Security
Market - Websites
track investments related to homeland safety
Barron's
Monday, December 2, 2002
Reviewed by KATHY YAKAL
Edited by Randall W. Forsyth
T he Department of
Homeland Security was born last week, bringing the biggest reorganization in
the federal government in more than half a century. This mobilization also
will have important implications for investors. So we checked out sites that
can help facilitate your research into companies for which the new agency is
likely to generate business.
Laguna Research Partners ( www.lrponline.net
) provides online help
for equity research and venture capital. Their resources take the form of
reports, news, and hundreds of links to other industry and market sources.
This year, the firm has put extra emphasis on Homeland Defense. Some of the
site's content is channeled through Multex.com and Reuters.com, but you can
also grab it at the lrponline.net site. Once there, click on the Equity
Research link at the top of the opening page, then click on Special Coverage:
Homeland Defense. Monthly reports here focus on companies that, in LRP's view,
are, "...ideally positioned to make important contributions to the War on
Terror, both in the U.S. and abroad." These reports include analyses of
the performance and current activities of specific companies as well as
relevant industry and world events.
Other features of this site's Homeland Defense section include related news
(from outlets like CBS MarketWatch and the Straits Times) and threat updates,
as well as additional timely sources of information (including books and
interviews). An interactive map of the Middle East provides country and
regional profiles. Links to news outlets for other regions of the world are
provided elsewhere on the domain. The site also offers the best set of links
we found for Homeland Defense, divided into categories like think tanks,
intelligence, biological threats, and journals.
Washington Technology ( www.washingtontechnology.com)
is the online arm of the print publication by the same name. Click on the
Homeland Defense link on the opening page, and you'll see a smattering of
recent stories dealing with the topic. These may not be of use to you, but
some of the publication's other sections, like its stories on the markets and
on technology, offer some more valuable perspectives.
Several online publications are specifically dedicated to keeping tabs on
the Homeland Defense industry. Homeland Defense Journal ( www.homelanddefensejournal.com)
is a free biweekly online newsletter; archives are available at the site.
Homeland Security & Defense (go to www.aviationnow.com
and follow the links) is published every Wednesday and carries a subscription
price of $595, although you can get two trial issues free. It covers a broad
range of related topics, including corporate and industrial security,
communications equipment, and new products and services. And, of course, you
can also go straight to the source for the latest news -- the government site
for Homeland Security (www.whitehouse.gov/homeland).
To get a comprehensive list of businesses in the defense and
defense-related areas, head to the InvestorIdeas.com site ( www.investorideas.com).
This site provides links to periodicals that cover industry sectors such as
security, technology and the environment.
If you're really serious about researching the companies, events, and
technologies that will contribute to the Homeland Security effort, try out
Mindbranch ( www.mindbranch.com).
This site is a clearinghouse of market research culled from a variety of
industries and publishers.
There are two ways to find what you're looking for. First, we typed
"Homeland Security" into the search box. We only came up with 14
entries here. Searches that result in more hits can be filtered by several
parameters, including publication date, price, and type of product (report,
newsletter, company profile, or directory). Beware: Some of these are quite
pricey.
You can also browse by topic. We clicked on Defense, under Manufacturing,
then Aerospace, and got 89 hits. Registration is free, and entitles you to
free white papers and alerts about new publications in your areas of interest,
as well as a weekly newsletter and customized home page. Numerous other
industries are indexed here, too.
Of course, you can use your standard research methods to find reports and
other data related to the Homeland Defense effort. Multex Investor ( www.multexinvestor.com)
is a good place to search for analyst reports. Click the Search for Research
link on the opening page, then scroll down to the Search by Industry link. We
found numerous recent reports by searching on the aerospace and defense
categories. Many sites offer screening tools that let you find stocks and
mutual funds by industry, plus access to market data and research tools. We
poked around message boards and chat rooms, too, but didn't find tremendously
deep levels of discussion on this topic.
M orningstar (www.morningstar.com)
recently added new diagnostics to the other analytical tools available on the
site. The new Fund Diagnostics feature can be found as a separate tab in the
site's Quicktake Reports. Free for a limited time, this tool is available for
the roughly 15,000 funds that Morningstar tracks.
There are several elements to each diagnostic. You get graphs and text that
analyze the fund's performance over the last five years, as well as its
expense ratio. The tenure of management is highlighted, in addition to sector
and asset breakdowns and the Morningstar rating.
Morningstar has consistently r anked
highly in our best Websites pieces, and this year was no exception. The name
may be synonymous with mutual funds, but it's also an exceptionally capable
site for stock research. Star-giver Morningstar received a 3½-star rank this
year in the category of
supersites; its overall average was slightly lower than those sites that
received Honorable Mention.
F inally, we wanted to
weigh in on the new version of MSN. MSN 8.0, launched a few weeks ago, sports
a more elegant design scheme than rival America Online, but suffers from AOL
syndrome: a too-busy home page. You can, however, customize the content and
layout to help you cut through to what interests you. MSN Money Plus, the
finance channel on MSN, offers an abbreviated version of desktop Microsoft
Money. This "Money Lite" (or "Mini-Money," as we'd have
called it) is designed for those who don't need all the horsepower built into
desktop personal-finance software but want easy access to their financial
accounts. Access to some features is available offline.
Limited online bill-pay (supported by roughly 950 merchants) is free, and
budget and spending trackers help you analyze your income and expenses. Up to
18 months of account details can be stored, and multiple family members can
access data on the channel. Dial-up access is $21.95 a month; if you use your
existing Internet service provider, it's $9.95 a month.
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