Better Ways to Build Wealth on the Web

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Following the Trends at Marketclub.com

Another useful Web site is marketclub.com, a trend-tracking service that helps identify entry and exit points for buying and shorting stocks, commodities, currencies, and other assets, based on price trends identified on charts for different time periods. The site offers an easy-to-understand graphic tutorial that shows users how to pick entry, exit, and re-entry points for both long and short positions.

Jennings, also a user of Marketclub.com, says that rather than trading all the recommended signals, he keeps a spreadsheet of all the trends, which he then organizes by sector. He prefers to make a decision based on a trend he can see across a particular industry instead of within a certain stock.

"If I see a whole sector falling apart, I decide it's time to get out," he says. "A year and a half ago I was into all the uranium stocks and I did well. By watching those scales, it gave me a heads up [that] maybe it was time to exit these stocks or this sector, which I did."

Aggregating Investing Blogs at Seekingalpha.com

Jerry Daughan, another ValueForum member, likes a premium site within realmoney.com—itself part of TheStreet.com&mdash that highlights stocks priced under $10 a share which can grow beyond that limit. Daughan says these aren't merely cheap stocks but ones that are thought to have a strong business model and growth prospects.

There are also several sites that offer general education to investors through articles, blogs, and discussion boards. The best known of these is probably Seekingalpha.com, which serves as an aggregator of many other investing-oriented blogs. Eric Wolff, a member of Covestor, says that lately it's been focused more on volume than on high quality of the posts.

The quality of content "depends on the person more than the platform," Wolff wrote in an e-mail message to BusinessWeek. "All these different sites are only as good as their contributors. I think Value Investors Club has the best contributors, but Covestor has the most promising platform for helping investors long-term."

Macroeconomic Commentary from Michael Shedlock

Investors who want to understand how bigger economic trends are affecting the markets before committing their money can check out Web sites and, more and more, blogs, that offer macroeconomic analysis of things like the housing crisis, commodities, foreign exchange, and interest rates.

Wolff recommends Michael "Mish" Shedlock's blog, globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com and the weekly commentary that mutual fund manager John Hussman publishes at hussmanfunds.com.

Wolff says he finds Hussman's frequent focus on market valuation very helpful. By reminding readers that profit margins are cyclical and that cheap valuations are often based on unsustainable profit levels, the site urges investors to use alternative ways to gauge how expensive stocks are relative to their entire histories.

With investing groups starting to pop up on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it seems clear that online investing tools will continue to gain in popularity.

People just under retirement age with $100,000 to $1 million in investable assets are increasingly interested not only in online tools but ones that allow for a more collaborative experience, says Honore at Aite Group. "They don't like the total-control broker model. They want to be able to check their balance and to do some interim trading," he says. "They see it more as a partnership with their broker."

Bogoslaw is a reporter for BusinessWeek's Investing channel .