Editor’s Note: This is the first is a series of brief reviews of major financial Web sites.
While Yahoo! tries to hold on to market share in the search engine business, its financial news section remains a solid source of stock information.Yahoo!.com’s financial section has a wealth of information on the stock market and trading activity.
Strong points:
- Market updates with commentary during trading hours. You can get a feel for what the market is doing and what it is reacting to with a quick read.
- Streaming quotes of major markets are user friendly. Yahoo! offers streaming quotes, which mean you don’t have to refresh the page to see the latest quotes. Quotes are still delayed by 15 minutes per exchange rules, but for a quick update, the quotes are great.
- A copious amount of market and individual stock information is available. The site does a great job of covering major indicators and offers interactive charts for stocks and indexes.
- One of the neat features is historical quotes for stocks and indexes. How far you can go back varies from stock to stock, but you can get daily, weekly, monthly or dividends only data. Prices are adjusted for dividends. Yahoo! allows you to download the information to a spreadsheet.
Weak points:
- Yahoo! navigation can be confusing.
- No explanation for many of the indicators and numbers.
- Bond information not easy to follow or complete.
Conclusion
Yahoo.com is a strong site for investing and personal finance and worth looking at for prices and major indexes.
Yahoo! Finance