In early 2008, both customers and non-customers who visit Fidelity.com will be able to learn about commonly employed trading strategies and then test those strategies against historical data. The results of this backtesting can help investors make more informed investment decisions on when to buy, hold or sell a stock.

In addition, Fidelity also announced today that customers who are eligible* for Wealth-Lab Pro will soon gain access to a re-engineered version of the highly-sophisticated backtesting tool, Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0. With a new, intuitive user interface, enhanced charting techniques, and greatly streamlined workflow, the latest version of Wealth-Lab Pro enables active traders to more quickly and easily design, build, backtest and execute trading strategies.

"It's important that all investors, who actively trade a stock portfolio, have the ability to test and modify their trading strategies in a fact-based way, rather than relying on gut and instinct, which can often be misleading," said Sanjiv Mirchandani, president, product marketing, Fidelity Personal and Workplace Investing. "Wealth-Lab technology now enables anyone to test the historical performance of a trading strategy, beforehand, so the results can serve as a guide. This is all part of Fidelity's mission to bring institutional quality trading tools to the retail active trader."

Backtesting on Fidelity.com

Powered by similar technology found in the more advanced Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0, backtesting on Fidelity.com will allow investors to learn about common trading strategies and then use historical data to backtest the past performance of those strategies, using any stock of their choice. The results of the backtests will compare how a strategy would have performed versus a simple buy and hold approach, including when an equity would have been bought, sold or held, the average profit/loss, total trades, total winning trades and total losing trades.

"Backtesting methodologies have traditionally been used by highly sophisticated traders, but Fidelity believes that every investor could benefit from testing their trading ideas, which is why we're providing these capabilities free to everyone," said James C. Burton, senior vice president, Fidelity Personal and Workplace Investing.

The initial strategies that Fidelity will feature as part of the service include:

Trend Following and Counter Trend: trade with or against price movement trends either long or short.

Breakout, Support & Resistance: identify trading opportunities based on price movement versus established parameters.

Dip Buyer: identify extreme or rapid sell off expecting to profit from an oversold "bounce".

Gap: identify trading opportunities following sharp moves up or down.

Investors can run these strategies against up to five years worth of price information, and any trade size, whether in dollars or shares, to determine how a trading strategy would have performed had it been used in the past. Tutorials will clearly explain the benefits and risks of each trading strategy, enabling investors to make an informed decision about how to proceed. Fidelity will introduce additional strategies to the online program on a regular basis.

Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0

Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0 will be integrated into Fidelity's suite of industry-leading research tools. Fidelity's extensive customer experience with active traders and a desire to drive innovation in the brokerage industry has resulted in a re-engineered tool with a completely new look and feel, added features and functionality, and increased speed.

Streamlined Workflow - Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0 features the firm's new, patent-pending Strategy Monitor, which provides active traders with a single window to display and run unlimited strategies simultaneously, and will then display Trade Alerts when a strategy has uncovered a buying or selling opportunity. No longer do active traders need to jump back and forth between multiple screens to run their trading strategies. Improved workflow in Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0 can reduce, by at least half, the time it takes an investor to perform their Wealth-Lab Pro tasks.

Ease of Use - improved graphics with a clean, contemporary interface makes navigating through the tool much more intuitive. Charting is easier to use with its new interface and sliding-bar parameters. Users also get the benefit of being able to drag and drop elements of a trading strategy.

Processing Power - Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0 offers significantly faster performance. To improve the speed of testing trading strategies in Wealth-Lab Pro, 5.0 will now compile these strategies as programs. As a result, running trading strategies in Wealth-Lab Pro 5.0 will be at least twice as fast as the previous version.

Customization - active traders who write their own trading strategies will benefit from 5.0's move to the innovative Microsoft .NET platform. The latest industry-standard programming methodology should make coding custom trading strategies a much easier and faster endeavor. And, with .NET's open architecture, Fidelity has widened the opportunity for third-party developers to write robust applications.

* Investors in households that place 120 or more stock, bond, or options trades in a rolling twelve-month period, plus have$25,000 in assets across their eligible Fidelity brokerage accounts are eligible for Wealth-Lab Pro.