on the AIMR Web Site at <www.aimr.com>

Webmarks

If your bookmarks look like mine they can easily run to three columns on two browsers. And as soon as they’re organized into folders, exciting new ones come along that cross folder definitions . . . the cyber equivalent of the professor’s study, but more useful.

What do you put there? You’ll have the items of personal interest (like travel, news and weather) and all of the important search engines useful to analysts. (These are getting better all the time—to my mind, the latest and best this week is Copernic). We’re seeing so many innovations with these tools that I’ll devote a column to them shortly.)

But the most useful and unusual sites are those from competitors and investment news sources. Today is it easy to benchmark ourselves against others, similarly skilled, motivated and challenged, by looking at their web sites. They are often quite good and candid. The best go well beyond a simple restatement of their published marketing material (although even that is useful to characterize a firm on its originality), using the web to disclose more about themselves than is customary. And the best provide a service . . . something helpful just for stopping by.

You should browse a list of investment firms at random or as the names interest you. A representative list can be found at Streeteye. Four that I’ll mention here do a particularly good job. American Express Advisors is a broadline, retail oriented firm giving help mostly to the non-professional investor. You can see the educational role it plays. Three others are more for the institutional investor—my world—and have a special challenge serving a demanding clientele. Each does an outstanding job: Schooner Capital for global debt; Deemer for technically-oriented strategies; and Olsen (a firm in Zurich with which I have some involvement) for foreign exchange traders. In addition to the public areas of their sites, each has agreed to open a portion normally reserved for clients for one month ending December 30, to be accessed using "aimr" as the userid and "webmark" as the password. You will find it very worthwhile visiting them during this month and seeing what can be done.

Three additional sites deserve mention among the many we could visit. Caspian is a Hong Kong-based firm whose entire approach is to use the thoroughness and efficiency of the web. They, together with Peregrine (also headquartered in what is now China), deserve our thanks for showing us what can be done. And Yardeni is putting the full range of a top-class economics approach at our mouse click.

For the complete, graduate level investment resource, none can beat Riskview . Here is a global value-at-risk measure on global securities . . . multi-currency, personalized, daily and all presented in clear graphics. This is the full global investment kit demonstrating the power of the web to place a large, valuable source of information at our monitors.

We’ll await the new things these wonderful firms bring to their clients and us.

By the way, some of the sites (particularly the personal interest ones) are now incorporated into the channels for automatic upgrading in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Communicator 4.0, so the information is always handy. I upgrade in the middle of the night over an analog line in the US and an ISDN line in Switzerland (the US analog at 56k is almost ISDN speed, but at lower cost). Many of the other sites are revised and updated, and you’ll have to refresh those addresses manually. If you do go back to look at the material (and that was the reason you marked them in the first place), you’ll find gold.

Dean LeBaron
October 28, 1997

e-mail <deanlebaron@compuserve.com>

website <http://www.deanlebaron.com>