Smartmoney.com: The only Financial Super Site you will ever need!
Written: Apr 23 '02
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Pros: Tons of Financial information, tips, and research tools
Cons: No cons at all!
The Bottom Line: Smartmoney.com has it all, from tax advice to stock tips, to mortgage information. It definitely deserves the title "Super Site".
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| Bryan_Carey's Full Review: SmartMoney |
Smartmoney.com is a financial service on the world- wide web with a multitude of financial information. This financial supersite gives more than just stock quotes, charts, graphs, and financial statement information. It also helps keep the consumer up to date on the latest financial news and has advice on personal finance and educational topics related to finance.
Departments:
The home page for Smartmoney.com looks like a newsletter, with important headlining stories highlighted with links to read more. Here, on the main page, you will find stories under titles like “The Market Now”, “In Focus”, and “Analysis and Commentary”.
Smartmoney.com includes several different departments that can be accessed to assist you with financial issues and concerns. They are:
My Portfolio- This is a customizable feature where you can logon and setup your portfolio. You must register with Smartmoney.com to utilize the portfolio options. This involves setting up a user name and password. It’s free of charge, and it will help track your portfolio, sending you daily updates on the prices of the securities in your portfolio.
Tools- This area relates back to the personal portfolio mentioned above, with expanded options. In the tools area, you can setup a watch list, compare stocks of different companies side by side, use financial calculators, track a certain sector of the market, and use a stock screening tool to help you find a good stock to buy. You can conduct analysis on the stocks in your own portfolio, or with the stocks of other companies.
Maps- In the maps department, you can view the performance of a large number of stocks or mutual funds all at once. You can also view a map of a specific sector, like telecommunications, health care, industrial, etc. The map shows you financial data for hundreds of companies, and then allows you to sort, based on specified criteria, to find a stock that fits your investment objectives. Underneath the map, you will see a listing of important news stories that you can click and read.
Stocks- The stock department contains stock quotes, news and analysis, commentary, the current Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ averages, and research tools to help you select stock. Along with stock quotes, you can access charts, news, earnings estimates, comparisons to competitors, insider trading, key ratios, and much more.
Funds- If mutual funds are your liking, then the funds department is the place to go. Besides the news and analysis section, you can lookup a list of the top performing funds and the lowest performing funds, for the time period of your choosing (1 day, 1 week, year to date, 4 weeks, 1 year, 3 years, or five years). You can also narrow down the “best” and “worst” list to include funds only from a certain sector, if you wish. There are also several on- line tools to help you select a mutual fund.
Personal Finance- This is primarily an advice section. You can lookup all sorts of helpful tips in areas such as college planning, retirement planning, tax planning, insurance, marriage and divorce, debt management, real estate, and automobiles. There’s also some helpful commentary to read, along with 401K tools, mortgage calculators, etc.
Economy and Bonds- In this department, you can find out all you could ever hope to know about the current economic conditions. There are many timely articles to read, plus an up- to- date list of key economic indicators, key interest rates, an interest yield curve, news from the Federal Reserve, and advice on selecting corporate and/or government bonds.
Community- This is a section that includes message boards and forums where you can logon and talk to others about the subject of finance. If you want to find messages relating to a specific company, Smartmoney.com has a search option that allows you to enter a stock ticker symbol. The results that display will show you the messages that relate to the specific company that you requested. These messages include ones posted in other sites, like MSN, Yahoo finance, Lion.com, Fool.com, and Raging Bull.
Costs for This Service:
There is no charge to use Smartmoney.com. Several of the premium services (Stock Screener, Portfolio Tracker, Realtime watch list, Risk map 100, etc.) will require that you establish an account first, with Smartmoney.com. But there is no charge to use any of these services.
Final Thoughts:
Smartmoney.com ranks as one of the world- wide web’s best financial services. The content is updated frequently, so it can be counted on to provide timely information. The tools are very helpful and easy to use, even for the novice investor. The articles are well- written and thoughtful, and they often present viewpoints that you might not have considered before.
I teach finance at a local university, and Smartmoney.com is one of the sites that I recommend to my students to turn to, when they need to conduct financial research. Unlike some of the other sites out there, Smartmoney.com doesn’t charge any fees for its services. This is a definite plus for students, who often consider even $10 per month to be outside of their limited budgets.
The maps are very handy, but they could cause some problems depending on your PC and what software you have loaded. The maps are driven by a java applet, so if you do not have this capability on your PC, you will not be able to utilize the maps. And even if you do have the ability, the maps often take a little more time to load than the other features in this site. If you can get the maps to load, I recommend checking them out. They group the stocks by sector, and use colors to indicate the performance for a particular company. Red indicates a bad day, black is neutral, and green is indicative of an excellent performance day. You can move your mouse around the map, and a company name will pop up, showing the actual gain or loss for the day.
I really enjoy the financial tools in this site, and I think that most others will, too. I have used the retirement planner, and a few other on- line tools. Smartmoney.com steps you through a few questions, and then produces a result page to tell you if you are on track to meet a certain financial goal.
Whether or not you like the subject of finance, I recommend logging into Smartmoney.com. No matter what your financial goals might be, you will have no problem finding something helpful in this excellent finance site. Whether you need advice on investing, company financial data, mortgage assistance, mutual fund research, or if you just like to read financial news stories, you will find most anything you need in Smartmoney.com.
Log on today, and get educated in the world of finance!
Recommended:
Yes
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