All the News That Fits You

The Trader

Use: Desktop investment adviser.

User Profile: Geoff Nicholls, 36, works out of his home office in Palo Alto. Nicholls works with companies that are developing commercial Windows applications. Past clients include Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. He actively manages his portfolio of 15 stocks, trading through Charles Schwab & Co.

E-News Service: PointCast Network. Popping up as a screen saver during breaks in computer use, PointCast splashes Nicholls's computer screen with colorful displays of news in animated text and charts. Nicholls downloaded PointCast for free from its Web site.
(PointCast is advertiser-supported by the likes of Fidelity Investments and Saturn.) He set the service to get reports and updates from financial news sources, including Reuters New Media, Standard & Poor's Comstock, and Money magazine.

Search Words: Company names, including Adobe, Intel, Oracle, Netscape

Favorite Reading: Nicholls takes a break from a long stretch at his workstation writing code. After three minutes, PointCast bursts onto the monitor. He follows the green stock ticker streaming across the bottom of the screen, showing 20-minute delayed quotes. Oracle's stock price is up 7%. He clicks on a news headline, reads that the company is reporting 44% revenue growth for the fourth quarter, and clicks on the full-text story for the details.

"The fact that the news and the quotes are in the same place is key," says Nicholls. "Not only can I track stocks, but I can understand what the numbers mean. In the past two months alone, I've netted $3,000 from transactions that I wouldn't have made if I weren't using PointCast."

Original Attraction: It's free. And its combination of financial news and graphics is the best he's seen. "People were blown away when they came into my office and saw this," Nicholls recalls. "But now it's spreading through lots of software companies out here." His best profit to date: about 25%, by trading Oracle at interim lows and highs.

Wish List: Stock listings for smaller companies. "And an alert that would flash when a stock price goes outside a certain range."

Coordinates Geoff Nicholls, (geoff@gazelle.com)

The Timesaver

Use: A faster read of the Wall Street Journal.

User Profile: Carl Mischka, 57, is president of CEM Enterprises in Corona Del Mar, California, a $10-million-a-year advertising sales firm specializing in print media. CEM reps for United Airlines's in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, and for Family Handyman and the International Herald Tribune.

E-News Service: Dow Jones Personal Journal, published by the Wall Street Journal. It takes Mischka about three minutes to download his preselected news reports and columns from the Journal's paper edition, plus sports and weather. Each new edition of Personal Journal is available after 3 AM EST. (Personal Journal, a dial-in service, differs from the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, which launched this past March on the Web.)

Search Words: Company names, including America Online, Microsoft, Iomega, United Airlines, Meredith Publishing

Favorite Reading: Mischka has his e-news automatically dialed up by modem at 7 a.m. Pacific time for delivery to his home office; his financial updates arrive after the East Coast stock markets close. He tracks general business news, focusing on the columns he enjoys most from the print Journal, including "Heard on the Street" and "Your Money Matters."

Mischka also leverages Personal Journal as a sales tool. On June 17, for example, he got a news alert that government regulators had grounded Valujet -- just 20 minutes after the decision was announced. Some of Valujet's passengers will inevitably fly on United Airlines, he reasoned, creating more readers for United's in-flight magazine. "I called an advertiser who was on the fence," he recalls, "and explained the string of events that would lead to a passenger increase for United. I made the sale."

Mischka is so hooked on Personal Journal's user friendliness that when a paper copy of the Journal was delivered to his hotel room during a recent stay in New York, he still preferred downloading the electronic version to his laptop. "I could read it between appointments," he says, "without having to scan the entire paper for the stories that I need to see."

Original Attraction: "The cost ($156 per year) is comparable to the paper version
($164 per year)," Mischka says. "It saves at least 20 minutes a day of reading. And my office isn't stuffed with stacks of unread papers. I might even save a few trees."

Wish List: "It would be great if I could have my stock portfolio evaluated and updated, like I can on America Online 3.0."

Coordinates: Carl Mischka, (mischkaCEM@aol.com)

Steve Ditlea is a regular contributer to the cybertimes area of the "New York Times" website, and a contributing editor for "Upside" magazine. He lives in Riverdale, NY.

"Draw in the News with Crayon"

"Q & A - Walter Bender/MIT Media Lab"

"Extra! Extra! See How E-News Services Rate"