You, Too, Can Be a Stock Analyst

Ever think you could pick stocks as well as the fund managers who appear on financial TV shows?

A new crop of Web sites has sprung up to give you a shot. No, I'm not talking about the online ghetto of financial chat sites that are filled with rumors, hype, threats and bad grammar.

These sites let anyone post stock picks. The catch is: Your picks are automatically tracked and ranked along with those from other community members. (TSC visited a few of these sites in a previous story.) At the best of these sites, you can use search functions to pull up the portfolios of the communities' top-performing amateur analysts. You can even receive email alerts when the amateur analysts you follow make trades. One site doles out cash awards to its best stock pickers. And as you'll see, some mutual funds are being set up like Web community sites, where astute amateur analysts actually help pick the funds' holdings.

Gonzo Trader

ClearStation was the first site to track its members' stock picks. And it gets the award for putting a semi-crazed, gonzo face on what might otherwise be a very dry business of ranking amateur stock analysts. ...