When we first surveyed web offerings in March 1996, the on-line world was, in the words of King James' Genesis, "Without form, and void.” A few visionaries were struggling to distinguish themselves from scores of amateurish competitors with mile-long URLs administered by guys in their basements. People weren't quitting their day jobs.
Clearly, much has changed. Nowadays, capital markets companies are throwing millions at their web development efforts, and fancy sites are popping up—and beefing up—at a stunning rate, many promising to be the Next Big Thing (and usually failing to deliver).
Which sites are worth your time? To answer that question, our editors loaded up on coffee and jumped headfirst into the primordial swamp of data that perpetually clogs the world's telecommunications lines.
We found most sites to be strong on window-dressing but woefully lacking in content. There are, however, a few diamonds in the rough that, for one reason or another, deserve your attention.
The list isn't intended to be exhaustive. In future issues we'll add other worthwhile ventures as they emerge. In the meantime, managing editor Robert Hunter profiles our current selections.

Capital Markets Risk Advisors

www.cmra.com

Most risk management consultancies use their web sites simply to hawk their devastatingly brilliant products and services. Not Capital Markets Risk Advisors, the New York-based risk management consultancy. Sure, there is the obligatory product catalog, but CMRA does its competition one better by offering users, after a free registration, access to a gold mine of risk management articles, presentations and speeches written by CMRA employees. The booty includes 13 articles on value-at-risk, two on model risk, one on operational risk, nine on risk management for institutional investors, three on stress-testing, three on credit risk management, one on corporate risk management, seven on general risk management, and five survey summaries covering Long-Term Capital Management and other timely issues. Moreover, the risk standards from the Risk Standards Working Group are available in full. Risk managers, accountants, treasurers and academics should pop in from time to time to catch up on CMRA's latest research. And stay tuned—CMRA is already hyping a new web site, www.riskinsights.com, that promises even more risk management information.

CBOE, CBOT, CME

It's no secret that the Chicago derivatives exchanges have had their share of trouble the past few years, with electronic trading making their brick-and-mortar open-outcry model seem increasingly anachronistic. Luckily, these heavyweights realized that the future—if not the present—is the Internet. Their web sites, similar in functionality but different in style, put the web offerings of their electronic brethren (particularly Eurex and high-tech upstart Liffe) to shame.

www.cboe.com The CBOE's site is the most reader-friendly of the three, offering instant glimpses into its markets on the opening page. One click on the market snapshot section opens "Trader's Tools,” a data bank unrivaled by any derivatives web site. In addition to 20-minute-delayed market data on the exchange's six index options and its five leading stock option contracts, the section offers market statistics for each trading day since 1995, the previous day's most actives, historical stock volatilities since the beginning of 1999 and the CBOE's historical volatility index since 1986. Other tools include a symbol directory, a stock-splits and mergers news function, new listings and series data, an expiration calendar, and an options calculator, as well as links to such Internet content providers as BigCharts, Zack's Company Reports and TheStreet.com. The site also provides an outstanding education section, covering the basics right up to advanced concepts with colorful charts and graphs. Strategy discussions include downloadable worksheets to help users craft portfolio-specific game plans. The CBOE's Options Toolbox, which used to come only in a CD-ROM, is also available on the site, as are the CBOE's publications (after a free registration). The site's institutional section takes things up a notch, providing various research reports and white papers on hedge funds and their use of listed options, corporate stock repurchase programs, ERISA pension funds, governmental pension funds and mutual funds. The section also includes a beefed-up portfolio tutorial and a long discussion of FLEX options. The CBOE's site is a must-read for options dabblers and junkies alike. www.cbot.com The most useful areas on the CBOT's site provide market and product information. There are commentaries (intraday, daily, weekly and annual) on all of the exchange's products, monthly calendars of economic data releases, 11 daily and five weekly/monthly statistical reports, and all sorts of other nuts-and-bolts information. The hard-core market data resides at Marketplex, which offers quotes (from 10 minutes to 30 minutes delayed), market news, charts and studies, CBOT reports, government reports, and copious contract information. The CBOT's product area offers virtually everything one needs to know about the exchange's contracts, quick links to CBOT publications and tips on finding a futures commission merchant. Worth visiting on a slow trading day: "About the Exchange,” which walks readers through the 150-plus years of the exchange's history, including an architectural history. www.cme.com The Merc's site ranks right up there with its fellow Chicagoans in content, and in some ways does them better in terms of functionality. Its most conspicuous advantage: new live quote services for certain contracts via the web. The Merc offers users a choice of three live-quote pilot programs, via Emerald Market Systems, Market Research Inc. and Townsend Analytics, all of which are free. Other price information is provided on a five-, 10- or 20-minute delay. The Merc's pricing section also includes daily and weekly settlement prices and charts. But the most useful section on the Merc's site is the "Traders Corner,” which includes, among other things, resource centers for agricultural products, weather futures and financial trading. The financial trading section is particularly strong, providing quick links to futures and options prices, third-party currency and interest rates, and other financial resources. The Traders Corner also includes calendars, contract specs, various regulatory and back-office information, and the "Resource Guide for Risk Management,” which includes an invaluable section for institutional investors. The Merc's products section includes all manner of data about the exchange's offerings, from the basics to advanced strategy discussions. The education section, meanwhile, offers tons of web-based learning opportunities, from quick quizzes and lessons to full-fledged on-line courses.

FREE CREDIT DERIVATIVES www.freecreditderivatives.com

People starting out in the capital markets usually find their way into niches—if not subniches—quickly, so someone specializing in, say, mergers and acquisitions knows little about options theory, and vice versa. The same is also true of financial web sites—for every TheStreet.Com, there are dozens of specialty sites covering all sorts of financial arcana. Free Credit Derivatives is just such a site. It's main function, aside from hawking Savvysoft's Tops 2000 Credit product, is to provide market-implied default rates for a variety of industries and credit qualities—and it does this for free (hence the name). Since this information doesn't exist anywhere else, the site makes our list. Novelty aside, these rates can be massively beneficial to credit derivatives teams pricing and pitching deals. At press time, the site was offering rates for a variety of credit qualities (from AAA to BAA3) in banking, finance, "industry” and utilities, with various government bonds expected to come on-line soon. The hook: Savvysoft is trying to market Tops 2000 Credit by offering a direct electronic link from the user's computer to the site, where it can download data instantly, behind the scenes, and interface with Microsoft Excel. But this isn't overly nettlesome, since buying the product isn't required to get the free data.

CIBC SCHOOL Of FINANCIAL PRODUCTS www.schoolfp.cibc.com

Charles Smithson and most of his associates at CIBC's School of Financial Products left the firm last year, but his school lives on, albeit in a state of arrested development, on the Internet. This site is the single best educational resource about derivatives available on the web. For Smithson, a former academic, the school was a labor of love—and it shows. The site greets readers with four main subjects: "Why and How To Use Derivatives,” "Who Uses Derivatives,” "Risk Management Products” and "Managing the Risk Management Process.” Each of these is broken down into subcategories, with links to numerous articles published by Smithson and his former colleagues at the school—all written in simple, easygoing language. But the site is far more than a compendium of articles. Its free on-line calculators section includes forwards, basic options (Black-Scholes, Merton, Black, Garman-Kohlhagen, the Binomial Model and the MBAW Model), second-generation options (including average rate, barrier, binary, compound, lookback, quanto and rainbow) and three volatility calculators—each if which includes a detailed explanation. The site also includes electronic versions of the past three Managing Financial Risk Yearbooks—annual recaps of the previous year's major events, issues and innovations. And the site's glossary is one of the best available on the web. Alas, all good things must come to an end. But Smithson promises to re-emerge soon at his new web home, www.rutterassociates.com.

The DERIVATIVES 'ZINE www.margrabe.com

Most people would think twice about calling themselves "Dr. Risk,” for fear of sounding, well, a bit presumptuous. Not William Margrabe, head of the William Margrabe Group and creator of "The Derivatives 'Zine,” a web-only derivatives and risk management publication based largely on readers' questions. The rules are simple: Ask Dr. Risk a question about risk management, model risk, market risk, credit risk, financial engineering or derivatives pricing, and he'll answer it on-line. But that's just part of the story. Margrabe tries to pull off something well-nigh unprecedented in derivatives commentary: injecting a healthy dose of levity—if not always outright humor—into his prose. A comedic tone infuses the entire site—even the derivatives dictionary, where he prefaces a remarkably thorough, scholarly list of definitions with: "You might be a derivatives illiterate if you: ...think you went on a gilt strip for forgetting Mother's Day...wonder why a mere caption can sell for more than a journalist's annual salary... think REMIC was the lead actress opposite Jack Lemmon in ‘Days of Wine and Roses.'” All this, and we haven't even talked about the site's humor section, which is administered by another of Margrabe's alter egos—the "managing director of comedy.” Trust us when we say you've never seen anything like it. With material like this, Margrabe could be playing the Catskills in no time. Of course, the site is more than an outlet for a frustrated comedian. Margrabe's Dr. Risk Q&As—some of which have been reproduced in these pages—are always hearty fare, with questions and answers on such topics as decomposing an option's P&L and reconciling put-call disparity.

FAS 133 www.fas133.com

At first glance, it might appear that only accounting types would be interested in any site that begins with "FAS.” But the bizarre history of Financial Accounting Standard 133 has touched virtually every corner of the U.S. derivatives scene—from corporates wondering how the new rules will affect them, to dealers still trying to sweep it under the rug, to auditors and consultants trying to figure out how to advise their clients. Thanks to fas133.com, anyone who needs to read about the latest developments in the FAS 133 saga can find them with a click of a mouse. The site is news-oriented, with constant updates of even the slightest developments in the interpretation or implementation of the complex standard—including the minutes from each Derivatives Implementation Group meeting. But it also provides more detailed articles covering the issue—many from International Treasurer, a fortnightly newsletter and the site's parent—as well as original research reports on systems readiness, best practices and the standard's impact on risk management. The site also boasts an "ask an expert” feature, which lets users ask prominent experts questions about FAS 133 implementation.

The FINANCIAL PIPELINE www.finpipe.com

Our first instinct on seeing The Financial Pipeline was to run screaming from anything that catered to what derivatives snobs call "the underlying.” But when we clicked on the site's "derivatives” link, we found a wellspring of relevant, engaging material. The derivatives section is primarily educational in nature, offering long introductory articles written by Chand Sooran, principal at Canada-based Victory Risk Management Consulting Inc. Some of the more compelling topics: credit derivatives, risk, technical analysis and derivatives trading, credit risk and derivatives products, derivatives systems, commodity swaps, currency swaps, equity swaps, exotic swaps, hedging swaps, an introduction to hedging Greeks, exotic options, pricing options, volatility, risk holes and liquidity risk, measuring risk, bank hedging operations, and structured notes. The site won't teach specialists much about their business, but for concise snapshots of areas outside one's realm of expertise, this is a good place to start.

HEDGEFUND.NET, HEDGEWORLD

Hedge funds used to be the most secretive of financial enclaves, where highly targeted marketing and word of mouth were the only ways privileged investors could get wind of hot opportunities. But the Internet, the great democratizing force that it is, is beginning to change that. www.hedgefund.net In 1997, Alex Shogren, founder and president of HedgeFund.Net, came up with a radical idea for the historically tightlipped hedge fund world: He'd create a hedge fund "community of interest” on the web, where investors and managers could get together to talk shop, share ideas, monitor funds and search for new talent. Three years later, his web site has emerged as a giant. HedgeFund.Net offers investors free access to—and tons of information about—more than 1,200 hedge funds, provides detailed fund screeners based on 33 investment strategies, and ranks funds based on a dozen or so separate criteria. The foundation for all this material: a mountain of data on each fund covered by the site. Among the information available: return statistics, including year-to-date, monthly, and highs and lows; risk analysis measures such as Sharpe and Sortino ratios, standard deviations, alpha and beta; qualitative data, including nuts-and-bolts information about the fund; and contact information. The site also provides customizable charts and graphs that match styles to benchmarks, as well as qualitative descriptions of manager backgrounds, investment styles and so on. The site also takes positions in hedge funds, and handles some of the maintenance work, from marketing to back-office tasks. And in the future, the site promises to offer a hedge fund version of Charles Schwab's OneSource, which lets investors trade mutual funds on-line. www.hedgeworld.com Hedgeworld, which went live on September 16 of last year, distinguishes itself from its more established rival in many ways. Its biggest selling point: it provides access to the TASS+ database, the industry's most comprehensive hedge fund performance repository, where information on more than 2,200 funds is updated daily. Users can see the data on a pay-per-view or annual subscription basis. Hedgeworld also offers a bona fide news function, with reporters cranking out articles on the hedge fund industry daily from the site's Rye, N.Y., headquarters. And the site provides investors an array of portfolio-building tools to help them model and track their investments. Hedgeworld hasn't forgotten about the sell side, either. Its biggest benefit to hedge fund managers: the site allows funds to build sub-sites within hedgeworld.com to spread the word about their funds to investors, on the cheap. It also offers a proprietary mail-and-alert facility that guarantees secure communications from fund managers to investors. And in the future, like rival Hedgefund.Net, Hedgeworld plans to offer hedge fund trading, in the hopes of creating a true one-stop shop. Stay tuned.

IFCI RISK WATCH http://risk.ifci.ch

There's no shortage of introductory futures and options web sites whose proprietors—generally brokers and FCMs—are trying to rake in fat trading commissions any way they can. Basic risk management sites, by contrast, are harder to come by. Who, besides regulators, have a vested interest in spreading the gospel of risk management to the masses? Not surprisingly, one has to look abroad for the answer. The International Finance and Commodities Institute (IFCI) was created in 1984 by the Swiss Futures and Options Association to promote global understanding of commodity and financial futures and options. One of IFCI's best efforts is the Risk Watch site, which could also be called risk management 101. Among its offerings: a 13-point risk management checklist for company shareholders, a collection of risk management case studies, a discussion of 13 basic risk management concepts and, perhaps its best feature, an on-line version of Gary Gastineau's Dictionary of Financial Risk Management, a useful tool for even the most experienced risk managers and traders. The site's library, moreover, is novel for two reasons. First, it provides just about every risk management document ever written by an international regulatory body. Second, it indicates which of 13 risk management topics—credit risk, settlement risk, market risk, "other risks,” systematic safety, market integrity, customer protection, risk control, regulatory cooperation, capital adequacy, sales practices, netting and insolvency, and accounting and disclosure—are covered in each document, and the library is searchable by topic.

NUMA WEB www.numa.com

It may not have taken off like Yahoo, but after five years of existence, NumaWeb, the first derivatives portal, soldiers on. These days, with Internet brokerage sites, on-line risk management and live data sites popping up at a breakneck pace, the technologically challenged (that is, underfunded) NumaWeb serves mostly as a reference center about derivatives, risk management and technology. But what a reference center it is. Founder Stephen Eckett, a former warrants trader in Europe, has taken great care to provide readers with nitty-gritty information that simply isn't found elsewhere on the web. Among the most useful: a listing of the world's futures and options exchanges, with links when available; a nifty options guide that spits out the appropriate trading strategy after users input their market views; contact information for dozens of derivatives journals and other financial publications; conference information; and a spreadsheet library where users can download simple option pricing systems. The site also provides the most comprehensive derivatives links section anywhere, a valuable directory of derivatives software companies, and an employment section featuring a list of recruiters around the world and bulletin boards for job offerings and positions wanted. In this age of increasing specialization, NumaWeb continues to be the one of the best general derivatives sites around.

OFFICE Of The COMPTROLLER Of The CURRENCY www.occ.treas.gov

When one thinks of federal regulatory agencies, rumpled suits and dot matrix printers come to mind well before fancy web sites. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities Exchange Commission, to name a couple, seem to view their web sites as little more than electronic filing cabinets for their mind-numbingly boring—albeit critically important—publications, rulings and other literature. But the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's web site is different. The banking regulator's subject index is one of the most useful tools on the web, providing links both within the OCC web site and externally, and phone numbers for the relevant OCC staff. Under "derivatives,” for example, there's an OCC telephone number as well as a link to a glossary of terms and the site's crown jewel: the "Derivatives Quarterly Fact Sheet,” which summarizes the derivatives activities and trading revenues of U.S. commercial banks based on their quarterly call reports. Backing up the Fact Sheet's brief textual recap are some 20 pages of graphs, charts and data tables, guaranteed to keep stat freaks busy for hours. A quick troll down the subject index also reveals entries for asset securitization, capital requirements, credit risk, currency, general disclosure, interest rate risk, liquidity risk, repurchase agreements, the OCC's risk-based capital model and swaps, among many others.

The RISKMETRICS GROUP www.riskmetrics.com

If we were giving a separate award for web site design, The RiskMetrics Group would win hands down, having produced the cleanest, most elegant site in the derivatives world. Add RMG's impressive functionality, and you've got an Internet powerhouse. The site, predictably, is most beneficial to users of RMG's products—particularly RiskMetrics, CreditMetrics, FourFifteen, and CreditManager—since it allows clients to download RMG's data sets directly. RMG also offers DataMetrics, the first Internet-based data service for risk professionals, which includes a time-series data warehouse culled from Reuters and other data providers, and a data service that provides data-querying, extraction and graphing tools, as well as the facilities to perform analytics according to the user's parameters. But RMG's site isn't only for paying customers. It also offers two valuable indices updated every day—the Global Volatility Index and the Global Correlation Index, which are the first systematic attempts to quantify global volatility and correlation. The benefit: the indices can alert risk managers quickly to big changes in global volatility and correlation, allowing them to shock their risk numbers accordingly. The site also offers a free on-line course called "Exploring Risk,” which discusses the concepts of hedging, diversification and insurance; the cycle of identifying, measuring and managing risk; the seven attributes of a strong risk management process; and how to distinguish business and financial risk. For a fee, RMG offers a more advanced course called "Managing Risk.” The site also includes a free, downloadable report called "Risk Management: A Practical Guide,” and a dozen or so other downloadable articles and working papers.

MARK RUBINSTEIN, NASSIM TALEB

The Internet has more than its share of derivatives vanity sites, created by "authors” who can't resist prattling on endlessly about whatever strikes their fancy, making it prohibitively difficult for readers to separate the tiny sprigs of wheat from the mountains of chaff. These two sites haven't resisted the temptation completely, but their compelling content makes up for the inconvenience. www.in-the-money.com Mark Rubinstein is one of the leading figures in the derivatives academy, co-creating the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein options model and writing countless papers and several books on options theory from his perch at the University of California at Berkeley. Last year, he wrote another such tome: Rubinstein on Derivatives, an introductory guide to derivatives. He also came out with an alternative CD-ROM version called Derivatives: A PowerPlus Picture Book, which helps readers learn about the markets interactively via hundreds of PowerPoint slides, 100 audio mini-lectures and other material. His web site, www.in-the-money.com, contains the book in its entirety, as well as hundreds of hyperlinked Internet sites (from the glossary), interactive end-of-chapter quizzes and free downloadable software updates—all of which can help readers get a first-class derivatives education from one of the most distinguished financial scholars around. For hard-core options junkies, the site also includes the Berkeley Options Database, a historical record of all reported trades and quotes, time-stamped to the nearest second, for all standardized contracts traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange from August 1976 through August 1997. http://pw1.netcom.com/~ntaleb/ The pros and cons of self-publishing have never been more entangled than on Nassim Taleb's web page, where searingly cogent analysis is jumbled together with other stuff that can only be described as maniacally self-indulgent. Where are web editors when you need them? Taleb, a well-known trader, outspoken critic of VAR and author of Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options, provides a books-in-progress section, where readers can download chapters of his brilliant and quirky new book, Fooled by Randomness: If You're So Rich Why Aren't You So Smart?—which he says he's writing "for the general public.” At press time, readers could feast on the following chapters: "The Millionaire Across the Street,” "Track Records, Black Swans and the Problem of Induction,” "Survival; Or Why Bad Traders Often Do Better,” "Monkeys on a Typewriter—Introduction to Data Mining and the Survivorship Bias,” and "Randomness and Our Brain: We Are Probability Blind.” Taleb veers a bit off track, however, with a peculiar—though highly entertaining—literary section, where he lists his "favorite literary novels of the 20th century” and then the "worst famous literary novels of the 20th century.” His list of 35 favorites includes such non-Book-of-the-Month selections as Pierre-Jean Jouve's Paulina 1881 (No. 6), Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoires d'Hadrien (No. 9) and Dino Buzzati's Un Amore (No. 12). In order to qualify as one of the worst famous literary novels of the century, it seems, a work must be universally hailed as brilliant and meet Taleb's definition of pretentious. We hear about his struggles with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude ("Tried to read it in Spanish and it was like a punishment. Switched to French, then English, without any detectable improvement”) and his summary judgment on Albert Camus' La Chute ("Someone needs some convincing argument that Camus, a political journalist at best, presents the vaguest talent”). For the moment, it's safe to say that this is the only web site that melds literary criticism and trading theory. But wait until Victor Niederhoffer decides to go on-line!

VALUE At RISK RESOURCES www.gloriamundi.org

As we've already seen, some do-it-yourself web sites can run into trouble when grand ambitions give way to rapaciousness. Refreshingly, the creator of Value at Risk Resources, Barry Schacter, stays true to the task at hand. The result: the best web site on value-at-risk the world has ever seen. Schacter is vice president and market risk portfolio manager at Chase, and has worked at the OCC in the past. He also served as editor of Derivatives, Regulation and Banking (North-Holland, 1997), and his scholarly orientation comes through loud and clear on the web site. Published and working papers get prime billing, and there are lots to choose from. Readers interested in one or more of the hundreds of articles on the lists can e-mail the authors directly to request more information, and some can be downloaded directly. Of course, a fancy reading list alone does not a great web site make. VAR Resources also includes a list of software products that calculate VAR and a brief description of each product; a comprehensive list of VAR consultants; and a helpful listing of upcoming VAR conferences. For true VAR animals, the site's regulatory materials include virtually every major international regulatory document pertaining to VAR, from the Basel Committee of the Bank for International Settlements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the live chat feature is a great way to ask other risk managers about the intricacies and nuances of VAR.

On The Horizon

The most casual browser of the Internet's risk offerings will inevitably start asking: "Where's the beef?” Many sites are little more than statements of ambitions yet to be fulfilled. Trading One of the most publicized web sites coming down the pike is CFOWeb (www.cfoweb.com), created by software vendor Integral Development Corp. The site—which has already garnered a splashy article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal investing section—promises to give corporate finance chiefs a forum to trade foreign exchange, interest rate and other derivatives over the Internet. The conventional wisdom about on-line trading is that liquidity will only visit a site that dealers support. CFOWeb's strategy: an end-run around dealers altogether, allowing corporates to trade with other corporates and removing brokers from the trading equation. Harpal Sandhu, the architect of CFOWeb, told the Journal his site could be far bigger than on-line stock trading. We'll see. Another future on-line trading site is Cantor Fitzgerald's eSpeed Online (www.espeed.com), which will allow customers to access Cantor's electronic bond-trading system, eSpeed, and its futures trading system, the Cantor Exchange, via the Internet. Eventually, the site will allow retail brokers to access Cantor's wholesale markets "to allow bonds and other financial instruments to trade on-line similar to stocks.” Futurecom (www.futurecom.org), the first web site to announce its intention to become a full-fledged futures exchange, is still awaiting regulatory approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Once that happens, the site will trade cattle futures at first, but creator Bill O'Brien plans to launch an array of energy, metals and financial futures in short order. Among the site's innovations: integrated trading and clearing, with a totally electronic audit trail; per-transaction fees rather than a seat ownership system; and cash, rather than physical, settlement. A number of credit derivatives trading sites have been popping up in recent months as well. The most hyped: Creditex (www.creditex.com) and Credit Trade (www.credittrade.com). Creditex, which seeks to "provide liquidity, standardization and transparency to the credit derivatives market,” has already signed up the likes of JP Morgan, Bank of Montreal, Deutsche Bank, CIBC, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Societe Generale and Westdeutsche Landesbank. Credit Trade, meanwhile, is designed for banks as well as corporates, offering an on-line auction facility where customers post bids and offers and a mail system that helps them close the deal. Its main focus: credit-default swaps, total-return swaps, asset swaps and credit-linked notes. Risk management There's no shortage of players jockeying for position in the on-line risk management derby. StreetMath (www.streetmath.com) is among the most advanced. Developed by software vendor TechHackers, the site already provides a number of risk management analytics covering bonds, credit derivatives and mortgage-backed securities, as well as real-time data for the current Treasury yield curve, more than 200 active U.S. Treasury bonds and some 300 international bonds (provided by Liberty Brokerage). It plans to offer more risk management capability in the future. Erisks (www.erisks.com), created by Oliver Wyman, the New York-based consulting company, is one of the more ambitious contenders. It promises a full array of analytics and risk monitoring services as well as a benchmarking service that will allow users to compare their own risks against those of others. Further down the line, it also plans to offer risk transfer services through custom-made products. At the moment, however, its news screen is a poorly edited conglomeration of news items that happen to contain the word "risk.” Similarly, while some of the white papers in its educational section are valuable, it is still a long way from its goal of creating a credible on-line reference site. RiskCenter (www.riskcenter.com), meanwhile, promises to offer a less ambitious combination of news, financial data and statistical analysis tools. Its news offerings are better researched, but a full-strength site seems several months away. These sites all talk the talk, but will they be able to walk the walk? Stay tuned. —R.H.