By Joel T. Patz

Anyone who administers employee 401(k) retirement/tax savings plans, wants to track his competition's financials or simply wants to market-watch will find Investor Insight a one-stop shop.

The program offers the same detailed information available to professionals for tracking stock news, analyst ratings, company research reports, price/volume charts, and current value and performance of their own portfolios.

Premiering as part of Quicken Deluxe 5, this program is also a standalone application that opens the way to capturing in-depth data for any security (stocks, mutual funds and so forth) traded on the NYSE, AMEX or NASDAQ. With a few clicks of a button, news reports from the Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones News Service, and company announcements from Business Wire and PR Newswire are downloaded to your PC with only a 15-minute delay during trading hours.

Late-breaking information concerning your Watch List of securities will be downloaded each time you go online, manually or according to a preset schedule. Investment Insight's greatest benefit is that it allows you to build portfolios of selected stocks and group them by category or industry, and build flash reports to track changes according to your parameters. It also lets you monitor press releases and headlines.

You click buttons to view your securities by point, percentage or volume change, and you can sort them alphabetically or numerically. A Comparative Chart button scans investments for percent change and abnormal volume, and a burst chart can give comparative readouts for any time interval. You can print Personal Reports that include selected stocks or funds in text and chart format, with snapshots of price chart, news, headlines and stories.