Happy Clicking ! Great Investing Web sites for Teens

Here is a handful of great investing sites-- some created and maintained by teens, others by larger financial institutions. Check back often to see what sites we’ve added.

Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com) This site is chock full of news and data on all the financial markets, including stock quotes and mutual fund information. There is also Bloomberg University, which serves up free on-line investing classes, and there are links to Bloomberg TV and Radio and Bloomberg Personal finance Magazine. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that by day, I work as a senior editor at the magazine!) Among the coolest tools for teens: the Portfolio Tracker and the Education Cost Calculator under the Tools section.

Buck Investor (www.buckinvestor.com) "Building wealth by bucking the trend," is the motto of this site, which is geared to investors under the age of 35 and sports an antlered buck as its mascot. The site has useful articles, bulletin boards, a weekly e-mail newsletter you can sign up to receive, profiles of young investors, and links to other helpful sites. It was begun by a pair of North Carolina State students three years ago, and in 1999 they sold it, moved to San Francisco, and continue to work with the site under the new owner.

CBS Marketwatch (www.marketwatch.com). The site offers well-written features, breaking news, and good basic research information on companies and stocks, as well as the fairly standard interactive features such as a stock screener, lists of stocks that analysts have upgraded or downgraded, and stocks that have hit fifty-two-week highs and lows. Marketwatch is also home to several columnists worth reading.

CyberInvest (www.cyberinvest.com). This multipurpose supersite has free information on every investing topic imaginable. One of the coolest areas compares the features offered by different financially oriented sites–the financial magazine sites, the investing supersites, and online news sites. It provides a nice snapshot of the Web’s financial world.

Dismal Scientist (www.dismal.com). Named after what Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics ("a dismal science"), this site is interesting, although not immediately useful for investors. Click here to read articles like "The Top Twenty-Five Economic Events of the Twentieth Century" and to increase your general economic knowledge, not to get stock-picking ideas.

Edustock (tqd.advanced.org/3088/) Begun by students at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland, this site has simulated market trading as well as basic information on investing and profiles of a group of companies young investors might be interested in. It’s bright, well designed, and easy to use.

FinanCenter (www.financenter.com). This site offers one-stop shopping for financial calculations. You pick a calculation you want to perform ("What is my return if I sell now?"), provide the numbers the site asks for, and get an answer. Quicker and easier than using your calculator–even if you did have all the formulas at your fingertips.

Investing for Kids (tqd.advanced.org/3096) A unique site, done by students at Palo Verdes Peninsula High School in California, (the same school as the Bulls and Bears Club, but different kids) has an abundance of information for all levels of teen investors. There’s the ThinkQuest Stock Game, where you invest $100,000 cyberportfolio. The investing information is wisely organized according to investing ability (beginner, intermediate and advanced). This site is a Yahoo! cool site and richly deserves the attention.

Investorama (www.investorama.com). This site has links to nearly 12,000 financial Web pages, organized by 149 categories so you can easily find what you’re looking for. You’ll also see a library of articles laden with sensible advice. Investorama is a good source of information about investment clubs. Douglas Gerlach, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Online Investing (Que Corporation, 1999, $16.99), started the site and writes much of it.

InvestSmart (library.advanced.org/10326) Another site designed for ThinkQuest, a kid’s Web page design competition, this one is well worth bookmarking, with a market simulation, investment lessons and a more active bulletin board than many other kid investing sites. The "Real Life Examples," make for great reading about how specific kids got started. Yahoo! has also awarded this site the status of "cool site."

Kids and Money (www.kidsandmoney.com) My friend Jayne Pearl has a terrific site that is designed for parents interested in teaching kids of all ages about money. Be sure to check out her fun "Allowance Then and Now Calculator" to see if you're overpaid or underpaid by your parents! Next time they tell you "when I was your age, my allowance was only (fill in the blank), you can inform them what that would be in today's inflation adjusted dollars.

Kidstock (www.kidstock.com) Kidstock is attractive and well put together, with articles on how kids can earn money, the basics of investing, and direct stock investing. It’s part of Netstock Direct, a Web site devoted to direct investing (buying stocks directly from a company) and to dividend reinvestment plans.

Morningstar (www.morningstar.com). The well-known rating company carries its mutual fund expertise to the Web, where it offers news stories and analysis on the world of funds. There’s free access to much of the site, although subscribers ($9.95) get enhanced features.

MSN Moneycentral (www.moneycentral.com). This is Microsoft’s entry into the financial Web page business; it features not only a library of personal finance articles but also several interactive tools for investors.

National Association of Investors Corp. (NAIC) (www.better-investing.org) This site, home to thousands of investment clubs, has a section on youth investing that is full of valuable articles and tips. It should also be the starting place for anyone interested in an investment club.

Raging Bull (www.ragingbull.com). This site, which was started by a group of undergrads from Rutgers University and the University of Virginia, is well known for stock chats and bulletin boards. One unique feature is the ability of a reader to choose to ignore annoying posts from a specific screen name. Reading through intelligent posts concerning a stock you’re watching can indeed yield insights.

Smith Barney (www.smithbarney.com/yin). The firm’s Young Investor Network section of their main Web site is designed to let you run a paper portfolio as well as check out the articles on investing. Well organized for the beginner investor.

StrongKids (www.strongkids.com) Created by Strong Mutual Funds, this site has a standard tool box for kids interested in investing and for their parents: an interactive calculator, a library of articles on investing, and information on the company’s mutual funds.

TheStreet.com (www.thestreet.com). With its news, information, and stock market commentary, this site is for the active trader. TheStreet.com was begun as a subscription site, but is in the process of transforming into two sites, one free and the other a premium site, RealMoney.com. The premium site will charge $200 a year for earlier access to columnists, real-time stock quotes, and hedge fund manager James J. Cramer’s Trading Diary. TheStreet.com will continue to offer its extremely readable columnists, news, analyses of companies, and personal finance information for free.

Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com). The Journal is the gold standard for financial news, and this site makes good use of the institution’s resources. It carries the newspaper’s daily copy but also updates the news during the day. Subscribers can search and read stories that have appeared in the past thirty days for free. A valuable although expensive tool is the ability to search all major business publications for stories on a topic; the search is free, but reading articles costs $2.95 each. This site charges a subscription fee of $59.95 a year, or $29.95 for those who also get the print edition.

WallStreetLinks (www.wallstreetlinks.com). This site provides an assortment of Web links, organized neatly by categories. If you’re having trouble finding information on a certain subject, try this site.

Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com). In conversations with young investors this site always comes up as a favorite. It’s the 800-pound gorilla of Internet finance portals: with thousands of message boards, news, and customizable portfolio trackers, it’s the first stop for many Internet-vestors.

Young Investor (www.younginvestor.com) Fun and well designed -- a good beginning stop for a young investor. This site is brought to you by the folks at Liberty Mutual’s Stein Roe Young Investor mutual fund, so that fund is highlighted. Visitors to the site choose one of six guides. (Gnaz Dax is a superhero (get it?), Slice is a teen snow boarder, Planet Lisa is an eco-conscious teen girl, Webster is a blazer-wearing, buttoned-down guy "focused on his career") The site has articles on investing, games, information about the Stein Roe fund holdings, and kid bulletin boards. Older teens may not find it as useful as younger kids.

Young Monthly (www.youngmonthly.com) Chris Stallman, a 15 year old Chicago area student started this attractive site in 1999. Among its unique features is its "Young 30" stock index, which tracks the performance of 30 companies of interest to young investors (for instance, Abercrombie & Fitch, Charles Schwab, AT&T, General Mills, and Wal-Mart).

Young Money (www.youngmoney.com) is the Internet site of Young Money magazine, a monthly periodical about kids and money. For the most part, the site contains information about the magazine, such as the current issue’s table of contents. The site is currently undergoing a re-design.