I won’t give away all my thoughts in the space, I am saving that for my investments, but much is at stake.
A few days ago I was writing about the mystery of Google Finance and their lack of interest in promoting their own good site.
If you are at a cocktail party, money and stocks is always a topic of conversation and it has not translated too well to the internet. Lot’s of financial sites make money, but there is no loyalty and no global community. Yahoo should absolutely own this space, but they have just goofed. Maybe it’s just not possible in the end. There is so much at stake, but little guys are acquired at the first sign of traction.
BusinessWeek takes a deeper look at the online brokers and their forays into social networking in this week’s issue . It’s a good read.
To me it does not make sense for the eventual winner in the space to be closed off within one/each brokerage system. The eventual winner should come from an ‘open’ platform. The fact that the online brokers are claiming so much success means they are lying or that some big things are coming to the space.
UPDATE – Here is the current financial landscape within Facebook . Pretty thin, but this will heat up fast as stakes for the college and young eyeballs heats up.
bizweek link no work
fixed – thx
Howard, imho, there’s nothing on YahooFinance, or even GoogleFinance that gives traders, or investors an edge– it’s al commoditized stuff.
For $1600/mo a Bloomberg gives an edge, at least in the right hands it does. Why the analytics of a Bloomberg, or even a Reuters system can’t be replicated on an open web site is beyond me. Actually it’s not beyond me.. developers cost money and the dominant companies that provide it can afford to develop the stuff because they have thousands of paying customers from the street.
The dribs and drabs of available market info are found on YahooFinance, Google’s site, or places like nasdaq.com.
The other day I wanted to look at 2%+ moves in the market over the course of the summer and had a helluva time finding even that simple market data without having to resort to manually calculating it. Time and sales on options in web land, or even on systems like OptionsXpress? fuggedaboudit… it’s there but limited. Same for money flows, block trades, credit markets spreads, etc. It’s all out there but piecemeal.
Also, as inane as the Yahoo message boards are since they longer seemed to be policed and are spammed to death, it’s still a big draw. They shut them down for a day last year and traffic in Yahoo briefly crashed.