One of the stock market's virtues is that it's easy to understand. Your stock goes up - you make money. It goes down - you lose. But if you're not a financial professional, your comprehension of REITs, tax-free municipal bonds and other investment alternatives may be vague at best.
The search engines discussed in this article - CNNfn, Northern Light's Alexander Personal Finance Search, invest-o-rama, MoneySearch, and Yahoo!.Finance - are designed to give the average investor practical information about the many investment instruments available.
CNNfn - A VALUABLE RESOURCE OF FINANCIAL NEWS AND HOW-TO INVESTMENT ARTICLES
CNNfn is the web site of CNN's financial network. You can do a keyword search (using Infoseek's search system) to retrieve articles about all aspects of finances written by both CNNfn's reporters and outside financial experts.
Much of the material concentrates on analyzing prevailing financial conditions. For example, an article dated 10/9/98 examines the current dip in Treasury bond yields. Some of the articles offer how-to information. One piece, dated 10/6/98, discusses investment alternatives for the person with very limited funds.
Special Features: quicken.com on fn contains information geared to the individual investor on such topics as banking, investing, taxes and insurance. Another excellent special feature is Tips and Tools, which includes a college planner, mortgage calculator, retirement planner, Roth IRA planner, and other investment tools.
NORTHERN LIGHT'S ALEXANDER PERSONAL FINANCE SEARCH PRODUCES COMPREHENSIVE, RELEVANT RESULTS
Northern Light's Alexander Personal Finance Search is basically Northern Light's special search menu designed to enhance searching for information about all aspects of personal finance.
Special Search Menu: Web searches can be limited to All Personal Finances, Banks and Banking, Taxes, Insurance, Credit, Loans and Debt, or Real Estate. Menus make it easy to limit and sort your results by date. Other search options include restricting results to press releases or product reviews.
After you get your results, you can narrow your search by selecting one of the Custom Search Folders which represent various aspects of your subject.
Results: I found the results of searches that I did to be both comprehensive and exceptionally relevant. Items from both the Web and Northern Light's fee-based Special Collection are included.
