Fri Dec 26.....Best Internet Finance & Business Sites 1997
.....just when i thought about trading this stock i read this--damn! this makes me want to buy and hold. can you dig it! the best search engine with about 1/6 the value of yahoo! wait till the intuit/checkfree alliance with excite really takes hold. TL we may need to buy and hold this one for a while!
By Steve Harmon
Senior Investment Analyst
Internet.com
"Where Wall Street Meets The Web"
Following the market in 1993 meant having a Bloomberg terminal and a penchant for flying with blinders on. With the Internet, in 1997 that wasn't the case as now dozens of companies provide everything from free news, charts, portfolio tracking, research and other crucial stock market tools to empower individual and professional investors. Here's our roundup of some of the best Web services in 1997:
CNNfn took the cable minute to minute model and ported it over nicely to the Web to provide a well-rounded source for general market and business news throughout the day. MSNBC is coming on strong, however, and could be a contender in 1998.
Search site Excite (NASDAQ:XCIT - news) is one of the few places you actually get a nice ranking of results for relevancy. In a sea of data and Web pages, time is the most valuable element. saving time for market-conscious investors is key. We also though HotBot (www.hotbot) was a great tool to find what you want when you want.
No one is an island and neither is Wall Street. Checking the international business and market situation was a must as Asia reminds us. Several regional sites of note include Asia Business News.
Snapshot Best Of...
Harmon's Hot ListBest Business-Finance Info SourcesÿÿBest Market NewsCNNfn
Best Search EngineExcite
Best Int'l Business NewsFinancial Times
Best Internet Industry NewsInternet.com
Best IPO DataIPOMaven
Best Venture Capital SiteKleiner Perkins Caufield Byers
Best Investment Bank SiteMorgan Stanley
Best Technology Finance Site (tie)Red Herring
Best Technology Stock SiteSilicon Investo
rBest Technology Finance Site (tie)UPSIDE
Best Quote ServiceUpside.com
Best Real Time Quote ServiceThomson Invest.Ne
tBest Financial NewsWSJ Interactive
Best Finance AggregatorYahoo Finance
For getting a head's up on IPOs not only in the Internet but across the board, IPOMaven, a long-timer in the field, had fairly comprehensive raw data on upcoming offers.
Coming on strong this year was UPSIDE as it challenged Red Herring's mindshare and came out with consistently-good articles and a fatter magazine. The Web site lets you create a stock portfolio and shows the run rate revenue for it along with other pertinent data. Herring.com also beefed itself up to more of a daily and offered a weekly direct email product.
Silicon Investor stuck to its message board nature and kept a loyal following, one of the largest (if not the largest) stock messaging sites on the Web, ahead of Motley Fools by some accounts. Anything that empowers the investor is to be congratulated. Take it with a few grains of salt, though, since many people tout their own stocks often. Or defend them.
In the old media company that gets it award there's Thomson. This huge multi-billion dollar company came out with free real-time quotes at a time when delayed quotes are everywhere. In paying the exchange costs for its users Thomson may be gaining users that otherwise may not check in. Thomson Invest.Net's front end is perhaps a little graphic heavy, we'd like to see more data and text without the big graphics as you log in.
The robust coverage of the Internet via the Wall Street Journal sprung new outlets that leveraged the Web for its real-time nature. WSJ Interactive, with its Personal Journal feature, is probably the future of newspapering across the board.
In the caterpillar to butterfly category Yahoo Finance began the year pointing to other sites and ended it with a host of content on site, not an easy transition to seemingly invisibly make. It flies where it once crawled.
These are only a few notable sites. Coming soon--our 1997 survey where you pick the best of several Internet venture capital, stock and notable events. Look for it here in early 1998. |
