Incremental though they are, the changes in the newest edition of CNBC on MSN Money make one of the Web's premiere finance sites even better. Many revisions focus on providing more information about your current and planned investments. This may be the most useful site to bookmark under Favorites-Financial, and if you use Microsoft Money, it is the best place.

The new MSN Money (www.money.msn.com), provides financial information sooner, better, and in greater detail. The home page, still in two-tone blue MSN-online color scheme, can display more information, and financial news and market stories now show up sooner. A redesigned home page takes better advantage of higher-resolution displays, intelligently wrapping text and graphics. The outgoing MSN Money was optimized for 800-by-600 pixel displays. Now, you get even more information—not just white space on the right side of the screen—at resolutions as high as 1,600-by-1,200. That means more room for financial information—but also lots more room for an ad-heavy right-side panel that hogs more than 550 pixels on a high-res display.

With the market climbing in the first half of 2003 and investors facing the pleasant possibility that some of their investments might be in the black, MSN Money cut a deal with GainsKeeper, a service that helps you decide which securities to keep and sell based on their tax implications. It tracks and helps you avoid wash sales (when you sell a losing stock and then buy the same stock within a month) that would not be tax-deductible. MSN Money is offering a free 30-day trial and a $19.95 yearly subscription. Reader's Choice, which lists the top 25 stories other users found most helpful, is also new, as is candlestick charting, popular in Asian markets, which shows open and close and high and low prices for your stocks.

Many other improvements are of the more-and-better variety: more banks you can check for loans and credit card rates, more news alerts that you can forward to a Pocket PC or cell phone, more information on insider trading, more key developments information on companies now going back three years, and more tools in the Decision Center areas that help with tax prep or financial planning.