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Thursday, January 17. 2008Yahoo Finance vs. Google Finance
Google Finance was a breath of fresh air when it launched in March 2006 simply because you could search for a stock by name without having to remember its ticker symbol. Yahoo Finance has since caught up in this respect: now both sites have sophisticated search systems, both with auto-completion. Beyond that, how do they compare when it comes to helping you research stocks and monitor your portfolio's performance?
Research Winner: Tie Yahoo has more useful information available for each stock, such as transactions by company officers and directors. In fact Google even links to Yahoo's site for research reports. Google, however, does a better job of presenting the information it has. For example, the ability to view news events on the price chart is particularly useful. Both sites are decent for research. I expect Google will integrate more information as time goes on, and Yahoo will enhance their visualisation options (they have new charts in beta, but these still don't include news events). Current Portfolio Holdings Winner: Yahoo Both Yahoo and Google present a fairly decent view of current holdings. Both have streamed share prices so you don't have to reload the page to get updates.
Yahoo has the edge as it allows you to customise your portfolio view. For example, this allows you to add a column for the time and date of the last trade, which is particularly useful when you own shares in thinly traded small cap stocks. Portfolio History Winner: Yahoo Both Yahoo and Google allow you to enter your transaction history (BUYs, SELLs...), rather than just entering a list of stocks you currently own. If you have an older Yahoo Finance portfolio, check out finance.yahoo.com -> My Portfolios -> New Portfolio -> Track your transaction history. Both Yahoo and Google fail to properly take account of splits: if you bought 100 shares in RBS before their 3:1 split, Yahoo and Google would still show you as owning 100 shares instead of 300. Incidentally both sites also fail to properly handle a return of capital. Yahoo gets kudos for allowing you to enter cash transactions such as cash paid to your brokerage account and interest income. Google loses out by only allowing you to enter currently listed stocks. For example, if you once owned shares in Arla Foods UK (which delisted from the LSE in April 2007 as it became a subsidiary to another company), you'll find there is no way of entering historical transactions on Google. Dividend Yield Winner: Miserable tie Both Yahoo and Google fail to include dividends received in the portfolio's performance. Yahoo does allow you to add a Dividend Yield column when editing a portfolio view, but this column actually shows up blank when you view the portfolio. Conclusion Yahoo and Google's finance sites are similarly good for research, and similarly bad at telling you about received dividends. Despite shortcomings, Yahoo Finance has the edge when it comes to monitoring your portfolio's performance on a day to day basis, and also when checking its performance since day 1. AOL are currently preparing a new finance site, I'll cover that once it's out of beta. Notes: the above covers stocks listed on the London Stock Exchange. You may find differences for stocks listed on other exchanges. Comments
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I use Yahoo to get quotes and view simple quote charts, but I haven't come across a service that is much fun to use or that provides the information I went in any truly useful form. For instance, without going into it too deeply, I generally want to know just a few simple things: the current quote, a history of the high/close/low, by month, quarter or year, and the associated quarterly and annual sales revenue, earnings, p/e, p/s values. This kind of stuff should be in one simple table for each stock. I shouldn't have to go from page to page to collect it. AND, I should be able to put 2 or 3 stocks side by side for quick comparisions of this data.
I agree that porfolios inability to add dividends is annoying. I also find it bothersome that the systems don't automatically make adjustments when a company changes its stock symbol (ie Sun Microsystems switching from sunw to java. That should be automatic. Portfolios should also automatically update following stock splits or reverse splits.
Check out http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/06/wikinvest-to-add-unique-comp-data-for-stock-research/
Do you know of any way to put the portfolio information on a personal webpage?
I want to show a portfolio on a page, but I want it to update like it does on Yahoo's servers. I have been looking for a way to do this, and am not married to the idea of using Yahoo. I jsut thought it would be the easiest. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks
Other than regularly copying the data yourself (by hand or using some custom script) I can't think of anything.
You can use Google Data API to retrieve data from Google finance and place it in your site.
Google portfolios don't allow you to enter 1m shares or more. Also I can't find a number of Mutual Funds.
Found the solution here:
http://phpstockportfolio.com Works like a charm.
I am not able to bring up my portfolio which I have done for months. I give the info asked for just as I did months ago and it is refused. WHY?
Marianne Dauer
Please contact your portfolio provider to raise this issue.
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