<This weeks Barrons> Ten to Trust -- Cover Story
Microsoft MoneyCentral again heads our annual list of the Top 10 investor Websites, compiled from rankings in five basic categories.
No. 1 Microsoft MoneyCentral (moneycentral.msn.com).
No. 2 Quicken.com (www.quicken. com).
No. 3 America Online looks better, works better and offers more tools than ever.
No. 4 Yahoo Finance (quote.yahoo.com).
No. 5 CBS MarketWatch (cbs.marketwatch.com).
No. 6 Morningstar (www.morningstar.com).
No. 7 TheStreet.com (www.thestreet.com).
No. 8 CNNfn (www.cnnfn.com).
No. 10 The Motley Fool (www.fool. com).
No. 9 Silicon Investor (www.siliconinvestor.com). Who'd have thought a site that began life as a giant message board for investors would flesh out enough to hit our Top 10 supersites once again? Silicon Investor has made substantial changes over the last year, and if we were giving an award for the Most Improved, this would be it.
First, there's a streaming real-time portfolio. SI was not the first to introduce this feature at no cost, but it's a feather in their cap. The site has also bulked up its research department, adding resources like institutional holdings, mutual-fund information from Morningstar and the audio/video company news that sites seem compelled to start offering. Silicon Investor is also available on the Palm VII wireless hand-held now, which is a more useful feature at this point.
The site's news coverage has also been expanded since last year. There are two dozen new news feeds, and news and editorials from sources like Red Herring and the Industry Standard. A refreshing break from the rah-rah blather comes from the Contrarian column penned by hedge-fund manager Bill Fleckenstein, whose visage and opinions have graced these pages.
Silicon Investor has built itself up in every area we evaluate to be a serious threat to those sites that keep hovering around the top. Its opening page does a better job than some of its competitors to guide to what lies within, but without overwhelming you with too many links, as Yahoo did a couple of years ago.
But at the heart of it all is what's made Silicon Investor a popular gathering from the start: lively, intelligent message boards. Lots of them. SI has tweaked its discussion forum tools a bit over the last year, allowing you, for example, to ignore certain scribblers and to change your original posting. If only real life worked the same way.
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