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To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (32226)	1/2/1999 3:01:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

I never could figure out why the local mom-and-pop ISP don't make disks allowing people to sign up as easily as AOL makes it, but then I guess that's why the local ISPs are still small and AOL is bigger than General Motors. The local ISPs have been trying to do that here but it appears not to be that easy. AOL has it perfectly. AOL has more resources now too:-) Glenn

To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (32226)	1/3/1999 4:25:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

THE NET'S BURIED TREASURE There's plenty of trash out there, but regulators and others offer terrific stuff for free Online investing is growing up fast. What used to be a marginal pastime for a few devotees has become almost a necessity, particularly for investors venturing into high-tech and small-cap stocks. Internet message boards, derided as ''chat rooms'' in the press, can and do move markets. And though stock promoters continue to infest the Internet, sometimes via mass ''spam'' E-mailings, tough action by the Securities & Exchange Commission and other regulators has put the shadiest operators out of business. Separating the online wheat from the chaff remains a challenge, however. Message boards are still a worthy source of investment information--and drivel. A growing number of Web sites offer staff-produced content--and much of it, often, is free of charge. (The McGraw-Hill Companies operates several such sites, including Business Week Online and S&P Personal Wealth--www.businessweek.com and www.personalwealth.com.) WHAT A DEAL. The best bargain on the Web, at least for investors, is easy to pick. The laurels for that go to the SEC's EDGAR Web site, from which investors can instantly retrieve the SEC filings of virtually every public company and mutual fund (www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/srch-edgar). Don't take EDGAR for granted--those same documents can cost hundreds of dollars from document-retrieval services. Investors can also peruse recent commission actions against rogue brokers--and pending SEC rules if you're having trouble getting to sleep at night. The SEC's regulatory brethren offer some useful Web sites of their own. The best of the lot are the sites operated by the National Association of Securities Dealers, its subsidiary NASD Regulation, and the newly merged NASDAQ Stock Market and American Stock Exchange. The Web site of NASD Regulation's Public Disclosure Program (www.nasdr.com/2000.htm) is a good starting point for investors seeking to hire a full-service broker. The NASD can provide, by E-mail, the disciplinary and arbitration record of every broker. Monthly announcements of disciplinary actions against firms and brokers can also be checked at NASD Regulation, as well as at the New York Stock Exchange's Web site (www.nyse.com). The NASDAQ-American Stock Exchange Web site (www.nasdaq-amex.com) provides company information and stock quotes, as do several commercial sites that are, for the moment at least, free. For market-news summaries, one useful site is CBS MarketWatch (cbs.marketwatch.com/news/newsroom.htx). But for company-specific information, a better Web site is Hoover's Online (www. hoovers.com), operated by a firm noted for its corporate reference works. Enter a company's ticker symbol and you get links to eight online news outlets, plus the companies' own press releases. Hoover's also has an easy-to-use stock screener for investors seeking, say, stocks with low price-to-book ratios. CYBER-SPITBALLS. Hoover's Online has another feature that is attracting quite a following among pros and small investors alike--IPO Central (www. ipocentral.com). This site provides a listing, updated daily, of every recent and pending initial public offering. Prospectuses are available via links to EDGAR. One nifty feature is the ''power search'' that lets you sort by underwriter and check out the pricing and track record of their recent IPOs. Investors who like to do their own research sometimes like to browse the Internet's message boards. ''Usenet'' bulletin boards linked by the Internet, such as misc.invest.stocks, have become a backwater in recent months. Far more useful are Web-based boards. The granddaddy of these is Silicon Investor (www. techstocks.com), but more comprehensive is the Internet's tower of investment babble, the message boards at Yahoo! (messages.yahoo.com/yahoo/Business_and_Finance) Yahoo! has message boards for more than 8,400 stocks, with controversial small companies often getting far more traffic than widely held companies. The IBM message board, for example, has about 6,500 messages posted, while the board for Hemispherx BioPharma Inc., a small biotech company, has 9,300. Short-sellers and company aficionados duke it out on the Yahoo! boards, lacing their postings with detailed information, links to Web sites, and plenty of juvenile name-calling. It can make for some intriguing reading--for while the Internet has come of age, many of its users have not.