Google Finance, launched in March last year, has failed to
put a dent in Yahoo Finance’s lead as the most popular web source of financial
news and data.
Google’s service is not even in the top 15 of financial
sites and has yet to break 1m unique visitors a month.
If there is a challenge to Yahoo, which has rested on its
laurels for too long, it comes from AOL’s Money and Finance site. It
unveiled a new version today that is still in its beta testing phase.
Yahoo Finance had 79m unique visitors in October, compared
to 70m for AOL, 46m for MSN Money, 18m for Dow Jones and 15m for CNN Money.
Marty Moe, senior vice president of AOL Money & Finance,
told me the revamp was part of AOL’s strategy of focusing on “key verticals”
rather than clinging to its traditional portal for success.
The site has some impressive features. Its real-time
headlines and news feeds are powered by Relegence, which AOL acquired last
year. Relegence provides a news engine to top brokerages, with more than 3,000
sources. Mr Moe said Yahoo had about 40 in comparison.
The new site will also have “heat indicators” letting users
know when a stock is driving news coverage and users will be able to set up
custom searches on any company or topic.
One of the simplest and most useful features for me was
historic returns being easily available next to Flash-based charts. You can
instantly see how the stock has performed over one month, six months,
year-to-date etc. There is even a “Return since” button linked to a calendar,
so any date can be entered to find out the percentage return since then.
“We want to bring the power of a Bloomberg screen to
individual investors, but make it easy to digest,” said Mr Moe.
The free service is expected to emerge from beta in
the next six to eight weeks and AOL has “a very aggressive 18-month plan” to
continue to add data, he said.
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