Sites

Morningstar, CNN Money, Yahoo Finance, and Google Finance

are all good sites for financial news, information and tools.

Portfolio

Originally I used Quicken's website to hold my portfolio. That was a long time ago. Quicken said that as of June 30, 2004, they will only provide their tools to those who are registered users of Quicken 2001 or more recent. So, I started looking around for another good site to maintain my portfolio. I checked Marketwatch, CNN Money, Yahoo Finance, and MSN Money. I'm not happy.
First, there is Morningstar, but for many of the tools, its available only with the premium account. If you invest with T. Rowe Price, you may be able to build a portfolio there, and use the Morningstar tools at T. Rowe Price. These are the tools that Morningstar only has for premium accounts. But, they are hidden, if you want to keep them separate from your T. Rowe Price account. On 'My Home Page' or 'Portfolio', in the right hand column, under 'Research' is a drop-down menu that says 'I Want To'. Select 'Access Tools and Calculators'. A new window will apear, and click on 'Investment Planning Tools'. The 5th tool down is 'Portfolio X-Ray'. Create your portfolio here. The Morningstar X-Ray in your T. Rowe Price portfolio is a mere subset of this one, giving you much less information. But, of course, you don't have to create and maintain it.
If you have an account at Vanguard, you can have all your other accounts accessed by Vanguard, to present a portfolio. You can add accounts manually also. They have a good set of tools too. But, that's just one portfolio.
Now, what tools do I refer to. Asset allocation, based on what stocks your funds hold. Which stocks you hold the most of, as held by all your funds, and individually. How each of your funds contribute to your asset allocation. Similar allocations for bonds.

So, what do Marketwatch, CNN/Money, Yahoo, and MSN offer. MSN is the worst. When I did this years ago it required entering each fund/stock separately, not all on one page. That can be tedious. There were no tools, and the least info presented. Now, they actually require you to use certain browsers and download some software. No one else does this. That's Microsoft for you. So I didn't bother trying them again.

Yahoo's new portfolio has some problems when entering your data. You have to add or delete entries one at a time, rather than having extra lines to add and a check mark to delete. When you add or delete an entry it loses any changes you made to your portfolio. Thus you have add and delete first, or save any changes and then come back to add or delete. It only handles stocks and funds. No place to enter bonds or cash so you can see your entire portfolio. There was no performance of the stock or fund: no YTD, no 1-YR, no 3-YR and no 5-YR. But it did have a separate page for your portfolio showing a semi-detailed look at each stock/fund that did include YTD and a chart.
I found no tools for your portfolio.

Marketwatch handles editting the portfolio different from the others. You edit it directly on the same portfolio screen. One problem is that it is too easy to delete an entry: one click. You can include cash, but there doesn't seem to be a way to know how to enter it unless you get lucky and find it in the list of stocks/funds. I knew because I already had it there from their old portfolio. They do have a view to see performance of the stock for 1, 3 and 5 years, as well as YTD. There's no custom view and being on different views it is not amenable to getting a printout.
I found no tools for your portfolio.

I found no portfolio capability at CNN Money. Maybe that's because their old one was pretty bad.

Looks like Morningstar is the best portfolio for the public.

Fund Screener

I've also searched for a good fund screener. I compared MarketWatch, Fidelity, Morningstar, and Yahoo. Morningstar is probably the only one in which you will have to register, but it is free.

First, how to find the screener: just search for "fund screener" in a search engine.

Filters: These include type of fund (asset class), performance, risk, Morningstar stars, expenses, and more. Yahoo has all the filters you need in doing the screening. The results show the value for each filter you used and links to get more information. The results are in alphabetical order. There is an easy link from the fund screend to a stock screener and to a bond screener. Not much reason to try another screener.

MSN Money Central has a limited set of filters, but probably most of what you'll want. It's results are similar to Yahoo but they are not in alphabetical order. They've taken one of your filters and listed the results in order of that filter. If you back up to modify your filter, you have to start over, your previous choices are gone. They seem to only have a fund screener.

MarketWatch is only a stock screener with only one filter at a time. So forget it.

Fidelity has stock and mutual fund screeners, but you have to follow links, under research, to the appropriate area. The mutual fund screener has only a few filters. The results show a fixed set of data, but it is the performance factors for YTD and 1, 3, 5, and 10 years plus the expense ratio and Morningstar stars. But, uniquely, it shows the filters used on the same result screen, and you can modify them and get instant results. I don't know in what order the results are displayed, but you can click a column header and sort them. You can also compare funds from the results.

Morningstar has a number of filters, but not as many as Yahoo. The results are in alphabetical order, but they show a fixed set of info about each result. It is easy to switch to bond and stock screeners.

Looks like I'd give the nod to Yahoo and Fidelity for the best stock screeners. Yahoo has the most filters with showing the results of the selected filters and Fidelity handles the results screen the best.

Fund Comparison

Another desire in researching a fund to invest in, is to be able to compare certain funds that you are considering. Morningstar and Fidelity are the best way to go here. With Fidelity you can specify 5 funds to compare, while Morningstar does not specify how many. Morningstar has a special tool for fund comparison under Tools. You enter the fund symbols. Fidelity has 2 ways of doing it. One, as I mentioned above, is using the results of the Fund Screener. The other is via the Research > Mutual Funds screen. Each fund one that you already researched at Fidelity are listed in their comparison box on the bottom right of the screen. The ones you check will be pre-entered for you when you go to the Compare Fund screen, where you can enter more fund symbols, up to 5.

Morningstar

Morningstar is one of the basic research sites. Some of Morningstar's research tools require you to pay for them. Some of these pay services you can get for free elsewhere. One of the free types of information is their Quicktake Report, which gives a pretty good rundown on a fund. Just enter the symbol and hit Go. You can find it on the front page and under Funds.
But even with the free services, setting up portfolios at Morningstar will provide you with different insights into your investments. You can get industry sector breakdowns, fund style breakdowns, major stocks owned, etc. within your funds.

MAXFunds

MAXFunds rates mutual funds with their own rating method. They use a scale from 1 to 100. The rating is used in 5 categories: Expenses, Performance, Management, MAXmetrics, and Category (not how they are in their category, but how good the category is), plus an overall rating. There's also a Fund Screener, using 6 filters, and unlike the screeners on most sites, you can pick several categories within each filter. Take their thoughts into consideration along with the normal screeners.

Map Of the Market

Market Watch's Map of the Market is about the coolest tool I've ever seen to see what is happening in the financial market. It shows you what segments of the market are hot and cold, and which companies in the segments are hot and cold. It is shown in color gradients from negative red shades to positive green shades. The brighter the better. Have a look.

Mutual Fund Observer

There used to be a site called Fund Alarm whose main function was to provide you with a list of funds that have consistently underperformed an appropriate benchmark. Mutual Fund Observer was started by one of its senior fund analysts, which he calls "in the tradition of FundAlarm" after Fund Alarm closed up shop in 2011.

Vanguard

This is one of the best sites to learn about investing in general. Naturally, you can check out the Vanguard mutual funds here, download or read prospectuses, use some tools.
Vanguard also has plenty of calculators and research tools into funds, not just their own, like the other sites.

Fidelity

This is another one of the best sites to learn about investing in general. Naturally, you can check out the Fidelity mutual funds here. This is another good place to do research on funds and stocks.

Two more sites that are more conventional and have some good basic information are Mutual Fund Investor's Center and Fairmark Press Tax Guide for Investor's . The Mutual Fund Investor's Center has many good articles on investing.

Kiplinger

Kiplinger is another alternative to most of your investing needs. Plenty of articles, calculators, and tools. Like the others you can track your portfolio. Since I don't do that, I can't comment on which is better for tracking.

Bank Rate

Two great things about this site that make it an extremely useful site, and maybe unique. The site provides a report (and a rating) on the quality of individual banking institutions. (Remember that the city and state used for the bank is not a branch, but the home office). You also can find the banks that provide the best rates for CD's and money market accounts, and sort the lists by yield, state, or bank rating. One of the problems with their listing of CD rates is that many banks have promotional rates for non-standard time periods. Thus their highest rates are not listed, making for a poor comparison.
These aren't the only things that the site provides on banks, but they are what I use.
By the way, these guys really hide the bank research page. To find it, click on Sitemap at the bottom of the page. Then click on Bank Ratings - Safe & Sound.

Banking My Way

This is another very useful site for finding the best rates at a neighborhood bank. Enter the criteria you want, including your zip code and find local rates. This site includes promotional rates, which also makes it better than Bank Rate . But I found that not all the banks are included, and again you got to know the bank to know if branches are near you. But they do a decent job of locating banks with local branches.

Roth IRA

If you want to find out anything about a Roth IRA, this is the place for you. You won't need anything else.