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I think many of the nearly dozen or so women's finance and investing portals have missed the mark. While those sites do a good job of creating communities organized around gender-specific issues and teaching basic investment lessons, I often find the tone condescending and information elementary. What's more, not all the sites deliver the news and hard-core numbers you need to make timely investment decisions.
Cassandra Toroian, the founder of Financialmuse.com, has created a site for women that has a good chance of standing out in the crowded field. "We're not a content company, we're a brokerage and banking firm," says Toroian, a former sell-side analyst and expert in small- and mid-cap bank stocks. Rather than generate revenues from advertising, Toroian aims to make money through brokerage- and banking-transaction fees, among other avenues. (Another women's financial site, WFN by Siebert, is also using this business model. Both sites plan to develop and offer insurance and retirement products for women.)
While Financialmuse.com is billed as the first online brokerage designed for women, I found it to be a serious and sophisticated financial site suitable for any investor. Toroian's design was based on research and focus groups that investigated how women and men use the Web differently. While both get around the Web just as easily, men tend to surf more, while women use the Internet as a tool to find information to get a job done as quickly as possible.
QUICKER ACCESS. The site is well organized, incredibly simple to navigate, and free of the content clutter that dominates many other women's financial portals. Click on iVillage's MoneyLife homepage, for example, and you'll get more than 40 sources of information. While all the same information may be available at Financialmuse.com, there are half as many choices to access, making it easier and quicker to tap into the data you want.
Despite its female-friendly design, Toroian makes it clear that Financialmuse.com isn't exclusively for women. While the user base is 85% to 90% female, "we have good tools for investors in general," she says.
The site is divided into 10 sections, including the brokerage and banking services, basic investment tools tools, asset-allocation strategies, and research-and-investment clubs. Although Financialmuse.com was officially launched in February, many of the features, such as the online securities service, are very recently up and running. I wasn't able to test that particular service, but based on the site's overall quality, I'm optimistic it's also easy to use.
IT TAKES WORK. In the online-banking section, users can click easily through to various options, including bill-paying, pending bills, account transfers, statements, and more. There is no account aggregation, which means you can view only those accounts that you've set up at Financialmuse.com. Unless you're planning on transferring your assets to the accounts Financialmuse.com offers, this feature isn't particularly useful. Toroian says she'll offer account aggregation in the future.
This site isn't for slackers -- you need to be willing and motivated to learn about investing. The investment-basics section is particularly impressive, giving comprehensive information about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and taxes, among other topics. However, the pop-up glossary is spotty, leaving, for example, "split-adjusted stock" undefined.
Sprinkled throughout the section are interactive graphs, including one that shows the year-by-year history of the stock market going back to 1925. As part of the graph, you can see how the market reacted to certain domestic and world events. Another graph shows how a hypothetical company's stock performance changes under three scenarios: strong earnings growth, when earnings growth reverts to the industry average, and when earnings stumble.
NOVICES WELCOME. There are also extremely useful descriptions of value-, growth-, and contrarian-investing strategies. Because it's a broker/dealer, Financialmuse.com can't make specific recommendations, but it does give examples of how to screen for stocks using each strategy. Say you're interested in contrarian investing, Financialmuse.com recommends a "contrarian recipe" that includes stocks that match certain criteria. A sampling: a 52-week price performance in the bottom 20%, debt that's less than 40% of capital, pretax margins of more than 1%, and 5-year sales and earnings growth higher than the S&P 500 mean. For each strategy, you get examples of stocks that meet these criteria (such as Apple Computer for contrarian investors). Also, you can search stocks by industry.
If you're just getting started with investing, you might want to take the free financial check-up. After filling out a brief questionnaire about your tolerance for risk, investment goals, and your time frame for investing, a customized asset-allocation mix is determined. After I filled out the questionnaire, a pie chart popped up and recommended that I invest 60% in stocks (of which 60% should be in large-caps, 30% in small-caps and 10% in international). Of my remaining 40%, 30% should be in bonds (50% municipals and 50% corporates), and 10% in cash. The end result is somewhat rudimentary, but I think the site is on the right track. Toroian says she plans on making this section more interactive.
For the most part, the site succeeds in its goal of being a serious financial tool. Good features include a daily commentary by Maria Fiorini Ramirez, a veteran international economist, and daily market commentary with financial news and quotes updated throughout the day. However, on a visit at around 3:15 p.m., I found the most recent price quotes to be from noon of that day. Clearly, it would be ill advised to trade on those quotes.
Another good feature -- an unusual one for women's financial sites -- is that wherever you click to throughout the site, you always remain in Financialmuse.com. That's good for Financialmuse.com, and it's also good for you because you won't get lost in another site. Of all the one-stop sites for a woman's personal finance needs, Financialmuse.com ranks among the best.
Gutner is an associate editor at Business Week. Her twice-a-month Hers.Online column for BW Online complements Gutner's Hers column in Business Week magazine.
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