Yahoo Finance (Finance.Yahoo.com)

Yahoo Finance provides a good overview of what's happening in business, the economy, and personal finance. Charts, current quotes, and historical pricing are available for major market indices as well as for stocks, mutual funds, and options, and more. There are articles and links to articles by popular financial columnists. Yahoo Finance also provides vast libraries of information on investing and personal finance, conveniently organized by subtopic. There is also lots of information on individual companies featuring financial results, business descriptions, earnings estimates, and more.

The "recent quotes" section will display quotes on the last 10 securities you checked. Conveniently, you do not have to register or sign in to use this feature. The quotes update automatically without the user having to resort to hitting the refresh button on the browser. Prices quoted on individual securities are delayed by 20 minutes (unless you cough up some cash), but quote delays are standard in the free sections of every financial site I can think of.

Yahoo Finance has an excellent stock screener which lets you input your prefered criteria and see what stocks (if any) match your preferences. For instance, you could retrieve a list of independent oil and gas stocks with price-to-earnings ratios between 1 and 10 carrying no debt.

Generally I have found the site to be quite user-friendly aside from some occasional slow loading which is usually not too severe. Yahoo Finance is currently my favorite "one stop" site for financial information.

MSN Money (http://moneycentral.msn.com)

At one time MSN Money was my favorite financial information site. It offers most of the same features that Yahoo Finance does and is definitely a good source of financial information. There is enough difference between the two sites that I still visit MSN Money occasionally just to get a different perspective on a stock or company.

A series of lingering problems with the site in the past, however, motivated me to switch to Yahoo Finance. One problem was occasional annoying ads that would expand over part of an article I was trying to read and just didn't seem to want to go away. A worse one was that at times the site just crashed, displaying a message along the lines of "we're sorry but the site is experiencing problems and is temporarily unavailable." These problems may very well have been solved or lessened by now (one would hope!) as I have not seen them recently on my occasional visits to MSN Money.

Google Finance (http://finance.google.com)

I mention Google Finance as much for what it might become as for what it is now. At present it doesn't seem to offer as much information as Yahoo Finance or MSN Money, but it does shine in the area of stock quotes where you can see a nice large price and volume chart and a lot of other good information relating to the company quoted including statistics, blog posts, and relevent news stories. The charts are marked with letters corresponding to the news stories, letting you see how the stock price was (presumably) affected (or not) by a particular news story.

It's a good site to keep an eye on. With Google's resources behind it, I will be surprised if Google Finance doesn't come up with additional innovative features over time.

CBOE/Chicago Board of Exchange (www.cboe.com)

CBOE.com is the online arm of the Chicago Board of options. It's a great place to go for quotes on put and call options, futures contracts, and related products. It also has an extensive set of relevant resources to educate investors and speculators.

NYMEX/New York Mercantile Exchange (www.nymex.com)

This is the place to go for quotes on oil, natural gas, and other energy products, gold, silver, and other metals. Quotes are available for both the current (spot) month and future months. Prices and expectations change all the time, of course, but it's a good place to go to see what the current consensus is.

Forbes.com (www.forbes.com)

Produced by the same folks who put together Forbes Magazine, Forbes.com is a great place to go for a steady diet of in-depth articles on business, finance, technology and similar topics. Whether you're an investor or an entrepreneur, you'll probably find something worth reading there.