SAN JOSE, California: Yahoo Inc. is refurbishing its finance portal, Yahoo Finance, adding stock charting tools, chatrooms for investors and video clips on financial news. The company is unveiling the new features Monday, which are expected to bring in more visitors to the site.
The site has been under redesign for nearly 18 months and besides the investor tools and chatrooms, it will also have embedded stock charts, quotes and financial news headlines from Yahoo, free of charge.
Yahoo Finance general manager Peggy White said Yahoo intends to allow other websites to offer entertainment, sports or news items. According to estimates, Finance.yahoo.com attracts 33 per cent of the U.S. online finance market, or a nearly three times bigger audience than MSN MoneyCentral, which has a 13 per cent share.
The stock chart offers the users a facility to view major events like splits or dividends even while staying on the chart or drag the timeline to a desired period. They can also type specific dates to create a chart and compare the performance of multiple equities within the same graph. The customized chart can be printed or sent out via email.
The upgrade has been carried out on the main U.S. site. International versions will be upgraded over the next six to 12 months, White said.
White said the work on final upgrading of the stock quote pages will be completed over the next two months. This section will function as the starting point for investors in individual stocks. A blog section will be added shortly.
For high-end investors, Yahoo has integrated several technical analysis tools that provide buy and sell signals.
White said Yahoo Finance will also offer video news from ABC.com, CNN.com, Forbes.com and SmartMoney.
Another new feature is an updated message board that compiles conversations into threads, making it easier to track the conversations. Users can also rate postings and filter them based on the rating, weeding out sundry comments.
Analysts said the updating exercise appears to be in reaction to Google launching a finance site recently. The Google site has interactive chart features. However, it has not been able to attract good number of visitors.
