Sites

Quicken

Quicken has a very good research tool to find mutual funds that meet criteria that you set up. Great place to start in finding funds to invest in. If you're interested, you can also set up a portfolio on the sight to track your investments. When you set up a portfolio you can have it analyzed with one click. The analysis even examines the stock/bond/cash breakdown of each fund to give you a portfolio breakdown. You can also get reports on the items in your portfolio just by clicking on the item. They also show alerts concerning investments in your portfolio. And well, there is so much more that you can spend all day there: discussions, stats, tools on various financial areas.
But Morningstar has much more news, and CNN Money is another excellent site for financial news.

Portfolio

Since I can't use Quicken anymore, I Well, Quicken says that as of June 30, 2004, they will only provide their tools to those who are registered users of Quicken 2001 or more recent. So, I started looking around for another good site to maintain my portfolio. I checked Marketwatch, CNN Money, Yahoo Finance, and MSN Money. I'm not happy.
First, there is Morningstar, but for many of the tools, its available only with the premium account. If you invest with T. Rowe Price, you can build a portfolio there, and use the Morningstar tools at T. Rowe Price. These are the tools that Morningstar only has for premium accounts. But, they are hidden, if you want to keep them separate from your T. Rowe Price account. On 'My Home Page' or 'Portfolio', in the right hand column, under 'Research' is a drop-down menu that says 'I Want To'. Select 'Access Tools and Calculators'. A new window will apear, and click on 'Investment Planning Tools'. The 5th tool down is 'Portfolio X-Ray'. Create your portfolio here. The Morningstar X-Ray in your T. Rowe Price portfolio is a mere subset of this one, giving you much less information. But, of course, you don't have to create and maintain it.
If you have an account at Vanguard, you can have all your other accounts accessed by Vanguard, to present a portfolio. You can add accounts manually also. They have a good set of tools too. But, that's just one portfolio.
Now, what tools do I refer to. Asset allocation, based on what stocks your funds hold. Which stocks you hold the most of, as held by all your funds, and individually. How each of your funds contribute to your asset allocation. Similar allocations for bonds.

So, what do Marketwatch, CNN/Money, Yahoo, and MSN offer. MSN is the worst. It requires entering each fund/stock separately, not all on one page. That can be tedious. There are no tools, and the least info presented.
Yahoo has too many steps to edit your portfolio, and they don't return you to the portfolio when done editting. It is difficult to find the proper steps to edit your portfolio. They also don't have a place for cash.
Marketwatch shows tools for allocation and analysis, but the allocation is simply the percent of each stock or fund within your portfolio. The analysis is a chart of each stock or fund's price over some specified period. Nothing like the tools I mentioned above.
CNN/Money also has an allocation and analysis tool. The allocation shows amount in each asset class, amount in 4 sectors, and top 5 holdings. But this is a joke, it is only from your individual stocks, not from the funds. The analysis shows total return of your portfolio for a specified period, compared to DOW, NASDAQ, and S&P 500, but the results for my portfolio were totally WRONG.

The all allow for different views with what data is presented for each stock/fund of your portfolio, as well as custom views. They also have multiple portfolios, if you want. Only CNN and Quicken allow you to enter a value for Bonds, just so it is included in total and analysis.
But in the views, only Quicken, CNN/Money, and Morningstar have YTD, 1-Year, and 3-Year performance for each stock/fund. And this is one of the main things I wanted, plus good analysis. But the values for performance at CNN/Money is again totally WRONG. Nowhere near the correct returns.

CNN has a nice print view, but it includes links for news about your funds and stocks, which is annoying to have to print too.
No site has the ability to copy a portfolio to a new portfolio, as a base to start a new one.

Fund Screener

Since I can't use Quicken anymore, I also searched for a good fund screener. I compared MarketWatch, CNN/Money, Fidelity, Morningstar, MSN MoneyCentral, and Yahoo. Morningstar is probably the only one in which you will have to register, but it is free.

First, how to find the screener: look for Research, Tools or Funds, and then Screener or Fund Finder (if they have both, go with Screener).

Filters: These include type of fund (asset class), performance, risk, Morningstar stars, expenses, and more. All except Marketwatch provided a good list of filters to narrow the funds selected. So I dropped Marketwatch from further testing. At Fidelity, to get a good choice of filters you have to choose Advanced. But Fidelity is the only one that allows you to select multiple options. For instance if you want small cap blend and small cap value, you can only do that at Fidelity. MSN lets you pick within a Fund Family.

Results: CNN/Money lets you see 100 funds on one page, but no next page to see the rest. This can be good to see how to narrow your list. MSN and Morningstar have 25 on a page, Yahoo has 20, and Fidelity has only 10. But Fidelity lets you pick which page you want to see next, while the others only let you go to the next page. That can be slow. This is why it is good to start with CNN/Money to see what filters are needed to narrow the screen, unless you are already very selective in what you are looking for.
Information: As to what is displayed, MSN and Yahoo are the worst, not displaying any useful information. Morningstar gives you YTD returns and expenses. CNN/Money gives 1 and 3 year returns, expenses, and minimum investment. Fidelity gives YTD, 1, and 5 year returns, and assets. Again, CNN/Money is the way to go. Morningstar, CNN/Money, and Fidelity all let you reorder the list based on any column display.

Fund Comparison

Another desire in researching a fund to invest in, is to be able to compare certain funds that you are considering. Morningstar and Fidelity are the only way to go here. With Fidelity you can specify 5 funds to compare, while Morningstar does not specify how many. Marketwatch is OK in this category, but their display of returns is confusing in trying to distinguish positive and negative returns (but maybe that's my browser).

Morningstar

Morningstar is one of the basic research sites. Some of Morningstar's research tools require you to pay for them. Some of these pay services you can get for free elsewhere. One of the free types of information is their Quicktake Report, which gives a pretty good rundown on a fund. Just enter the symbol and hit Go. You can find it on the front page and under Funds.
But even with the free services, setting up portfolios at Morningstar will provide you with different insights into your investments. Similar to Quicken, you can get industry sector breakdowns, fund style breakdowns, major stocks owned, etc. within your funds. The views are different from Quicken's, and simpler. Compare, and even use both.

MarketWatch

CBS Market Watch is pretty much like Quicken for research, without the Quicken product info. Another great place for research and market news. Actually, MarketWatch is probably more diverse than Quicken.

Map Of the Market

To get to the Map of the Market select 'Quotes & Research' at the top of page and select 'stocks'. On the right side of stocks page, under 'related links', click on 'Map of the Market'.
Fidelity's Map of the Market is about the coolest tool I've ever seen to see what is happening in the financial market. It shows you what segments of the market are hot and cold, and which companies in the segments are hot and cold. It is shown in color gradients from negative red shades to positive green shades. The brighter the better. Have a look. Then visit other tools available at Fidelity.
To get the map, click on Map of the Market in the left-hand column.

Smart Money

Smart Money is a print magazine that has numerous articles and much information on investing, estate planning, retirement, and other financial needs. There are many tools to help you learn about your financial state. They also provide the capability to keep a portfolio there, which is becoming much more common. Can't comment on what tools are provided based on your portfolio, as I have not used it.

Fund Alarm

Fund Alarm's main function is to provide you with a list of funds that have consistently underperformed an appropriate benchmark. This refers to 3 periods, and for each fund, they identify how many periods thay have underperformed or overperformed the market. But they have a separate list of thos funds that have underperformed for all 3 periods. Performance data is provided for these periods and comparisons to benchmarks. It is a warning bell to look closer at these funds.

Risk Grades

Risk Grades provides you with a RiskGrade measurement of a stock or fund. You can also enter portfolio to see the risk of each item in it and the overall risk. It also shows the current RiskGrade of the S&P 500. They have a what if feature that lets you modify your portfolio, without saving it, to see what changes in it do to your overall risk.
Your portfolio, like at other sites, is updated to show the current value of the entries.
RiskGrade is a standardized measure of volatility that is different from the usual ones like beta and standard deviation.

Vanguard

This is one of the best sites to learn about investing in general. Naturally, you can check out the Vanguard mutual funds here, download or read prospectuses, use some tools.
Vanguard also has plenty of calculators and research tools into funds, not just their own, like the other sites.

Fidelity

This is another one of the best sites to learn about investing in general. Naturally, you can check out the Fidelity mutual funds here. This is another good place to do research on funds and stocks.

E. F. Moody

A great place for learning about investing, estate planning, and so much more. As they say at their site: 'THE INTERNET'S LARGEST (OVER 1,000 PAGES AND 774 LINKS) AND MOST COMPREHENSIVE INDEPENDENT FINANCIAL PLANNING SITE DESIGNED FOR CONSUMER KNOWLEDGE AND PROTECTION.' By the way, this is not Moody's Investors, the company that rates bonds and companies. This is Errold F. Moody, Jr, a financial consultant.

Two more sites that are more conventional and have some good basic information are Mutual Fund Investor's Center and Fairmark Press Tax Guide for Investor's . The Mutual Fund Investor's Center has many good articles on investing.

Kiplinger

Kiplinger is another alternative to most of your investing needs. Plenty of articles, calculators, and tools. Like the others you can track your portfolio. Since I don't do that, I can't comment on which is better for tracking.

Investing In Bonds

If you are interested in bonds, this is THE site. It has a guide to bond basics and how they are taxed. But it also has a database of the bonds that were sold the previous day, municipal and taxable. You can sort the results in various ways so that you only have to look at a section of the results, usually the top. Unfortunately you can't find what is for sale that may not have been sold yesterday. There is no archive either. You still have to talk to your broker.

Bank Rate

Two great things about this site that make it an extremely useful site, and maybe unique. The site provides a report (and a rating) on the quality of individual banking institutions. (Remember that the city and state used for the bank is not a branch, but the home office). You also can find the banks that provide the best rates for CD's and money market accounts, and sort the lists by yield, state, or bank rating. One of the problems with their listing of CD rates is that many banks have promotional rates for non-standard time periods. Thus their highest rates are not listed, making for a poor comparison.
These aren't the only things that the site provides on banks, but they are what I use.
By the way, these guys really hide the bank research page. To find it, click on Sitemap at the bottom of the page. Then, under CD & Investments, click on Safe & Sound bank rankings.

Banking My Way

This is another very useful site for finding the best rates at a neighborhood bank. Enter the criteria you want, including your zip code and find local rates. This site includes promotional rates, which also makes it better than Bank Rate . But I found that not all the banks are included, and again you got to know the bank to know if branches are near you. But they do a decent job of locating banks with local branches.

Roth IRA

If you want to find out anything about a Roth IRA, this is the place for you. You won't need anything else.