Online Services

So who’s the dean of the fund digerati? It’s a dead heat. Both Vanguard and Fidelity dominated the field with the sheer depth of their Web sites. While many of their rivals also offer such features as online account transactions, turnover data and info on expense ratios, Fidelity and Vanguard were the only two companies to boast nearly all of the 28 items on our wish list.

Still, in terms of navigation, Fidelity’s Web site has the edge: Quite simply, it’s the easiest to use of any we tested. With its crisp, clean and polished layout, Fidelity’s site seems to anticipate what your next move will be after you click to a new page.

While Fidelity and Vanguard had no close competition for the top spot, Strong, T. Rowe Price and Invesco each offer very well conceived sites -- though we should mention one alarming occurrence with the latter. When a SmartMoney reporter misentered her account number and password on Invesco’s Web site, she got an onscreen surprise: the name and address of another Invesco shareholder, in Safety Harbor, Fla. Although her account data didn’t appear, we did get an eyeful of some sensitive information. Alarmed, we tested the other firms’ Web sites to see if we could replicate the results and, thankfully, could not.

An Invesco spokeswoman told us "it’s a one-in-a-billion chance." Our reporter, she said, had a nearly identical account number and the same password as the Florida shareholder. Where there are winners, of course, there are losers. So what hurt bottom-finisher USAA the most? Well, the company hasn’t got a Web site. (A USAA spokesman says one’s now in beta testing and should be available by year’s end.) Dreyfus, however, doesn’t have the same excuse. The firm’s site, it turns out, is little more than an advertisement. Accounts can’t be viewed, trades can’t be made, and there’s not even a list of fund holdings or sector weightings. (Dreyfus says that site improvements are in the works.)