FinPortfolio Is an Asset Allocation Wizard By Kathy Yakal It's hard to believe that a mere five years ago, sophisticated, interactive portfolio analysis was almost exclusively the purview of financial professionals, who charged average folks on a pay-as-you-go basis. Sites like FinPortfolio (www.finportfolio.com) are changing that. FinPortfolio provides you with specific asset allocation guidance to help plan for future events like college and retirement. You tell it how much seed money you have, how much you'll need and when and how much you can contribute annually. FinPortfolio spits out an asset mix that will meet your annual return and volatility preferences, and suggests how much you should contribute to each class. FinPortfolio also helps you put together a portfolio that will beat one of the indices, or a stated value. Once you've selected the securities, the site shows you each one's price level, expected return, volatility and Sharpe Ratio, for comparison. If you're not diversified enough, you can screen for more securities or funds that have negative correlations -- meaning they move in the opposite direction -- with the ones you already have. The site's Portfolio Optimization feature checks the expected return and volatility, and helps you devise strategies to get a higher return without adding risk, using standard risk analysis tools, as well as modern portfolio theory classics like alpha and R-squared. In fact, if you want to buy some securities, FinPortfolio will help you determine how much of each to purchase to complement your existing portfolio. Using the FinPortfolio site was a pleasure, though we ran into problems with some slow-loading and empty pages. It gets extra points for aesthetic value and usability. And for now it's free. Beginning October 1, FinPortfolio will start charging for some of its services. For $99.95/year or $29.95 a quarter, you can manage up to five portfolios, with up to 15 assets per portfolio, as opposed to the three portfolios with up to eight assets each offered to the free user. Paid subscribers will also get sophisticated asset allocation tools and portfolio management interactivity -- plus access to alerts, enhanced portfolio optimization and risk analysis. www.finportfolio.com Ease of Use: 5 Depth and Usefulness of Data: 4 Editorial Content: 4 Tools and Interactivity: 5 Timeliness: 4 Price: 4 Total: *** FinPortfolio lacks some features found in other sites that offer portfolio management and advisory services. Financial Engines www.financialengines.com -- is a formidable competitor in this area (see Website of the Week, "Sharpe Financial Tools For the Masses," June 30, 1999). Newcomer SmartLeaf (www.smartleaf.com), for example, factors in the tax implications of buy/sell/hold decisions, as does GainsKeeper (www.gainskeeper.com). And it can't beat Microsoft MoneyCentral's (www.moneycentral.com) free, customizable and thorough portfolio management. But its mission is different and its universe is smaller. Were the site free, we'd recommend it wholeheartedly, but we're not sure it's worth a hundred bucks a year when so many good portfolio management/asset allocation sites are free. We'd also like to see more substance to match its style. Still, FinPortfolio has a lot going for it, and the site's young: Keep an eye on it. We rate it ***. Kathy Yakal is a Barron's contributing editor who covers investment sites for Website of the Week.

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