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.

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Each stock page on USAToday also includes community analysis and links to related concepts from Wikinvest as well. Wikinvest charts can be annotated with news stories and embedded elsewhere. For instance here is a chart from USAToday’s Google stock page:

Wikinvest gets only about 450,000 visitors a month worldwide (November, 2008 comScore numbers), but is growing rapidly. Distribution deals like these (and broader adoption of its Wikinvest Wire by financial blogs) could help Wikinvest grow beyond its current niche.

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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.

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The current market gyrations have investors running everywhere seeking advice. What better time to launch a newswire culled from the latest posts of financial bloggers? That’s the idea behind Wikinvest Wire, which has just been launched by the user-edited investment site Wikinvest. Except that it is not really a newswire in the traditional sense. It is more like a contextual recommendation system for the blogs invited to participate.

Wikinvest Wire is starting off with 100 financial blogs, including Confused Capitalist, Money Morning, College Analysts, The Mess That Greenspan Made, Financial Armageddon, and Old School Value. All told the blogs attract about one million unique visitors a month. Wikinvest is also in the process of syndicating the Wikinvest Wire to mainstream media sites, where links will appear on their stock pages. Wikinvest Wire is invite-only, but interested bloggers can apply.

The Wire will exist primarily on the participating blogs themselves, on Wikinvest topic pages, and on the yet-to-be-named media sites. For each of the 100 financial blogs, at the end of each post three links will appear to posts from other blogs in the network discussing the same stock or financial topic (such as “Google (GOOG),” “bailout,” or “credit default swaps”). The contextual links will also appear on relevant pages on Wikinvest and other stock and financial sites. (See screenshot). In this sense, it is similar to contextual recommendation systems like Sphere, OutBrain, or BlogRovr, which all append recommended links at the end of blog posts or news articles using a variety of methods.

Nevertheless, Wikinvest co-founder Parker Conrad positions Wikinvest Wire as really taking on SeekingAlpha, an investing news site that republishes posts from select blogs and media outlets (including TechCrunch). Conrad argues:

This launch puts us directly in competition with a larger site—SeekingAlpha.com—in that both SeekingAlpha and the Wire are syndication platforms for investing bloggers. However, there are some important distinctions:

SeekingAlpha requires a blogger to give up their content to SeekingAlpha. The bloggers’ articles are published on SeekingAlpha, and SeekingAlpha distributes links to content on their site to their partners, such as Yahoo Finance. Investing bloggers use SeekingAlpha, grudgingly, because it increases their traffic marginally. But they also hate SeekingAlpha—because 99% of the traffic to their posts actually goes to SeekingAlpha. Selling ads against the bloggers’ content is, after all, SeekingAlpha’s business model. But you can see why that might chafe . . .

Wikinvest, however, does not require bloggers to host their content on our site—and all links, from media partners, wikinvest.com, and other bloggers, go directly to the blogger’s own site. What we get out of it are links back to Wikinvest which are included in the Wire.

There’s also another big difference Conrad forgot to mention. SeekingAlpha is an actual site where readers can go and see all of the posts it hand-picks in one place. There is no one place you can go to see all the posts included in the Wikinvest Wire. The links are generated algorithmically and distributed piecemeal all over the Web. There is not even an RSS feed that pulls all the 100 financial blogs that make up the Wikinvest Wire together. (Although, you can get an RSS feed for any Wikinvest topic page, which will include Wikinvest Wire posts for that topic).

All of this is by design, as Conrad explains above, to generate more traffic for the participating blogs. But it’s not really a wire unless there is one place you can go to see all the posts popping up as they go live. So I’m not sure SeekingAlpha has too much to worry about.

Nevertheless, the addition of relevant financial blog posts to each page on Wikinvest should help to make it an even more useful site than it is today. If you are trying to figure out what to do with your stock portfolio, it is worth checking out for the comprehensiveness of the data and collection of arguments from both bulls and bears on each stock. They also have great charts that anyone can annotate (I’ve embedded one below).

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But starting today you can get interactive, embeddable WikiCharts like the one below from Wikinvest. Hold the mouse down over the chart and you can pan it from left to right. Hover over the line and you will get date, price, and volume, information.

And it’s a wiki, so anyone can add an annotation. Do you think you know what’s been driving Yahoo’s stock price up and down lately? Stick in your best explanation before or during big price movements as an annotation.

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People have a thirst for information and data, but the traditional data available does not make much logical sense. They don’t help you understand the nuances of companies and industries.

Each industry has its own unique set of comparable metrics by which analysts and professional investors gauge the health and productivity of the companies in that industry. For airlines, it might be fuel costs, revenue per available seat-mile, cost per available seat-mile, and load factors (what percentage of seats are sold per flight). For home builders, the comps might be number of home closings, number of new contracts, and number of canceled contracts. For manufacturers, you might want to look at inventory turns. For banks, default rates and interest rate spreads. It is too much for any one individual investor to calculate and keep track of.

But that is where Wikinvest comes in. As the name suggests, the site is like Wikipedia for stock research, and is part of a growing trend of investment sites that tap into the wisdom of the crowd for investment advice. (See also, Cake Financial, Covester, and Motley Fool CAPS). All it takes is for one member to add a useful piece of data for everyone else to benefit from it. The company will seed about a dozen industries with comp data, and then invite its members to fill out the rest. Each data point must be footnoted with a source.

This is a really powerful example of what can happen when people collaborate around data. The comp numbers will appear on each industry page, relevant company pages, and a metrics page for each metric. They will also be embedded within articles about specific companies or industries. Explains Wikinvest’s other co-founder Parker Conrad:

What we are building is wiki for data. You might have data on our site that appears in multiple points on the site and that data point is updated everywhere it appears.

That’s great if the data is right. But there is one caveat: errors will also propagate more widely as a result. Wikis are eventually self-correcting by nature, but tell that to the investor who takes an erroneous piece of data on faith in the middle of an edit war and buys or sells a stock because of it.

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Wikinvest is meant to be a research portal where anyone can contribute information on company profiles, investment concepts, or chart analysis. The site is a competitor with financial profiles and news listed on Yahoo and Google Finance, as well as Wikia’s investment portal and company profiles on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia.

Wikinvest does a good job of providing business focused company profiles, which include market information and product histories. Wikia doesn’t have company profiles and Wikipedia is focused on company history, not analyzing market data.

They also have a very novel feature, wiki charts, which let users explain trends across real-time share price graphs through embedded comments (example).

All this data is useless if it can be undermined by one malicious editor, so Wikinvest has a reputation system that tracks user trust. Trust is based around how often a user contributes and how much of that work is preserved. Users that contribute less and are infrequently over-written, are given the least scrutiny from administrators. The site also focuses on companies with at least $100 million in market capitalization.

Wikinvest still faces the stiffest competition from the financial sites themselves, which offer real time news along with their professionally edited content. Wikinvest, however, has a wikis advantage of nimbleness, by quickly adjusting to new trends and interlinking across concepts.

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