NASDAQ CAME TO THE WEB IN EARLY
April. This means the three leading stock exchanges in North America each have a Web site. Since many of you own stock, a good part of your equity is bound to be traded on computers hooked into the Nasdaq, the venerable New York Stock Exchange, or the oft-overlooked yet crucial American Stock Exchange.

Each of these Web sites has good material as well as some potential areas for enhancement, though each takes a different view of what information ought to be made available online. Let's compare all three.

Although the Nasdaq site is the newest by far, it is the most complete. That's appropriate for the Web pages of a 5,120-company exchange on which many of today's high-technology growth companies are traded.

Clearly-worded navigational toolbars are important to any Web site, and Nasdaq has one of the best. "Full Quote," "Index Activity," "Company Look-Up" and "Glossary" are the most useful icons for your purposes, but the range of options gives you a sense of how comprehensive this site is.

The Index Activity page gives you the day's combined prices for a number of exhcange-member subcategories including Banks, Telecommunications, Finance, Insurance and Computer. Clicking any of these icons takes you to a summary of the lastest prices for every member of the given group. Click on the company symbol for the current stock price. If the firm has a Web site -- and most Nasdaq members do -- there should be a link to that as well.

On the Nasdaq Company Lookup Page, you can search by company name or stock symbol for the price of any Nasdaq stock, subject to a 15 minute delay. Although the other two exchanges post closing prices about two hours after the end of the trading day, Nasdaq is the only one of the three exchanges to post quotes in anything resembling real time. (As you can imagine, the value of stock quotes decreases rapidly over time; several sites make information available with a 15-minute delay.)

The real find on Nasdaq is the quite complete Nasdaq Glossary. It excels at translating jargon into English. "Short selling," as an example, is defined as "the selling of a security that the seller does not own, or any sale that is completed by the delivery of a security borrowed by the seller. Short sellers assume the risk that they wil be able to buy the stock at a more favorable price than the price at which they sold short."

The other two sites show other strengths.With $6.2 trillion in total market value, the New York Stock Exhange NYSENET site is a good example: With individual quotes posted only at the end of the day and only about 50 of its members clickable off its Listed Companies Links page, leading edge applications are rather unstunning.

Instead, the NYSE has chosen to make its site a fount of more enduring information. From its Publications page you can click to one of several dozen think piece abstracts, the full texts of which are available for a fee via snail mail. Or, if you want to know what the NYSE Daily Volume was on any day from 1888 to the presnt, you can go to the NYSE Historical Statistics page.

In contrast, the American Stock Exchange site does the most intelligent number-crunching applications of the three exchange Web presences. Its presentation of the day's most active stocks, largest gainers and biggest decliners is done in a ranked, attractively laid out table. For those of us still scratching our heads about what derivatives actually are, there's a comprehensive explanation on the Introduction to Derivative Securities Page.

Each of these sites have something to offer, but a word of caution here: reload these pages often, since their information is extremely fluid. And watch your puts and calls.

-- Russell Shaw