WEBPOINTERS : WEB SITES MAY HOLD KEY TO FINANCIAL SUCCESS.Byline: Kitty Williams You want to make your money work for you in 1997. It's your plan and your resolution. So you look around, read the paper, grab a few money magazines off the newsstand, and ponder Ponder - A non-strict polymorphic, functional language by Jon Fairbairn <jf@cl.cam.ac.uk>. Ponder's type system is unusual. It is more powerful than the Hindley-Milner type system used by ML and Miranda and extended by Haskell. . A couple of years ago, you recall, everyone was talking about mutual funds as the hot new way to make money off investments. Is that a good idea? I looked around on the Internet Internet Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the to find some answers. To sum up what I found: Maybe, maybe not. (Don't you love specific financial advice?) With the help of the Web, you can do your own research and discover why mutual funds are still attracting investors, whether you should be among them, and what the alternatives are. Start out from the NETworth site. There you can get objective analysis of funds that interest you from Morningstar, a respected source of information on more than 7,500 mutual funds. You can search by fund name or ticker symbol Ticker Symbol An arrangement of characters (usually letters) representing a particular security listed on an exchange or otherwise traded publicly. When a company issues securities to the public marketplace, it selects an available ticker symbol for its securities which investors . If you aren't looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. a specific fund, you can click on Top Performers. Following that link, you come to a page which lists 44 categories of funds, and a choice of return periods from year-to-date Year-to-date (YTD) The period beginning at the start of the calendar year up to the current date. , three-month to 10 years. Select a category, say Mid-Cap Blend, and a time period for a list of the top 25 performers. For more information on a specific fund, you can click on the Morningstar hyperlink A predefined linkage between one object and another. See hypertext. hyperlink - anchor next to it. You get information on the funds family name, assets, and category, the three-month, year-to-date, one year, three-, five-, and 10-year average returns, Morningstar risk and returns ratings, an investment profile, fees and expenses, operations data including the name and tenure of the fund manager, and portfolio information on price/earning ratio, price book ratio, composition and sector weightings. This information is free, but you must register to access it. As an example of the sort of information you can find, The Vanguard Vanguard Any of three unmanned U.S. experimental satellites. Vanguard I (1958), the second U.S. satellite placed in orbit around Earth (after Explorer 1), was a tiny 3.25-lb (1.47-kg) sphere with two radio transmitters. home page contains news and announcements, planning tools, articles about international investing, year-end distributions, and gifts to children. It also has educational articles, up-to-date information about Vanguard mutual funds by category, risk level, asset type, fund minimums and daily fund reports. After you've done all your homework, you tell me: is ``Maybe, maybe not'' a fair assessment? ADDRESS BOOK The Motley Fool Website http://www.fool.com/sea(underscore The underscore character (_) is often used to make file, field and variable names more readable when blank spaces are not allowed. For example, NOVEL_1A.DOC, FIRST_NAME and Start_Routine. (character) underscore - _, ASCII 95. )all.htm NETworth http://networth.galt.com NETworth Mutual Fund Market Manager http://networth.galt.com/www/home/mutual/ Morningstar Search http://networth.galt.com/www/home/mutual/mstar.html Vanguard Group http://www.vanguard.com CAPTION(S): Box Box: ADDRESS BOOK (see text) |
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