You don't need the Web to trade stocks. And chances are that your full-service broker doesn't even have Internet access. But then again that $250-a-trade broker also probably can't track the up-to-the-minute value of your portfolio, flag a technical breakout from the 50-day moving average of your favorite drug stock, sip from the burbling brook of gossip that runs through the financial markets or filter high-growth tech stocks that are more than 25% off their 52-week highs. Ah, but you, equipped with the lowliest, Net-connected PC, can: the Web gives all of that (and so much more) to you free--even if most of these tools were not designed for hobbyists. But that's part of what makes it so much fun. Here's our list of the most important places for the e-trader to visit online.

Best Overall Sites
1 Yahoo! Finance http://quote.yahoo.com
Our favorite. Take 60 seconds to set up a free portfolio and you'll see why. Most investing sites have their own version of Yahoo's basic stock-price quotes; none keeps more data so close at hand. Crucial research and charts are a click away, and they load fast. "Recent News" links at the bottom of the main portfolio screen track breaking stories elsewhere online; the message boards have more stock gossip than the Wall Street subway platform. Missing: real-time quotes.

2 MSN Investor http://investor.msn.com
Homepage contender. While the site draws on a lot of the same info sources as Yahoo (Yahoo is faster since it has fewer graphics), Investor's presentation is far prettier. After a special download, you can click around in the chart graphics, overlaying comparative performance and zooming in and out on the time frame. In keeping with the larger MSN MoneyCentral that houses Investor, the site also takes a more educational approach, with how-to articles, regular commentary from the likes of stock picker Jim Jubak and a "Strategy Lab" that helps introduce more advanced investing tricks like stock options.

3 DailyStocks.com http://dailystocks.com
This is the home of "Gigablast Research," a kind of stock search engine that bests even Yahoo. Enter a stock symbol like msft, and DailyStocks.com spits back a page with hundreds of links to free Microsoft stock resources around the Web. It's a full-time job just playing with a cross section of the services that get listed, but how else would you ever know that PCQuote calculates historical volatility (how much a stock price tends to swing) or that a consulting company called ViWes tracks the level of short-interest bets against nasdaq-traded companies?