Great Websites for Directors
from Winter 2000
by Shaun Assael
You’ve met the digerati. They come into your office with metallic briefcases, knapsacks, and tiny eyeglasses, talking alphabet soup (“U-r-l” …”H-t-t-p”). But it’s never too late to play catch up. We have every confidence you’re using some of the basic sites we recommended earlier this year (“Dot-dumb Isn’t Funny Anymore,” Spring 2000 issue). To help you further ratchet up your e-sophistication, here’s the 411 on 15 of our favorite places to go.
The Digital Day
If you’re on the road and find USA Today is already out-of-date before it’s dropped at your hotel door, bookmark on your laptop the three dot-coms that comprise the digital diary of business. Bloomberg.com (free) is built for speed and offers an impressive array of newsletters, specialty publications, and charts to gird its market headlines. The Wall Street Journal’s interactive.wsj.com ($59 a year) is, well, the Journal. But what makes its online edition different is that you can also read the paper’s Asian and European editions, get background on thousands of companies, and mine the archives of many business publications. Plus, Barrons is thrown in too.
Don’t look for breaking news on hoovers.com ($29.95). But when a company is in the headlines, this service has the best corporate profiles in the business. They’re nicely broken down to include subsidiaries, products, people, and the competitive landscape. Hoovers’ money section features some of the best dispatches on IPO winners and losers.
After you’ve digested those three sites, go for a chaser of spin at briefing.com. To borrow a line from the PGA, these guys are good (and should be, at $100 a year). Take this dispatch: “The migration of capital will collapse many of the current highflying stocks, and move into new tech stocks rather than exit the market.” The Briefing boys wrote that last January, when we were all clearing cash to buy Priceline. A simple one-page view at Briefing contains a lunch’s worth of one-liners. Even if you don’t use them, you’ll be able to recognize the folks who do.
The Global Village
After a weak Euro helped lead the Nasdaq into a free fall, there was no shortage of embarrassed executives caught having to explain why they didn’t see it coming. Obviously, they weren’t watching ftmarketwatch.com (free). This joint effort of CBS’s “Market Watch” and the Financial Times covers the entire European Union in a one-page view, thanks to crisply written sector analysis and quick hits on Europe’s movers and shakers. You can also receive its content via cell phone, which is only appropriate since this site does some of the most extensive reporting to be found on Europe’s telecom industry and its IPO frenzy.
Got a branch office going into Bangkok? You’ll just love emdirectory.com (free). While everyone else in the boardroom looks lost, you’ll sound like Madeleine Albright’s favorite houseguest if you’ve been able to devote just a few minutes scanning this astoundingly complete directory of emerging markets. Not only can you find online newspapers from around the world (we’re addicted to Polynesia’s Cook Islands News), but there’s a search engine for global economic conferences, sections on foreign currencies and stock exchanges, translators-for-hire, and an astounding guide to Web-accessible radio stations from Argentina to Yugoslavia. Our favorite feature is the world clock and the calculator with a 10-year currency rate conversion memory, just in case you want to cash in an old receipt from that tiki bar in Tonga.
As dense as EM Directory is, it’s downright sexy when compared with dismalscientist.com (free). But where else are you going to find gas prices by zip code, a yield curve slope, an index of online shopping, a future inflation gauge, the GDP of foreign countries, and the all-important Beige Book that Alan Greenspan supposedly uses like the Bible? If it’s a number and it affects your company, it’s here.
Inside Intrigues
As many a Nasdaq investor has ruefully learned, chatroom gossip can murder a stock. The question is, who’s plunging in the knife? Louise Mooney, a Seattle publicist who works with the boards of several Silicon Valley (and Alley) tech firms, says it’s often a competitor or an ex-employee. “You can’t afford to ignore these things anymore,” she says. “I scan them religiously and I tell all my clients they have to, too.” One of the most widely read and influential ones is ragingbull.com (free). This aptly named site lets you search by sector, exchange, or valuation. A rating system called “Membermarks” attempts to hold yappers to some standard by rating them against each other. Of course, you don’t have to scan only for defensive reasons. Your rival’s former employees might be airing his dirty laundry in the same chatroom.
Insidertrader.com ($49.95 a month) is another intriguing early-warning system. Executives and board members sell their stock for a variety of reasons—profit-taking, valuation concerns, taxes, college tuition, gambling debts. But insider buying happens for one reason: Somebody is damn sure his or her stock is heading up. If that somebody is your competitor, you’ll want to know about it, especially if more than one person is making that kind of wager. Subscribers also get notification of the largest transactions and extensive interactive charting applications.
Valuable insider information need not be so cloak and dagger, of course. At bestcalls.com (free) you can get a calendar of upcoming conference calls that CEOs have scheduled with analysts, a searchable archive of calls you missed, and, in some cases, links to the calls themselves. All you have to do is listen and take notes. You might even want to check out earningswhispers.com (free) on the days leading up to those calls. The site has previews of quarterly reports and that all-important “whisper number,” the earnings per share that professional investors tacitly expect companies to meet.
Don’t want to work that hard? Then simply bookmark edgar-online.com (free). This warehouse of SEC filings on thousands of companies lets you do the simple stuff, such as measuring your earnings against the competition. But it also has some guilty pleasures, like the litigation search engine provided by MarketSpan. Pull down a menu of nearly every company in the Fortune 500, select one, and see who’s dissing whom in the federal courts. The best way to use this site is to let it come to you. If you ask, it will send alerts about your competitors right to your desktop, cell phone, or PDA. Dick Tracy never had anything this good on his watch.
Where’s the Remote?
E-mail accounts are getting to be like remote controls: Before you know it, you’ve got more than you need. Your cell phone company wants to push one on you. (They figure that if they can hook you with an account that you’re reliant on, you’ll be less likely to switch providers.) Then there’s the one at work, an AOL one at home, and maybe a Yahoo! address you keep on the side for private correspondence. Given all this, it was inevitable that someone would invent a universal inbox, the Web equivalent of a universal remote. You can get all your e-mails routed into one place, along with faxes and even phone messages (they’re received as audio files). Even better, sites like webley.com ($14.95 a month) have “automated attendants” that will read your e-mail when you call in. Others, like messageasap.com ($15 a year) will forward them to your wireless device. Sure beats having your secretary print your messages out once a week.
Digital Distractions
Maybe you’ve always been the smartest one in the room. But to match wits with real geniuses, wander by edge.org (free). It’s a virtual gathering place for gurus where you can find writing like this: “Like little ripples on the surface of a deep, turbulent pool, calculation and other kinds of procedural thought are possible only when the turbulence is quelled.” The fun is in joining the public forums, like the one that followed tech-philosopher Jaron Lanier’s screed about “cybernetic totalists.” As K.Lee@excite.com replied, “His conflation of expert systems with intelligent agents reveals not his immunity to hype, but his ignorance of A.I.” Oprah it’s not.
Finally, if all of this has your head spinning, then take a meditative moment with yogasite.com (free). Not only does it have a guide to yoga centers and spas (in the event a road trip gets out of hand), it also offers on-the-spot relief. In the third hour of a mind-numbing meeting that looks like it will go on forever? Call it up on your wireless Palm, click on the link for meditation, and pretend you’re in a Japanese rock garden as you follow the instructions to “breathe through your nose. Focus on your breathing—cool air in, warm air out. If the mind wanders, gently bring it back to the breath. That’s it.” Start with a five to 10 minute meditation and work your way up to 15, 20, 30 minutes or more.
Ahh. Feel at one with the Web, and good luck.
