Market Map is cool and useful
Written: Jan 27 '00
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Pros: Comprehensive financial web site
Cons: none
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| BeckyJo's Full Review: SmartMoney |
This is an excellent free financial website. Like most financial sites on the Internet, you can search for funds and stocks using various criteria like sectors, returns, market cap, etc. They also have a large selection of articles to read, including a lot of educational material.
I like their mutual fund snapshots, which combine text information describing the fund with an interactive plot on the same web page. One nice feature of the plotting is that you can compare funds to each other as well as to a variety of benchmarks. You can store your own portfolio information also (actually several portfolios if you want) and it will help you track your results.
The display of stock information is complete, once again with nice plot features such as when dividend payments occurred. You can overlay competing stocks from the same market sectors, as well as display moving averages and various other technical indicators. A real strength of this web site is the speed at which it operates. Browsing is fast and links within the sites are almost instantaneously loaded. Also, charts update quickly, I think because all the data is downloaded with the page and then a Java applet runs the charting.
There are two extra cool features of this site that are unique in my experience: Map of the Market and Sector Tracker.
The Map of the Market is a graphical display of the entire S&P 500 driven by a clever Java applet. The stocks are displayed in a 2D graphic with each company’s rectangle sized according to the real market cap of the firm. Stocks are grouped by market sector (technology, financials, etc.) The colors range from bright red (bad day) to black (neutral) to bright green (good day). Moving the mouse around pop’s up the name of the company your are over and the actual up to date gain or loss for the day (I suppose the data is about 20 minutes out of date like most free sites). Clicking brings up a menu with more information. There are special little icons on companies for which there are accompanying current news articles. Mousing over them brings up a popup menu with a list of links to pick from. This Map is a really easy way to get a feel for how the markets are doing during the day and it is easy to pick out big movers.
The Sector Tracker allows you to look at different market sectors and easily compare them over differing periods of time. Then you can zoom in and look at the companies that make up that sector.
The web site is associated with the Smart Money magazine put out by the Wall Street Journal folks. It has more good articles and commentary than most of the free sites. The magazine is a pretty good one and most if not all of the articles are on-line as well. It is very easy to spend a lot of time at this site.
The only caveat I'll offer is that I have a pretty fast computer attached to the Internet using a DSL line. I’m not sure how the fancy graphics and applets will do using a slower computer or slower Internet connection. Don’t let that stop you from trying it out though.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
BeckyJo
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Member: Becky Rausch
Location: Richland, Washington
Reviews written: 49
Trusted by: 162 members
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