SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. on Monday will unveil an upgraded version of its top-ranked financial information site that features new stock charting tools, improved investor chat rooms and financial video news.
In a bid to expand the audience for its investor tools, Yahoo Finance also plans to allow other Web sites to embed stock charts, quotes, and financial news headlines from Yahoo, free of charge, on other sites using a small amount of code.
"Yahoo Finance is introducing this feature, but before long you will see this coming from other parts of Yahoo," said Yahoo Finance General Manager Peggy White of plans to allow other Web sites to serve up Yahoo entertainment, sports or news items.
Finance.yahoo.com attracts 33 percent of the U.S. online finance market, or a nearly three times bigger audience than its closest rival, MSN MoneyCentral, with a 13 percent share, according to data from Web measurement firm Hitwise.
In part, the upgrade of Yahoo Finance is a response to the introduction four months ago by rival Google Inc. of a competing financial information site, analysts say.
But Google Finance remains a bare-bones financial information site focused on basic stock quotes, graphs, corporate news and data, as well as links to blog commentary.
So far, the Google site, which Hitwise ranks 38th among U.S. business and information sites, has attracted only a small following relative to the well-established Yahoo Finance, which had 108 times more unique visitors in the last week of June.
Initially, the improvements at Yahoo Finance are focused on the main U.S.-centered site at http://finance.yahoo.com. International versions of Yahoo Finance will be upgraded over the next six to 12 months, White said.
The upgrade of Yahoo Finance is a work in progress.
White said Yahoo is working to upgrade over the next 60 days its stock quote pages, which serve as the starting-point for many investors in individual stocks. Financial blogs will be added shortly as well, perhaps filtered by a third party.
By offering a new reputation system that allows readers to rate the value of postings on its stock message boards, Yahoo has recently begun seeking to breathe life into the decade-old stock chat room phenomenon.
Investor message boards long ago degenerated into a mosh pit of harsh invective and uncorroborated rumor traded between bullish and bearish advocates of specific stocks. Yahoo now offers users the ability to rate individual messages according to a five-star system, then filter out lower-rated postings.
The structure of stock message boards will provide "threaded" conversations around specific topics tied to a stock, rather than serial discussions that simply list investor messages on different topics in reverse chronological order.
The new Yahoo Finance stock charts, now in public test mode, offer investors a one-click way to compare the performance of a stock to competing companies or indexes.
The full-screen charting application gives users free access to historical stock price data reaching back decades, in an easy-to-use format that provides a "drag-and-drop" ability to switch from a daily timeframe to years of stock chart history.
For more sophisticated investors, Yahoo has integrated a variety of technical analysis tools that provide buy and sell signals. For novice investors, Yahoo Finance provides educational information about how to use tools on the site.
Seeking to capitalize on the growing appetite for video information, Yahoo Finance also will begin integrating video news from ABC.com, CNN.com, Forbes.com and SmartMoney into the site, with other sources to be added shortly, White said.
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