Finance sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance haven’t changed much in the past ten years. The fonts are different. Maybe there’s some more real-time quotes and fancier, interactive charts. But at their core they all follow pretty much the same formula: dump as much data on the individual investor as they can and let them figure it out. Wikinvest, which started out as a crowd-sourced investing site, is trying to change all of that with a complete redesign that is being turned on tonight for members who log in.
Over the past two years, Wikinvest has become a great resource for researching stocks but some of its most interesting data was hidden away. It is not a daily habit like other finance sites, attracting only about 500,000 unique visitors a month. The redesign aims to change that by putting all of Wikinvest’s industry- and company-specific data front and center. Each stock page has a chart, key metrics, a news feed, wiki analysis, and opinions from bulls and bears.
But there is a new data central tab which presents financial data in new ways. For each metric, whether it is revenues, operating margins, or debt-to-equity ratios, Wikinvest tells you whether the number you are looking at is high, low, or average compared to the industry. It also computes trends for you such as revenue growth and net income growth. Hovering over an one of these numbers produces a mini chart graphing the trend over time.
Beyond that, though, Wikinvest shows industry metrics which can give investors insights into the health of the company. For instance, the industry metrics it shows for Google include ad revenue growth, paid clicks increase, and market share of searches. All of these also have their own little charts, each of which are embeddable. Here are the charts for ad revenue growth and licensing growth:
You can also create charts which compare Google to Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay across a variety of metric. Here is one comparing advertising revenues:
The whole point is to make the data intelligible. If you don’t know what the Price to Sales ratio means, you can click on it and get a definition
In addition to making all the data come more alive, Wikinvest also now has a news feed for each stock. But instead of showing articles tagged with the ticker symbol, which is now overused by every finance news site from Forbes.com to the Motley Fool, it matches words in articles to its own database of 100,000 keywords associated with different companies. Its news feed shows headlines and snippets of text from 200 trusted sources, ranging from Bloomberg and the New York Times to wonkish finance and economic blogs. This casts a wider net and brings back different types of headlines than you might find on Yahoo Finance, although it may be too wide a net. I am not sure why a Forbes story about the hospital where Steve Jobs got his liver transplant comes up on the Yahoo stock page.
Is that enough to make it the new Yahoo Finance? No, but at least it’s something different.
The new UI looks great as you show in the Screenshots. However have these changes been made Live for audiences world-wide ?
I am based in India and still see the same old UI
Whoa, a graph that plots the change in GROWTH year over year? I feel like I’m in calculus class again.
Super cool data.
New UI not visible in India ?
Hey, nice write-up of the redesign. Haven’t tried it … yet … but it certainly seems to blow Yahoo away in terms of aesthetics and data portability, though. Nifty graphics.
hey TC, my comments keep getting deleted, yo. this is my third time posting and I feel like a fool now. Anyway, the graphs look nifteh but I thought this was a wiki?!?!
Oh wow. the charts on this page are actual embeds! Now if only they had a chart that told me whether I should buy or sell…
Yup, and leave all those complicated calls to complicated people. … Oh, wait.
You mean like http://www.valuecruncher.com?
Not embeddable yet, but does give guidance.
Sooner or later the pendulum swings back again, and the interweb will move back towards the more rigid form of structured/semantic data, just to gain that few extra centimeters of intelligence out of all this mountain of information.
I see both WolframAlpha and Wikinvest as both part of this inevitable trend that will only become more noticeable as we get deep into the web 3.0 era.
Congrats on the clean redesign, wikinvest!
WikInvest is awesome. Data drilling gives us great information. I was paying for such data elsewhere. Now, I can get it for free.
I thought Google would be the one to do this. WikInvest won! Great.
no one is going to invest based on data from a Wiki — sorry, won’t ever happen.
Hey jerk y
I remember reading somewhere that hours before Lehmann Brothers declared bankruptcy, the credit ratings companies had them rated at AA.
And what about Jim Kramer’s blatant lies on CNBC?
After this recession, I’d rather trust a wiki where I can see all the sources of the facts, than these black boxy companies who are little more than the mouthpieces of the instutions they are supposed to scrutinize.
You realize this is all information taken off of their SEC filings, then prettied up into a nice interface, right? It’s not like people go in there and make up numbers. So, you’re essentially saying, “no one is going to invest based on data from SEC filings, won’t ever happen.”
I agree with Jerky, never, ever will you trust a Wiki to make a major financial decision, it simply won’t happen if anyone does do it then they are delusional.
Impressive MediaWiki interface. How did you do that?
Very cool UI. Looks very clean.
this looks sweet. i’ve been recently using wikinvest a lot for a research project I’m doing this summer. great stuff. keep up the good work!
Sweet! I love the web 3.0 feel of this site. Im curious as to why more people dont use it as compared to the bland old Yahoo Finance.
I just wrote a review of this on my blog, this could be a game changer for stock lovers!!
i’m not saying that the quality is bad I’m saying that it’s not real time
Congrats to the Wikinvest team! The new site looks really great. It’s long overdue someone shakeup Y! Finance’s reign in the finance portal space. You’ve aggregated and displayed the new kinds of data needed to do it.
Andrew Waterman
CEO, Emerginvest
…Now if external websites could only use their API more easily to get at this awesome data, we could finally ditch Yahoo Finance once and for all. Hint, hint!