Any site with a quote from W. Somerset Maugham ("It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it") on its home page warrants a closer look. In the case of Tradetrek (www.tradetrek.com), the site also deserves credit for its collection of analysis tools and trading strategies.

Tradetrek offers a wide range of technical trading strategies, signals and concepts, including buy and sell signals based on eight technical patterns (such as triangle breakouts, range breakouts, cup-and-handles, and triple top and bottoms), five-day neural network forecasts and an interactive fundamental stock-valuation model that calculates the six-month price target for any stock. Tradetek.com also offers some excellent research tools for short-term traders, including block trades, charts, news, quotes (including time and sales data) and fundamentals. And to round things out, the site has lots of educational resources and innovative portfolio management tools.

Tradetrek has several major areas: Technical, which features the aforementioned patter-based signals and lists of the stocks that are forming them; Quantitative, which contains the site's neural network analysis engine; Tools, featuring the site's customizable "Power Search" scanning tool; and Tradetrek University, a very helpful educational section that includes articles and tutorials on everything from chart types and the bid-ask spread to risk management and the use of artificial intelligence/neural networks in trading.

You can scan the market for trading opportunities using the site's pattern- based stock search models. The site posts real-time stock picks along with trading rules and risk-management suggestions, and provides a "Historical Chart Walker" with which you can gauge the performance of different trading strategies. It's not a typical back-testing module that allows you to test a trading system on a specified chunk of historical data and analyze the performance results. Rather, it allows you to click on a past date (as far back as 1970), view the trade signals given for that day, and then step through the chart day by day to see how the signal panned out. It's not high- tech and it won't impress statistics geeks, but it's a good learning tool that quickly allows you to reference the validity of past signals.

What really sets this site apart from so many others is the Quantitative analysis section. First, it contains Tradetrek's proprietary artificial intelligence/neural network five-day stock forecast engine. Second, it gives you tips on how to put on different "ratio trades" (trades that consist of more than one stock - for instance, two stocks you expect to converge or diverge in price no matter what direction the general market is heading). Finally, its Portfolio and Risk Management tools allow you to manage your portfolio risk in relation to a set of risk parameters, among other features. Two portfolio risk parameters used on the site are beta and value at risk (VAR) - which have wide application in the institutional world but are less well known among retail traders.

Beta is a way to measure how much a specific stock is expected to move given a move of a certain size for the overall market. A beta of one means the stock, on average, will move as much as the index. For instance, if you believe the broad market is likely to rally, then you should take long positions in stocks with a high beta. VAR gives you the dollar value you're not likely to lose in one day, given a specific statistical likelihood. You can read more about both these features in the Tradetrek University section of the site.

Other cool features in the Quantitative section are the money flow and volume-weighted average price (VWAP) calculations, and the block-trade analysis (Institution Watch) that shows the institutional interest in a stock. These are good tools for real time traders looking for that little edge or extra insight.

On the downside, it takes some time to learn to navigate the site. The layout (a dual horizontal-vertical menu scheme) makes it somewhat difficult to know where you are within the maze of information Tradetrek offers. On an unrelated note, it should be much quicker to pull up a chart in the technical part of the site rather than the fundamental part.

Tradetrek has three packages: Basic, Silver and Gold. The Basic package (free) includes the site's basic tools, models and other applications with 15- to 20-minute-delayed market data. The Silver package ($9.95/month) includes more advanced tools, models and analysis with delayed data. The Gold age ($24.95/month) has streaming real-time market data and includes all the site's tools, models and trading strategies.

Keep an eye on this site. It offers excellent trading tools and resources - and lots of them. Here's hoping they're able to take the site to the level they hope to.