The Best Investing Sites

The Wall Street Journal looks at some of the best Web sites for investors:

One of the best sites we found was MSN’s MoneyCentral. It took only about two minutes to create our portfolio here, one of the shortest set-ups. The site provides dozens of specific ways to analyze stocks, with another 50 features offered through a quickly downloadable “Investment Toolbox” — for example, price indicators, stock-split details and real-time stock-price charts.
MoneyCentral is very navigable and user-friendly, offering sections like “Get It Done” that lets investors quickly jump around to different areas. Still, there wasn’t much bond information, and the news offerings on the smaller stocks and funds were slim.
Yahoo’s finance site also offers a lot of detail about portfolio holdings, good real-time news from wire services, and neatly distinguished stock, mutual-fund, and bond centers. It is not the best organized, however, and can overwhelm users with all of the data available. Views of aggregated portfolio holdings are tough to follow, and setting up our portfolio here took the longest — close to seven minutes — since it took a while to figure out how to enter all of the data. Better research and real-time quotes can be purchased for a monthly fee of $11 to $14.
SmartMoney.com, which is part-owned by Dow Jones (which also owns The Wall Street Journal) offers some of the best charting on the Web. Charts are big and readable, and price changes can be tracked easily. The site itself also offers plenty of market news. Creating and monitoring a portfolio here, however, can mean muddling through quite a few advertisements and pop-ups.
Morningstar.com, which is more known for mutual-fund research, offers an impressive portfolio tracker that can also include bonds and cash holdings, unlike some of the other sites surveyed. It’s also easy to dig into market-index data at the site.

Posted by on December 8th, 2005 at 5:22 am


The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.