Today I was privileged to get a sneak peak at a new financial portfolio web application I think you're going to like. It's called SteamStreet. The site is still in beta. The developers wanted a few investor types to have a look under the cover before the general public in order to get feedback on usability and function. How could I resist? I gladly accepted their offer to take the private SteamStreet Beta for a shake down cruise and write up a review of the site.

SteamStreet is a nicely done web application for evaluating, managing and tracking your financial portfolios. One really cool feature, which I'll tell you about in a little bit, is the portfolio sharing capability. But before you can share a portfolio you have to have a portfolio to share. So let's walk through some of the steps for creating a financial portfolio in SteamStreet.

I logged on using my super secret private SteamStreet Beta logon key and clicked the link to create a new portfolio in my account.

I'm calling my hypothetical test portfolio Bio Diesels. It's a short list of big blue chip pharma companies that make little blue and purple pills. Once my portfolio was created I found myself back at the Portfolios overview page.

This was one place where I thought the user interface could have had a little more intelligence built in. Because I was creating a new portfolio I thought it would be a smart thing if the site had a button to take me straight from "create portfolio" to "enter transactions". Maybe that's something the developers will implement as a result of the beta testing. It's only one extra click though, not a big deal.

Next I'll enter some transactions in my Bio Diesels portfolio. This is where some real magic takes place. Have you ever forgotten a ticker symbol? Or maybe you were setting up a new portfolio of securities you wanted to watch and didn't even know the ticker symbol of the company you wanted to evaluate. SteamStreet has a very cool way of dealing with that. Just start typing a few characters of the stock or company name. SteamStreet's application servers go to work immediately and present a short list of securities containing the combination of characters entered. With each key press the list gets shorter and shorter until the one you want is among the few in the list. These guys did their homework on that feature. It's a winner.

OK, my securities transactions have been entered and my Bio Diesels portfolio is complete. Let's have a look at how my portfolio has performed.

I'm really jazzed about this view of my Bio Diesels portfolio. Here I get a view of how my portfolio has performed over whatever period of time I choose. I just hover my mouse over the chart and SteamStreet shows me the data point.

OK, I promised I'd show you the sharing feature of SteamStreet. From what I could tell you don't automatically have sharing turned on in a new account. It must be activated, which from a security point of view makes perfect sense. I went to my account options page and turned on sharing and just like that, I get a public link to my Bio Diesels portfolio. SteamStreet gives you full control over who gets to see your portfolios, and how much information they can see.

I haven't yet explored all the features available in my beta account, but I can already tell SteamStreet has some very useful capabilities. I'll be looking forward to new developments as the beta test continues.