Quote Me!
Written: Jul 02 '00 (Updated Jul 02 '00)
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Pros: lots of information, analyst's reports, investment challenge, individual and portfolio-style quotes
Cons: only semi-intuitive to navigate, plain layout, not personalized by default
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| IntegraRacer's Full Review: Yahoo Finance |
When investing in the stock market, my opinion is that long-term investing is best. However, even in my long-term approach (but even more so for short and medium-term investors), I still need to determine the best price points to buy into a given stock or to find out the latest news on the company whose shares I’m purchasing. Financial information like that is very important to me, because I like to see everything about a company (in order to feel comfortable about the company’s prospects for the future), including their 10K Annual reports and financial statements, their 52-week trading range (High and Low stock price during a 52-week period), website, etc. So where should I go to find the quotes and other financial information I need as an investor? Yahoo Finance. Let me tell you why.
A Little Personal History, Shall We?
I started investing when I was in college, because my roommate and I created USC (Univ. of Southern California)’s first real-money (as opposed to trading on paper only) investment club. At the time, the Internet was starting to catch on, and websites / information was not as comprehensive and available at the time. One of the first pioneers (at least in my mind) was the big Internet portal, Yahoo, who came out with Yahoo Finance.
The reason I needed financial information was because we would research various stocks and bring our recommendations to the board. Also, because we were investing a large sum of money (in the eyes of several college students), we had to be careful with our stock picks. I used Yahoo Finance in every way possible; so let me actually get into the site now.
Drum Roll, Please
The homepage. It’s located at http://finance.yahoo.com. The first thing you see is the time and date (Eastern Time, of course), as well as the status of the financial markets (Open or Closed, Holiday, etc). Secondly, you see 6 major indices (Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500, etc; and it’s linked to more detailed info) along with its gain/loss, its current value, and the percentage change, if any. Next thing you see is the quote search tool, which is (quite honestly) the thing I used most on this site. Because that is the topic I am focusing in on this review, I may talk about the other components in depth at a later time.
But let me mention them briefly: US and World Markets (which gives all the major US and worldwide financial indices and more), Research (which has so much, from Stock Screeners (which gives you names of stocks that fit criteria that you specify), Upgrades/Downgrades (by analysts), etc.), Loans (which gives mortgage and loan quotes and info, as well as a way to purchase your credit report), The Investment Challenge (which I participated in for three months, but never seemed to beat the top traders), Reference (which tells you a little bit about the website), and the list goes on. I don’t want to seem like I’m padding, so I’ll stop here. You’ll also see the latest market news (with clickable links), as well as websites in various financial categories, and last of all, their Yahoo Finance in different languages. It was funny, because the whole site was in a certain language (e.g. the Germany site was in German, even the banners!!)
Quote This!!
I use this part of the site a lot, so I will go through it with a familiar example to everyone, Microsoft (ticker symbol: MSFT). So by typing in the ticker symbol into the quote lookup on the homepage, I get a quote page about Microsoft. You get various options on how to view the info.
The Basic: Gives you the ticker symbol, the last date and last price the stock traded, the amount the stock changed from the previous close as well as the percentage change, and lastly, the volume traded that day.
The Daywatch: Gives you the same as the basic view, except it also tells you the average volume traded daily for that stock, the opening price of the stock, and the range the stock was traded that day.
Portfolio: Give you the same as the basic view, but it also adds on the shares that you own (you need to actually create your own portfolio and fill in the information there), the value and the change in value of the stock, as well as how much you paid for it and how much you have made from it.
Fundamentals: Gives you the basic view, but also tells you the company name, the market capitalization (value of the stock multiplied by the number of shares outstanding), Earnings per share, the Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio, and the 52-week range (of the value of the stock).
Detailed: Gives you all the combined information of the other four choices, but in addition, it shows you the dividend and ex-dividend date, as well as a small 1-yr chart of the stock’s price.
So does this burger come with fries or what?
Obviously, if all you came here for was an online quote service, you’re in the wrong place, because all quotes and information is 20 minutes delayed. For real-time quotes, you can get them through any online broker (for a fee or for free), and one other place, http://www.realtimequotes.com; although I think they might have been bought out, it should still be free. But here’s the rest of the goodies that you get when you look up Microsoft (or any other company, for that matter):
News:
Yahoo provides all the press releases and online news that it can find on the company, and it is sorted by date. For instance, Microsoft has 53 news articles listed under its name on Friday (June 30), which are directly related or indirectly related to Microsoft. For instance, some article may only mention Microsoft’s ticker symbol as it relates to the Nasdaq or the software industry. I believe it keeps the links of the articles in its databases for a little less than a month, before it purges them from the system.
Messages:
This takes you to the Yahoo Finance Message Board on Microsoft, and it will show you the post number, the subject, the author of the post, and the time and date of the post. This is a great tool, and I will expound a little more on it in a later review. But to summarize its benefit, you may have people who are trading this stock heavily, and you may hear the latest, breaking news here first.
Profile:
One of my favorite things, the profile summarizes the nature of the company, its industry, etc. It also lists contact information, websites, the various indexes it belongs to, ownership information, as well as its top officers. Lastly (and most important), it shows all the key financial ratios, as well as stock related information. An example is that it tells you how many shares of Microsoft are being shorted, as well as the beta (helps determine the level of risk) of the stock, and it even shows the profit margin for that quarter. What great information that is all in one place.
Research:
This section details the number of brokers who are rating the stock (like epinions) as Strong Buy, Moderate Buy, Buy, Moderate Sell, Strong Sell. It tells the changes (from the week before) of average broker recommendations, as well as the expected Earnings per Share (EPS) for current and future quarters. In addition to detailed Earnings Growth and Earnings History information, a big plus is that it lists and links you to analysts’ research abstracts. These will tell you things like expected future stock value, their rationale for buying / selling, etc. A big plus, I think, because I have a hard time tracking this information down on other free financial websites.
Insider:
To summarize this, it is simply telling you which “Insiders” have been showing trading activity in the past year. Insiders are board members, officers, large institutional shareholders, large shareholders, etc. So if you see significant insider activity, it may indicate that there is something big happening in the future and that you may want to investigate into it. This section is a bonus, anyway, and it is interesting to see (for example) the movements of Bill Gates. Haha.
Options:
This section is brand new; they only added this section in June. It lists detailed information on the options on the market for various months and years, and if you are trading options, it can be very beneficial to you. It is not important to me, because I have not traded options in the past. But it gives you all the information associated with both the call and put options; the strike price, last trade price, the change in value, the bid and ask prices, and the volume.
It all sounds very good, is there a downside?
Quite honestly, I like Yahoo Finance because it gives me all the information I need at my fingertips. The only qualms I have about it is that its layout is not always the most intuitive. Compared to the Altavista Money website, for instance, it does not show you all the information you need on the same page. Altavista tries to personalize all your information onto your homepage; Yahoo does not (by default). There is http://my.yahoo.com, of course, but it is a more general customization. Also, Yahoo allows you to customize your finance page, but it is not as easy (in my opinion). Oh yeah, big negative. Although the site allows you to search for stocks, it does not give you the option to just search, period. So I have to go back to yahoo.com if I want to search for a finance-related topic; I can’t do it on the Finance site.
Yahoo is my one-stop source
I love Yahoo Finance. If I didn’t, I probably would not write about it. I feel that it gives me so much more information in one place than if I had gone site to site trying to find each piece separately. In addition, I can find information that I would normally have to pay for on other sites. Lastly, with a search engine like Yahoo backing it, you are sure to find whatever information you need on the site. Even if you have good tools available to you from other sources (e.g. your online brokerage), Yahoo Finance is a good source to supplement that information. I would recommend this for traders of all trading types (short, medium, and long-term investors).
P.S. Oh yeah, just to reiterate. If you are a day-trader, you will probably want real-time quotes and information. For that, I would consult the site I mentioned earlier, as well as with your online brokerage.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
IntegraRacer
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Member: Willis
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Reviews written: 32
Trusted by: 46 members
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