DECISIONPOINT.COM
INVESTERTECH.COM
THEWEBINVESTOR.COM

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DECISIONPOINT.COM

www.decisionpoint.com

Decisionpoint.com is a useful one-stop site for getting a picture of the broad market indicators. It is simple, well designed, and contains information that can assist traders in making decisions.

The homepage contains links to daily, historical, and interactive charts along with sporadic advice from newsletter and advisory publishers, most of which offer subscriptions for sale. An educational section containing the basics of technical analysis serves as an introduction to novices. The site includes both free and subscription-based information.

FIGURE 1: TREND WATCH, DECISIONPOINT.COM. Here's a chart showing the NYSE composite, Dow Jones Industrials, S&P 500, and NASDAQ Composite. You can get an idea of the trend of the broader markets when you view these charts.
Decisionpoint.com includes daily updated charts of popular indices, short- and intermediate-term indicators, mutual funds, and SPDRs. Some of the short-term indicators include the McClellan oscillators, put/call ratios, volume oscillators, and TRIN. The intermediate-term indicators include advance/decline line, ITBM (breadth momentum), and NASDAQ breadth indicators. Figure 1 is an example of what you can expect to find if you click "Trend Watch" under the section "Daily Charts & Reports."

After getting a picture of where the market is heading, you can move on to the interactive charts and conduct an analysis on individual stocks and mutual funds. You can have up to three exponential moving averages or Bollinger bands as overlays on a chart. Indicators are limited to volume, on-balance volume (OBV), stochastics, Williams' %R, relative strength index (RSI), MACD, price rate of change, and money flow index.

In the Top Advisor's Corner, you can get a glimpse of what some newsletters and advisory services are indicating regarding the markets. All of them are excerpts from newsletters and are maintained for marketing purposes. Information from as far back as six weeks ago is made available to the reader.

Anyone who has acquired the habit of doing extensive end-of-day analysis of the general market conditions would be well advised to visit decisionpoint.com. The design is good, easy to navigate, and simple for comprehension, making a visit to the site enjoyable.

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INVESTERTECH.COM

www.investertech.com

Don't let the incorrect spelling of the word "investor" mislead you. It is easy to make mistakes while typing in this URL, and rarely does it come up on search engines. Moreover, when you find the homepage, investertech.com may at first glance look cluttered and disorganized. But there is more here than meets the eye. You need to experiment with the different links to get a slice of what this site has to offer.

FIGURE 2: MULTIPLE CHARTS, INVESTERTECH.COM. Here's an example of what you can expect if you chose to view the technology sector using the chart view option at Investertech.com's site.
Multiple chart viewing is what sets this site apart from others. The homepage contains links to the following:
Easy Chart--Contains summary and industry charts
Easy Select--Contains fundamental and technical criteria to use as a screening tool
Markets--Offers charts or data of the most active stocks, winners and losers, and stocks with the largest trading range
Navigation--Includes a list of financial Websites.
You have a choice of viewing stocks in chart or data form. An example of the chart view is shown in Figure 2. If you select this option and choose to analyze a specific industry group, your screen will be filled with multiple charts, each representing one of the companies included in the specific industry. This enables you to get a bird's-eye view of the general direction of the specific sector.

Technical indicators used for screening include volume, moving averages, DMI, RSI, MACD, stochastics, Williams' %R, CCI, ROC and OBV. Fundamental indicators include P/E ratio, market capitalization, and earnings growth.

Investertech.com is a free Website containing end-of-day data that gets updated daily. The screening tools are extensive and the time required to study charts is reduced, since several charts can be viewed at a time.

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THEWEBINVESTOR.COM

www.thewebinvestor.com

Thewebinvestor.com is a compilation of excerpts from various other Websites related to trading that are mostly subscriber-based. It contains sections on intraday charts, technical analysis, stock markets, futures markets, weekly reports and links to related Websites.

FIGURE 3: STOCK CHARTS, THEWEBINVESTOR.COM.
Here, you see charts of stocks that may have some action on a given day. Moving averages and support/resistance lines are drawn on the charts to help the reader understand the reasoning behind the predicted move.
The presence of animated advertisements on the homepage tends to be distracting. The navigation menu on the left-hand side contains many links in a small font size on a black background, making it difficult to read. But allow your eyes to move over to the main body of the Website and you can see the extent of information available. It caters to a wide array of users ranging from daytraders to those interested in fundamental analysis.

The information available in this site is in a short blurb form, which may be helpful in getting a start to conduct further analysis. Charts are drawn clearly and explanations are well documented. See Figure 3 for an example from the "Today's Charts of Interest" section.
 There are no interactive charts on this site. However, the ones that are accessible include technical analysis indicators to help the reader understand concepts used to support specific decisions.

The intraday charts section contains graphs from IQC.com. Especially useful is the Technical Trading section authored by Ed Downs, CEO and founder of Nirvana Systems and creator of OmniTrader. It provides expectations on the next day's market activity. The information on this link is updated daily and is worth visiting on a regular basis.

The section on futures contains a snapshot of the activity in those markets. It contains reports and charts of various sectors that are updated at the end of the day. The section that contains charts of the top 10 movers is revised throughout the trading day.

If there were two words that best described this site, they would be information-packed. For those interested in useful information to assist with trading decisions, this site is worth a visit.

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Originally published in the November 1999 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights reserved. © Copyright 1999, Technical Analysis,Inc.


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