Information is free and plentiful. Indeed, there's too much of it. AOL, Yahoo and MSN are only the best known of the so-called portals offering not only investment advice but free stock tickers, portfolio management tools, and complete financial planning guides. It's easy to do. The online sites walk you through it.
Times are good.
In other words, online investing looks like a sure thing to both investors and the companies that are climbing all over each other to offer services. Online traders will buy and sell two or three times more often than other investors. That will change. The online trading companies insist this is the wave of the future. We are a decade past the last serious crash of the stock market.