Add Stock Quotes To Every Post With Upcoming Wikinvest Plugin

Financial bloggers are going to like this one. Wikinvest is getting ready to release a Livequotes plugin that automatically adds a stock quote every time a publicly traded company is mentioned in a post. It auto-detects company names and adds the ticker symbol, price, and the percent change in parentheses after the name, with links to the Wikinvest page for that stock. It also can add links for financial terms and definitions such as “PEG ratio” or “price to book.”

The plugin works on WordPress and Blogger right now, and will launch officially in a couple weeks. But Wikinvest will give 10 TechCrunch readers early access. State in comments why your site or blog is deserving and how your would use the plugin, or email Wikinvest founder Parker Conrad (parker [at] wikinvest).

The plugin works automatically, potentially cutting out a few steps for financial bloggers who often include links to stock quotes in their posts. For ambiguous company names, there’s a backup to the auto-detect feature: simply put the desired stock quote in double brackets like [[AAPL]]. It will look like this:

But instead of just spamming your blog with a bunch of links back to Wikinvest (because, let’s be honest here, that’s what this is really all about), it adds a box inside the editing pane of WordPress or Blogger that previews the links it will add. Any links a blogger doesn’t want can be unchecked before the post goes live.

Wikinvest will soon add support for other financial quotes beyond stocks, such as for currencies, commodities, and interest rates.