The Internet is a bottomless well of information for investors; all of it accessible with incredible ease and most of it free. The intent of this newsletter is not to bore you with yet another overview of the Internet and World Wide Web, but simply present some of the Web sites and their addresses that we feel might be of use to DollarLink customers. This is not a comprehensive survey by any means -- there are books the size of phone books that try to do that! -- but rather a short compilation of useful sites.
You will need an Internet connection (usually about $20/month) and Web browser software. We prefer the Netscape Navigator browser (downloadable for free).
Of the hundreds of search engines (which allow you to find other sites on the Web) we usually rely on Yahoo and Altavista because they cover probably over 95% of the Internet.
Most publications have their own Web sites where they have varying amounts of content. In the financial world, we like Barron's, USA Today, Bloomberg, Business Wire and New York Times. Wall Street Journal is good but not free (although you can get a limited-time free access to it). We also like the sites of the two trade journals for active traders, Futures Magazine and Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities. We also like the site of Futures Truth which attempts to verify performance claims of many popular trading systems.
MyYahoo, an offshoot of Yahoo , is an impressive site. It allows you -- in an easy fashion -- to define your interests (financial and otherwise) and then delivers news stories and quotes that are pertinent to your interests. It also allows you to create a large number of stock portfolios and update these with delayed stock quotes as well as news stories pertinent to the stocks in these portfolios. You can even have a tickertape scrolling across your screen with quotes of your choosing.
There is no lack of trading and investment advice on the Web. Rather than try to list sites of this nature, we'll just refer you to a couple of sites that have very comprehensive and well-organized listings of links to newsletters and trading systems: Wall Street Directory and Syndicate .
Galt Technology has links to probably more mutual funds than anyone else. Fidelity has a huge Web site dedicated to their own funds.
You can send and receive messages on any financial subject to the various Internet financial discussion groups. They are misc.invest, misc.invest.futures, misc.invest.stocks, misc.invest.technical and misc.invest.funds . These discussion groups are very active with the most active, misc.invest.stocks , getting 600-1000 messages per day. Most of the discussions at these groups is a waste of time, but once in a while you can find a gem. Unfortunately you do have to wade through oceans of pure nonsense because you don't know where or when that gem might appear.
You can get delayed intraday and historical quotes on the Internet for stocks and commodities. DBC has a comprehensive and popular site where, besides quotes, they also have timely news stories and lots of other features. PC Quote has a similarly structured (though somewhat less elaborate) site. Two other fee-based data vendors, Quote.com and Interquote specialize in delivering (usually via e-mail or downloads with supplied software) specific sets of quotes in periodic fashion, from tick-by-tick to daily.
Most quotes data on the Internet are for stocks and indices, but we have found two sources of free historical commodities data: Ira Epstein and Potts . Both of these sites allow you to download ASCII commodities data off their site. The data can be a useful source for DollarLink if you missed a few days of quotes.
Many discount brokerage firms have sites on the Web where you can trade stocks at greatly reduced rates. The ones that stand out for us are Lombard which charges a flat $15 per trade, Ceres ($18/trade), E-trade ($15/trade) and Datek ($10/trade). Lombard 's site also has some (rudimentary) charting and research information. Unlike some other electronic brokerage firms, Datek -- even though it is the cheapest broker -- has gotten favorable comments in the discussion groups (the absence of negative comments on Datek is impressive because there is always somebody unhappy about something in the discussion groups) for the speed of their executions.
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