In addition to monitoring your portfolio directly within your brokerage account, there are other tools available on the internet to help you monitor your portfolio. Major websites offering portfolio tracking tools include:

• Yahoo: http://finance.yahoo.com/
• Morningstar: http://www.morningstar.com

Below, we describe each of these tools in more detail.

1.1.1     Yahoo

Yahoo offers a relatively sophisticated alternative to solely monitoring your portfolios through your brokerage account. In addition to monitoring your actual portfolio, Yahoo gives you the opportunity to create watch lists that can be used to monitor investments that you may be considering or contained in a “shadow portfolio”. Some of our favorite features found within Yahoo include:

• News alerts: News alerts alert you via either email or on your home page as to new news relating to your portfolio’s holdings.
• Price targets: You can set price targets for your investments, either for buy or sell alerts. Yo can be alerted via email or via your personalized portfolio page.
• Multiple portfolios: Within Yahoo, you can set up any number of separate portfolios to watch. For some portfolios you may simply enter the ticker symbols to monitor, or you may enter the number of shares and the price paid. The difficulty with monitoring an online portfolio of mutual funds is making sure that the dividends are re-invested. This is typically a manual process.
• Different views for each portfolio: In Yahoo’s portfolio tool, there are over 75 different variables available to you to display within your portfolio. These variables include basic price information, detailed price information, real-time market data, fundamental data, moving average data, price and earnings estimates, and portfolio data.
• Streaming real time quotes: For an additional fee, Yahoo makes available to its users streaming real-time price quotes.
• Advanced charting: Yahoo also allows Yahoo users access to basic and advanced charting tools. The charting tools include price ranges; bar, line, and candle charts; moving averages; overlays such as Bollinger Bands; and other technical indicators such as MACD and RSI.
• Advanced fundamental data: The fundamental data includes data from detailed balance sheets and income statements for the past four quarters and three years.
• Integration with Yahoo tool bar: The Yahoo tool bar resides in your internet browser and gives you quick access to your Yahoo portfolio and the above tools.

1.1.2     Morningstar

Morningstar is a good alternative that offers sophisticated portfolio analysis tools. In addition to many of the basic portfolio monitoring services, Morningstar offers premium services for a fee that include:

• Portfolio X-Ray: Portfolio X-Ray is a tool that allows you to quickly analyze your portfolio including asset allocation, and sector and international exposure.
• Portfolio Diagnostics:  Portfolio Diagnostics gives you an assessment of your portfolio’s investment objective and how it compares to other similar portfolios.
• Stock Intersection: Stock Intersection summarizes all of the funds in your portfolio by their stock holdings to give you a better sense of how much exposure you have to an actual company.
• Similar Fund Search: If a fund is closed to new investors, the Similar Fund Search will search the universe of funds to find a similar fund to the closed fund.
• Asset Allocator: Based on your financial goals, Asset Allocator will create an asset allocation based on your investment goals.
• Risk Analyzer: Risk Analyzer will analyze the real risk in your portfolio and make recommendations to help you reduce your risk.
• Cost Analyzer: Cost Analyzer analyzes the total costs of funds and makes recommendations on the lowest cost funds.
• ClearFuture: ClearFuture is a tool to help you analyze your 401(k) options and helps you allocate your investments based on your investment objectives.