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" ... AdvisorSquare Sites, however, are clearly superior in both scope
and utility to those offered by its competitors."

David B. Yeske chairs the San Francisco Society of the Institute of Certified
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"AdvisorSquare is an interactive service for creating custom Web sites for financial professionals, designed and implemented by Manhattan Analytics, Inc. To create your site, you interact with AdvisorSquare through a wizard-like tool over the Internet using a standard Web browser. You then dynamically create and configure your new Web site with custom ActiveX components that match your needs

AdvisorSquare maintains a sizable store of investment data, 10,000 mutual funds, view charts, and quotes on 20,000 stocks that give considerable added value to the custom sites. The company obtains the data from a variety of information feeds using satellite and FM receiver technologies. To further add value to the price of admission, the service includes a custom domain name, search engine registration, site hosting, and site statistics."

Dan D. Gutierrez, Technical Editor.

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Bethesda, MD, July 29, 1999-Day trading on the Internet may be the province of the twenty-something generation, but many of today's generation of recently retired investors are very comfortable navigating financial web sites, according to a new survey by the Forum for Investor Advice.

While it is rare to find someone from the sixty-something generation day trading on the Internet, it is not unusual to find many of them on the Internet tracking their investments and researching new financial opportunities, the Forum discovered.

Commerce Department research shows that only 15% of people 55 and older are online, but nearly half of the recently retired investors surveyed by the Forum said they have Internet access. Those surveyed by the Forum had investable assets, not including real estate, of $50,000 or more.

Meanwhile, two out of three of retired investors with access said they use the Internet to gather financial information and half said they use it to monitor the performance of their investments.

Not only are the retired investors not day traders, but only 11 percent said they ever have used the Internet to buy or sell stocks or bonds, while only 7 percent said they have used it to buy or sell mutual funds.

"More and more people transitioning to retirement today are becoming computer literate, and they use their computer skills to organize and track their financial affairs," said Barbara Levin, Forum executive director. "They are much more hands on concerning their investments than were retirees of just a few years ago."

The survey was conducted for the Forum by Mathew Greenwald & Associates of Washington, DC, who interviewed 500 investors who have retired within the past two years and 200 other investors who plan to retire within the next two years. They ranged in age from 55 to 70.

Slightly more pre-retirees have Internet access (47%) than do retirees (45%). Yet, retirees are more active Internet users.

"While two-thirds of retirees use the Internet to gather financial information, only half of pre-retirees use it for that purpose," said Ms. Levin. "And, while half of retirees use it to monitor the performance of their investments, only a third of pre-retirees do. I think this is a reflection of the additional time most retirees have."

The survey also shows that retirees who do not work with a financial advisor are more than twice as likely to make stock trades over the Internet than those who work with an advisor. In addition, they are more than five times as likely to buy or sell mutual funds over the Internet than are those who have an advisor.

Not surprisingly, the amount of money a retiree has available to invest also influences use of the Internet. Among retirees with $100,000 to $250,000 in investable assets, 62% track their investments on the Internet, while 71% of those with investable assets of more than $250,000 use the Internet to track their portfolios.

Editor's Note: Copies of the full report, Transitioning to Retirement: The Financial Needs of U.S. Retirees, are available to journalists upon request.