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" I DON&amp;#039;T KNOW WHY THE DAILY PAPERS still print stock tables. The back pages of The Wall Street Journal&amp;#039;s C section go right into my finches&amp;#039; cage, where I allow the birds to simulate the paper&amp;#039;s famous dartboard stock-selection method. Investing, and the information essential to it, has gone online, and there is no going back.  There are about fifteen thousand Web sites devoted to personal finance. The big financial portals such as Yahoo! Finance, AOL Personal Finance, and Lycos Investing are impressive for their breadth, but for the most part, they, like most sites, seem to mirror one another with the same rehashed wire-service news (Reuters, AP), research reports (Zacks, Hoover&amp;#039;s), and tools to track your portfolio. If you could only figure out a way, no doubt you could line all of Capistrano with HTML code.   Of course, not all of the Web&amp;#039;s financial sites are rehash. Some sites are invaluable. For me, tracking fools and thieves on Wall Street is a nice reminder of how important it is to find wisdom and reliable numbers. I advise that before people start trawling for information on stocks, they should first check out their brokers and the firm they work with. The National Association of Securities Dealers&amp;#039; regulatory arm, NASDR (nasdr.com), tracks disciplinary actions. Just plug the name of a broker or firm into the site&amp;#039;s database and it will come back with a tally of any rules the dealer has broken or is charged with breaking. One common transgression among brokers is failure to provide regulators with timely reports. If your guy is guilty, who&amp;#039;s to say he won&amp;#039;t play with your money in ways only he will enjoy? Some brokers don&amp;#039;t break the law but still do a lousy job filling your orders and answering questions. There are several online services that keep tabs on how well electronic brokers take care of their customers. Unfortunately, their rating services all use their own criteria, some of which are quite subjective. You&amp;#039;re best off checking more than one evaluation. Investingonline.org gathers all the major brokerage-ratings services together in one place.  Having decided where to trade, you can turn to some of my favorite sites for information on what and how to trade: QUOTECENTRAL.COM Real-time stock quotes for free. You can also create a portfolio of stocks for the site to follow as the market moves. This is part of the giant omnibus site FinancialWeb.com, for which you&amp;#039;ll have to register with all the usual personal information. The site&amp;#039;s ads are annoying, but five years ago this service would have cost hundreds a month. COMPANY.SLEUTH.COM This site provides all kinds of information that impresses people when they ask what you know about a certain company. The site sweeps through the online universe, picking off all the little secrets that companies don&amp;#039;t necessarily like their investors to know. That includes filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, earnings estimates from other informed (or not) sources, analyst ratings, and employee disputes. It also tracks how much blather there is about a company on Internet chat sites and even looks for scoops and rumors within the chats. Company Sleuth gathers some more-traditional stock bellwethers, such as short interest (how much of a company&amp;#039;s stock has been borrowed by short sellers expecting the price to go down--high short interest is often regarded as a bullish signal) and the price patterns that people who trade off charts love to spot. It&amp;#039;s all free, and the registration process doesn&amp;#039;t even ask you to cite your income. CBS.MARKETWATCH.COM WSJ.COM These two aggressive news sites consistently break their own stories. The CBS site is free and mixes written news stories with streaming audio feeds. The site&amp;#039;s star reporter, Thom Calandra, is a serious cut above most market commentators, and his lively daily Stock Watch columns cover everything from currencies to bonds to precious metals with breezy erudition and a bull pen of stellar sources. (Calandra stands alone in his penchant for academic conferences about big pocketbook issues.) Wall Street Journal Interactive is better yet. It costs $59 a year, but that&amp;#039;s a bargain compared with the $175 print version. The interactive edition is everything its paper sister is, but it arrives earlier--sometime after midnight--and is updated throughout the day with news from the Dow Jones wires. The site embraces all The Wall Street Journal&amp;#039;s editions, including those for Asia, Latin America, and Europe, making it the best American source for international financial news. You can also track news about people, companies, and issues that interest you. Here, too, you can search a database of articles from hundreds of other publications. For active traders, the site offers up to fifty real-time quotes a day and modest but respectable tools to track your portfolio. Pay for this site. You need it just to know what page everyone else is on. MORNINGSTAR.COM  The best for mutual funds. The enormous bound version of Morningstar Mutual Funds was once one of the most requested reference works in American libraries. Now it&amp;#039;s online and in its virtual form bigger than ever. Morningstar began as a kind of Consumer Reports for mutual funds and remains the single most reliable, unbiased source of data and analysis on funds. Morningstar delivers a fairly generous plate of information for free. There is the expected data on fund performance and risk, and daily spoton commentaries by Russel Kinnel, Morningstar&amp;#039;s director of fund analysis. Kinnel&amp;#039;s the kind of cynic I like, one who can cut through the hype the fund industry dishes out and take the firms to task when need be. Morningstar.com is also the best place on the Web to access the superstar fund managers, who dutifully line up for online chats with subscribers. Not all that&amp;#039;s worthwhile on the site is free. For $99, a premium membership offers a set of powerful screening tools that help you manage your portfolio. The most powerful feature on the site is the Portfolio X-Ray, which puts your own portfolio of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds through the same analytical ringer that Morningstar applies to the professionally run funds it monitors. Some of that analysis is free. It will, for instance, parse your portfolio for a mix of asset classes (cash, domestic stocks or bonds, et cetera). It will then tell you how much you&amp;#039;re paying in commissions and fees overall, steering you to less-expensive alternatives. This simple task can give a huge boost to your portfolio over time. FINANCIALPLAN-AUDITORS.COM This is the site that will help you figure out how to live it up and die dead broke. The trade-off is that making it through the site&amp;#039;s prying questionnaires and doomsday scenarios is more chore than fun. Bear with it. There&amp;#039;s no advice here on how to get rich, just on how not to get poor. By taking all your financial data and mixing in information about your goals and expected mortality, this site measures the probability that your current financial strategy will get you to a comfortable end. One thing I like about this site is that it rejects the methodology most financial planners use in their calculations. Most assume that stocks and bonds will make you so much per year, based on their historical average. It&amp;#039;s a faulty method because history has its ups and downs. When you retire, there&amp;#039;s always the chance you&amp;#039;ll have to live off your investments just when the market has torpedoed them. The historical method can also throw off the estimates of your own future wealth, even if you have a relatively modest portfolio, by many thousands of dollars. Financial Plan Auditors builds the so-called timing risk into its calculations using a method that economists amusingly call a Monte Carlo simulation. The results are chilling, or comforting, depending on your outlook. They tell you how much you need to invest over time. I found myself way short. That&amp;#039;s the chilling part. Sinking more into my old age, however, has given me some comfort. KIPLINGER.COM I like this site mainly for its hundreds of different financial calculators. And you don&amp;#039;t need a degree in finance to use them. All the calculators have the formulas built into them; all you do is fill in one of the simple forms. You can, for instance, tally up how much the fees built into your mutual funds affect returns, what your current return is on a fund or stock, what future returns make selling your investments now worthwhile (a tax question), and how foreign-currency fluctuations influence the international stocks in your portfolio. Not all the calculators relate to stocks and funds; others uncover the hidden costs of insurance, taxes, and all kinds of borrowing and saving. INVESTINGINBONDS.COM Investing in bonds is practically a lost art in an era when stocks don&amp;#039;t just fill everyone&amp;#039;s portfolio, they also provide social capital (party gossip). Still, every investor needs to be smart about bonds, all the more so since recent months have reminded investors that volatile markets have a downside. This site is the province of the Bond Market Association, a trade group of financial firms that sell bonds. Nevertheless, the advice here is measured and clear. It explains what a bond is and how it is priced. For those considering investing in bonds, it offers a checklist that covers such topics as goals, tolerance for risk, and years to retirement. There&amp;#039;s a yield calculator that will tell you how you should decide between tax-free and taxable bonds. And, my favorite, it offers an organized, easy-to-navigate gateway to four hundred more sites that will lead you to information on buying and pricing just about any bond on the planet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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