The number of share dealing services appearing on the world wide Web is growing. Many have introduced innovative pricing structures injecting a strong competitive edge to their enterprises. The appeal for the traveller on the Clapham omnibus is undoubtedly the flat rate charged per share transaction. This simple and transparent pricing, coupled with 24 hour access to the sites (although the markets themselves are obviously closed), has demystified part of the stockbroker’s profession. The spin‐off from what is known as e‐trading is the vast amount of information being generated about the stock markets. With many newcomers to the traded options markets lacking investment experience, a high reliance on information about the past performance of markets, sectors and shares is often the sole basis for decision taking. In order to entice new users to register some sites offer the free facility to access market information and intelligence. In terms of a reference resource this is surely good news for librarians, their budgets and their users. Below are brief reviews of four Web‐based share dealing services. The list has been compiled from the www.uk.gomez.com Web site which, according to their own literature, “is the leading provider of e‐commerce customer experience measurement, benchmarking, and customer acquisition services.” Gomez uses a variety of methods to measure a range of online services such as online shopping and banking.
E*trade www.etrade.co.uk, in common with those sites listed below, has many features including portfolio tracking, stock watchlists and market commentary. It offers a huge resource for researchers, notably free access to company information, including company profiles, product listings, annual reports and key company dates. E*trade provides the additional facility to trade on the US markets (NYSE and NASDAQ) which must be done using US dollars. DLJ www.dljdirect.co.uk also offers both sterling and US dollar denominated dealing and throws in a personalised stock ticker that provides a Web‐delivered alerting service. DLJ gives excellent company information; particularly useful are the charts which may be used to plot share price performance over a selection of time periods. DLJ also provides information on directors’ dealings. Its market news section is most current, with updates every five minutes.
Stockacademy ‐ www.stockacademy.com ‐ as its name suggests, a major strength of this broker site are the educational assets. Part of the Internet Service Provider Freeserve organisation, Stockacademy offers comprehensive market and company information. Its interactive graphs, which use javascripting, are impressive, its news service is displayed in a simple yet highly effective format and there is a ticker service which can be customised to include stock prices from the main equity markets. The education section is a useful aspect, giving the user the opportunity to take part in a series of online workshops such as “how to read the financial pages” through to “using ratios to analyse companies”. These online workshops have multiple choice tests built into them and might prove to be useful training tools for library staff.
Charles Schwab Europe ‐ www.schwab‐worldwide.com/europe ‐ like Stockacademy ‐ has a strong educational dimension, in fact they were both developed by www.incademy.com. The Charles Schwab site provides dealing services for both the US and UK markets. However the supporting research and information resources are available through other sites such as the Reuters news service. There is nothing wrong with this approach but it does make for a rather disjointed Web site that requires the user to invest far too much effort in navigation.
