations and read a tutorial on interpreting a mutual fund report. You'll see a weekly analysis of the financial markets, with a commentary on topics such as T-bills and making sense of economic data, and it both describes and explains movements by the Fed. You'll see specific information about the California economy because the bank operates primarily in that state. This site contains good advice that's written in clear English; definitely worth a look whether you're a Wells Fargo customer or not.

In the GNN Personal Finance Center , you'll find an on-line book called Investment Strategies for the 21st Century. The background is plain-grey boring, but the content is good. Every two weeks, the webmasters post another chapter that contains lots of good information for the beginning to intermediate investor. The book includes great-looking graphs that explain why you should be concerned that investments pay better than inflation, the meaning of compounding of a dollar, whether you should hire a manager, and how to travel along Harry Markowitz' efficient frontier.

For mutual fund information, a helpful spot is Networth by Galt Technologies. You have to register for this service due to regulatory requirements, but they'll only use your name if you request a prospectus. You can ask them to notify you of updates via e-mail. You can also look at their database of 5,000 mutual funds, view prospectuses on-line, and even check out the fund manager. You'll see some ads here, too, but the good things in the Networth Funds Profile database make up for them. This database has all the Morningstar research and performance information for each of the mutual funds on file, including ratings, amount of initial investment, current yield, and fund objective. You can use the Extended Search function to search according to your invesment objectives. It'll run that against the 5000 funds in the database and only show you the funds that pass your test.

Investment Dealers Digest provides a monthly magazine called Nest Egg that features the Tradeline performance leaders, the mutual funds that are doing the best according to certain return calculations (5-year annualized returns or 1-week performance, for example). You can click on any items that come up on the Top 10 (updated daily) to display a graph of the fund's performance versus the S&P 500. The Investors Calendar shows items of importance to investors such as the date the Consumer Price Index statistics are announced, or retail trade, housing starts, and building permits. This is a nice-looking page: nothing flashy, but interesting graphics. The lead article in every issue has good information for the mutual fund investor.

The Rest

InterQuote Financial Quote Services has a primarily text-based home page with just one graphic at the top that shows a pile of money. It provides current (with a 15-minute delay) and end-of-day information on stocks, options, indices, and futures from most of the American and Canadian exchanges. Five service packages are available, ranging from a real-time interactive package ($69.95 per month) that offers continuously updated real-time stock quotes to a free limited quote collection and porfolio pricing. The real-time data is meant primarily for active traders who want stock quotes run across their screens continuously. You can stay on-line all day long for this price. The quote data contains the stock symbol, last price, change from previous day's closing, trend (up or down), bid/asked, and the last trading block size, but it's not pretty. The Windows version looks like an Excel spreadsheet, though you can also access the real-time data on the Web server. NYSE, ASE, and NASDAQ exchanges are available in real time, and other exchanges can be accessed with a 15-minute delay. A delayed interactive package ($19.95 per month) provides quotes with a 15-minute delay. The end-of-day quote package is the least expensive ($45 per year). You can register to use the services for free for 15 days, and as long as you don't return when those 15 days are up, you don't have to pay. All of these packages use the Interquote software, available here for Unix or Windows. You can stop by and see five closing quotes per day on the Web server by logging in as "guest." The pages could use a little enlivening, but the information is there.

InterTrade provides the data for MIT's Daily Stock Market Summary, and though it's not a pretty home page, you can pick up a lot of historical data. You can get a block of 500 ticker quotes for $20 or subscribe for a year and get ticker quotes updated monthly for $120 or every three months for $90. If you're a stock market junkie and need this data daily, check it out. One interesting offering on the experimental stock market information page is a listing of the 50 most frequently graphed stocks. This will show you which issues are the most popular in the on-line world. As of the date of this review, the top four are Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Silicon Graphics.

The Experimental Stock Market Charts are part of the MIT AI Lab Experimental Stock Market Information Service. The best thing about this page is the charting: You'll find price and volume graphs for several hundred stock issues and several indices, including the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite. The stocks are listed on the page in alphabetical order, and not all prices are current, but the graphs are interesting. You can view daily price and volume data with a table below showing the last week's worth of stock quotes. The historical files are accessible via FTP. The Experimental Stock Market server also has data about a variety of mutual funds, but these aren't updated as often as the stock quotes.

If you think you're good at managing a portfolio, you might check out the PAWWS Portfolio Management Challenge , which runs in two-month cycles. At the beginning of each period, each player gets a portfolio with a value of $200,000. Using research databases, they simulate stock trading to increase that portfolio. Prizes aren't huge (joysticks, speakers, mugs, wrist rests), but it's fun to get in there and pretend you have a wad of dough and see what you can do with all of your investment savvy to increase it. A month into the summer round, the top-ranked investor had increased his $200,000 to $461,000. You can go into the Top 10 and see what each player is doing to pile up the wealth, which is an interesting way to observe investment behavior. Each player can include a reference to his or her home page, so you can meet other on-line investors. You might want to get into this and see what you could do if you had $200,000 and weren't concerned about losing it.

The Capitalism Zone , a list of links to other resources, is hard to look at, with its wallpaper made of currency and its nearly illegible text. This page is dedicated to Adam Smith and contains a brief biography. You'll see a series of interesting links on the author's page (he also publishes "Babes of the Web"), including other quote-related sites like Quote.Com and the Daily Stock Market Summary, though they run together and are hard to see.

by Theresa W. Carey

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995