yahoo finance

yahoo finance

The Benefits of Using Yahoo Finance

1. Introduction

Historical stock prices provide a company’s time-series information needed for most types of financial studies. This data will reflect important details, such as the company’s returns, volatility, and risk, as well as its sensitivity to market movements. Many researchers agree that it is a good idea to include sector information in one’s models. The security markets adjust stock prices continuously throughout the given trading hours to incorporate data from various sources. Thus, companies within the same industry sector should share similar characteristics. Yahoo Finance is one of the few websites to include sector information in its databases. Consider a study concerned with beta, a measure of a stock’s systematic risk. Without sector information, the researcher would calculate a stock’s risk using a simple market model. Simply stated, the returns of securities within the same sector should share similar influences. Including ‘industry information’ in one’s models generates more significant results and should reduce standard errors.

The benefits of Yahoo Finance are numerous. First, it is one of the most reliable sources of stock prices available, thanks to its strong relationships with other major financial sites as well as established discount and full-service brokerages. Second, including industry sector information in one’s models greatly improves the accuracy of an analysis. Yahoo Finance is one of the few stock price resources that allows users to include sector information in their stocks’ downloads. Finally, this price is reasonable, and it is incredibly easy to install and use. This page provides a simple introduction to use and the numerous benefits of including Yahoo Finance’s historical prices in one’s analysis.

2. Comprehensive Financial Data

Simple and user-friendly input of data is possible. Stocks are not only identified by their ticker symbols but also by their company names, which the system automatically recognizes. Also, user input of calculations is very easy. Corresponding data series for e.g. quarterly financial figures (common size balance, profit and loss, key figures, etc.) can be quickly calculated and edited after intuitively selecting the desired data elements from the overview. 190 different technical analysis indicators are supported by Yahoo Finance. These built-in calculations are also editable and can be extended by additional data object imports. Further calculations can be easily aggregated and calculated in a short time. The result is a comprehensive input of data for mostly all types of financial, investment, and trading calculations.

Relevant and comprehensive financial data is presented in a clear and easily accessible manner. Data is provided not only as an overview, but also on a per stock level. Yahoo Finance uses a stock’s proper company name for a stock’s data display. This is an interesting aspect. Also, there are as many as 8,095 possible data elements for research and investing objectives, 27 editable calculations included, 49 constellation pairs for technical analysis, data from 18 stock markets, and for more than 100 different stock exchanges around the world. Furthermore, there are data aggregates of the most important stock indices, investment funds, and currencies.

3. Real-Time Market Updates

Real-time stock quotes are available for financial and business news outlet subscribers via internet and mobile devices. The caveat is for many free real-time stock quotes, they are usually around 15 minutes delayed, which means that a trader would not see the actual opening price for trades done during the trading day until 15 minutes after the closing bell.

Real-time stock quotes are available on all user accounts at no additional cost. Real-time quotes include the price, volume, and trading history, as well as extended hours market information. Charting is also provided for real-time data and provides intraday data views with daily high and low price indicators, intra-day volume, as well as customizable advanced charts. These intraday stock price charts may be presented by either a line or candlestick chart and include five-minute intervals, as well as time scales of two days with data points or up to 180 days with weekly or monthly data points.

4. Powerful Investment Tools

4.1 Stock Screeners. If you are looking to set up a specific investment strategy, there is no easier way to screen for stocks matching your buy criteria than by using a Yahoo Finance stock scanner. You can preset up to 72 different filtered settings including fundamental and technical data, as well as famous and frequently used. By selecting from the drop-down menu, you can enter your investing strategy criteria and then review the return of stocks generated during the search. The stock scanner can generate various sorts of information and up to 25 stocks per search with specific results against the search request. You can also program email alerts for the search to be given the stock filters requested on a specific date, or as new stocks fit your search criteria. You can also scan your investment selections on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. When you sign up for Yahoo Finance Premium, in addition to a stock scanner that has over 300 filters, you also receive a CSV download tool of the search results.

It’s no wonder that Yahoo Finance offers powerful investment tools such as stock screeners, portfolio management, and a community bank. With other tools such as trading ideas and research, as well as interactive charts and news feeds, Yahoo offers investors everything needed to research, trade, and manage an investment portfolio. As for its additional services such as free Yahoo Finance stock quotes and market data, the company states on its website that fiscal revenue is derived from advertising, which can include promotional links.

5. Conclusion

Literature concerning decision making illustrates that the efficiency of decision making is likely to increase if more dimensions of choices are uncovered. This insight is particularly valid for when individual stock market investors surf the stock market. The vast amount of information needed to handle an investment atmosphere is provided by Abarbanell et al. in their field study of 97 retail investors. Individual investors, as described in their study, acquire not less than 14 different categories of information prior to decision making. It is the objective of the present study to use their categories and survey to pinpoint the potent financial web site aiming to facilitate the information seeking of individual equity investors.

Stock market investors are often daily wowed by the sheer quantity of online information made available at their fingertips thanks to the burgeoning of internet services. Investors are hungry for analysis which would help them in making sense of this information and assisting them in decision making. It is the objective of this paper to put Yahoo Finance under scrutiny and use its ample tools to show if this financial portal is up to the task. To single out the winners in the different classes, both quantitative and qualitative criteria are used. To state the conclusion right at the start, nine out of ten online stock market investors in the sample gathered information at Yahoo Finance. This portal was even more popular than any of the two established journals under scrutiny, The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. The second conclusion is that Yahoo Finance did fare well when the portal was scrutinized. It turned out to be among the class winners in several of the eleven categories under assessment. Especially, it was endowed with a large amount of information like number of shares outstanding, daily traded volume, relative trade volume and beta coefficients among others. An area where Yahoo Finance could improve is to lower the number of clicks from the home page to updates of analysts’ recommendations.