Soaked, Stoked, Stocked.

Using the Yahoo! Interactive web charts is something that anyone can do quite easily, albeit the former versions were easy to use, the improvements that have been made will allow for much more freedom. I have already noticed that if I leave the page and close my browser, I can reopen my browser and go to the charts again and it will retain my previous settings. This is useful because most people like having some indicators that aren’t usually default and it is helpful if everybody had their own preferences waiting for them.

I wouldn’t say that this is the end-all in terms of research for stock numbers, but it is definitely a good place to start. With this program it is easy to go all the way back to the beginnings of a public company, with the timeline at the bottom there is always an indication of the period that you are looking at.

Most people would use this application very liberally and not rely heavily on it, as most people have other forms of research to supplement their buying. The improvements that have been made will even help those busy people. When you look at the graph it is easy to tell what you want to know and the information is quite simply at your fingertips.

I would like to see these graphs be available in a widget format or an rss feed. This would make it much more usable for lots of people who are on the edge of web technology and do not want to spend much money on expensive computer equipment. With this open-source, web 2.0, wiki-fied world more people already have access to this information for free, why not allow for a program like this to be used along with free-software.

I would like to put this feed up on my PageFlake if I had the opportunity and this would eventually allow me the opportunity to watch more than one chart at one time on the screen. But, there is a problem I have noticed with the graphs. As I have used Firefox to use these graphs and have very often had many tabs open with lots of content, Firefox will eventually freeze up, so there could be a potential problem in how efficient the program really is.

It is probable that they will eventually add these features that are lacking but pretty soon it seems that most of the other technologies will catch up with what Yahoo! is doing too.

For an advanced stock investor it might be more suitable to look up quotes on a high-priced bit of software that has hundreds of extra options to manage a portfolio. For a quick look ,or a brief history lesson on a certain company’s stock, there are the stock charts found on all finance websites. We have all fiddled with these before to look up useful pricing information on a stock symbol.

In fact, there is a long list of websites to choose from and sometimes the deciding factor of which someone would like to use is the other features the website has to offer and the quality of the stock chart becomes less relevant. The most visited sites will go to those with the most insightful articles, blogs, and release their information most expeditiously. Perhaps there was a time that the stock chart would bring in more viewers but the restrictions of the Internet web page had limited the capabilities of the user’s interaction with the chart. Web 2.0 has allowed for a lot of these barriers to be broken just as it has in many other aspects of what the Internet has to offer.

In 2006, Yahoo! started using the web 2.0 interface to make the experience of referencing a stock chart easier with more user-defined preferences. Since then they have consistently added and taken away features and obstructions to create the stock chart they use today.

To me it seems that a lot of people are using similar color schemes and layouts that Apple has made popular. Very soft lines and colors with the ability to drag easily over a faintly blue background, something that blends very well and nice to look at. Even the font is similar to the one used on Apple computers. This is definitely not a bad thing, I personally like the color schemes and it seems to be a national preference as Google has also somewhat adopted a similar layout.

Accordingly, all the same features are still available as in other web charts but to access them now we can click on a series of links for options that open up in small dialog boxes. In charts before there was no choice but drop-down boxes to specify a certain date and the back and forward buttons to travel through the timeline of a chart. Now there is a draggable timeline on the bottom of the chart that will easily allow the user to specify a certain period of time to look at with a slide of your mouse.

There is a regular view which includes links to all of the essential basics we would like to know about the company, Google and MarketWatch do this as well and is nothing new. They also provide the ability to interact with the chart in full-screen mode which allows for a bit more information on the page, which comes in handy when printing. There is also the ability to share the graphs through e-mail with a click of a link on the bottom-right of the graph.

Taking a look at some of the “Technical Indicators” that Yahoo! Provides, they do offer more than any of the other web charts as far as the amount of information the graph is able to fit. I have looked at the chart compared to the ones on MarketWatch, Bloomberg, and Google Finance, and Yahoo! is still just as good, if not better, than all of these.

There is the added feature that Google provides of a more visual way to reference news articles related to the company. Google has letters at certain nodes of the chart to denote a corresponding news article listed on the right with the same letter. This could be added to the Yahoo! chart very easily and I’m sure that it will be only a matter of time before they add something like this.

If I were to do research on a certain symbol I would start here and probably use it at all times during my research. I am not a high-powered investor and a free tool that allows me this information makes me feel a little bit more in control of what I am learning, and I would surely recommend this to anyone doing some stock research. Try going to Finance.Yahoo.com and search a quote, click on the “interactive chart” button and fiddle around for a bit, see how you like it.

I have attached a Powerpoint presentation that allows for a visual comparison to the past and present Yahoo! Finance stock charts and with comparisons to other site’s stock charts as well. One main point that I tried to get across was the simplicity of the design that Yahoo! chooses and how that compares to other sites as well. Enjoy!

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Lately, it seems that oil prices have once again been affected by the market.  Not only at the pump have I realized this but three out of the four news feeds have oil prices and barrel prices as a top headline.  Also, there has been the theme of doom for the last month on many of theses feeds.  Headlines like “Get ready for the bad times” or “how to save now”, things that I think are just trying to scare people, but the large amount of these types articles are constantly being accompanied with news stories about the weakening economy and it almost feels like walking on eggshells just reading the articles.  Some are saying to stay away from the big names and start looking at smaller name stocks, some are saying to just hunker down and prepare for the worst.  There is little about a light at the end of any tunnel for us but I presume that it will come, but not any time soon, at least that is what the PageFlakes seem to be pointing towards.

My writing style will most likely not be similar to David Gaffen as I don’t have the same knowledge as him and can’t claim the same thing.  Most of my posts will only carry observations about the market as I have little insight into most of the bigger picture.  Also, unlike David Gaffen I will be keeping my blog a little lighter, in the seriousness department.  I do like to have fun and have a variety of interests so those may pop in and out of my blog at random. 

The stock market and the world of money is so heavy and fast that some people believe that there is no way to make money if you are not on top of every little thing that is happening in the market.  That is not necessarily true, the market is built for people who want to get rich slowly and for those who want to take the fast track.  Regardless, the approach for either needs to be a little light-hearted and very good-natured, after all it is our own money we are dealing with.  Being too picky and tense about these kinds of financial matters can cause a lot of stress and even a few bad decisions down the line.  I find that I would rather be interrupted by a trumpet solo than the worrying thoughts of the what-ifs and why-nots.

Furthermore, I would like to stress I am not in this to win a huge prize but I feel that there is a lot about these markets that could help everybody just as long as they are able to take advantage of it and I am one of those people.  One day I plan on making stock trading a side thing to compliment my dream job of ice cream taste tester and possibly the most financially stable ice cream taste tester in the world, if not the world then America, if not America then Los Angeles, it really is about starting small.

So I do hope you enjoy, I have already added a link to my PageFlakes site and it is chockfull of information and links to websites.

David Gaffen’s blog, MarketBeat, has drawn quite a crowd.  To be the official blogger on the stock market for a newspaper called the “Wall Street Journal” is quite an accomplishment and with that responsibility comes great criticism.  It is evident that he will never give a recommendation to a certain stock as it can only deflate his readers confidence in him if it goes sour.  Also, with the large amounts of people that look at his blog everyday it is no wonder he has to choose his words so wisely and be as objective as possible.

Gaffen posts multiple times a day and there are almost always immediate responses to his posts, giving corrections, advice, or asking questions.  There is the occasional flamer but people disregard those posts and typically ignore them.  For the most part people have some insightful comments and it is always great to see a comment from someone who is trading with the stock that is being blogged about. 

On technorati, MarketBeat has a rank of 10,116 and an authority of 436.  People quote the site a lot and there are lots of posts with updates about what “WSJ” is saying, which usually means what David Gaffen is saying.  Looking up his blog on Diigo has similar results, there are many people that link to his site and find specific blog posts interesting but there seems to be more interest in his blog in the world of technorati than in Diigo.  Looking up his blog on del.icio.us has similar results, there aren’t that many people favoriting his site, only 90. 

Conversely, there are lots of other stock-related blog sites that have lots more exposure than Gaffen and all of those are highly noticeable on all of the bookmarking websites I have just mentioned.  Some of those sites include SeekingAlpha, MorningStar, and the KirkReport.  In fact, all of these sites are either mentioned or make an appearance in Gaffen’s own blog in a weekly list of blogs he posts called the “blog roll”: http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/category/blog-roll/.  Since Wall Street Journal sets up his site there is no space for him to link to these sites on the side of his blog page and it probably makes more sense that the Journal doesn’t want those posted anyways, so he Gaffen has been courteous enough to post these sites in successive blog posts.

Also, with the formatting that WSJ provides for him he has little room to show much personality so he leaves it up to the words to tell the story, somewhere I think it is better to keep it.

The internet has consistently changed the way we run our personal lives all in a move to get things to go faster and faster and faster.  One of the first things I ever noticed about the internet, as I was a sophomore high school student, was the changing way that people were talking to each other and I signed up to my first forum: DSLReports.com.  I was chatting on that every day to see what people were and weren’t saying and another thing I realized quickly was that there were some people out there that are just not even worth responding to.  Not to say that everyone should be heard because everyone else could be a genius, far from it, but there is always that select few who choose their words carefully and exercise their ideas with caution. 

A blogger that I have chosen to watch more closely than others has been the blogger for the Wall Street Journal, David Gaffen.  His web address is: http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/.  One reason I like his blog is the sheer number of posts, in one day he will post up to seven posts and usually has about four or five.  This is good because it makes it easy to see what the biggest topics may be for each sector of the stock market.  Gaffen posts about a variety of subjects that affect the stock market and above all, his historical knowledge of the market is a great resource.  He is not only the Journal’s blogger but he also writes regular articles for the newspaper, as well.  He is truly a busy man and the public gets the return. 

Sometimes, I see his blog quotes posted in other blogs and it reaffirms my faith in him but also reminds me of how carefully I have to choose who has the best advice.  I wouldn’t want someone who looks for the best blogged idea of the day and reposts it with some of their own mumbo-jumbo, perhaps they should just link straight the blog itself instead of writing a whole new one.  No, it is the original ideas that I like and I have found that in some other bloggers too, like the Kirk Report. 

Gaffen’s writing style is very informative and succinct, he does not add too much needless information and what this allows me to do is to search for the proper relating news articles and stock information myself.  By doing this I am able to see what is going on beyond the blog post and make some insight myself, rather than have Gaffen spit out numbers to me so I don’t have to go to through search process which other stock bloggers have a tendency to do.  He does not make recommendations, he only quotes history and although the stock market is curiously unpredictable it is always better to know what has happened so that we could always be prepared for what could happen.

First, I would like to explain the title of this post, “P-Flake”. PageFlakes is a great tool to organize websites, blogs, web searches, and basically anything that you find interesting. The tabs that it creates could be used as a helpful resource to make this one website a one-stop for research sources about a variety of subjects. That’s one reason, after all I have to introduce our subject, the second reason is because I am currently listening to Parliament Funkadelic or “P-Funk”. On a side note, I just realized that Dr. Dre sampled Parliament’s “Getten to Know You” for a D.O.C song called “Whirlwind Pyramid”.

That’s a really far side note because my PageFlake is based around stocks. The type of stocks that I am most interested in are technology stocks, of course there is a lot of general information about the stock market here too. With PageFlakes I can feed websites to certain tabs and have it all presented at one time, and on my front page I have assembled what I think are some useful links to keep anyone updated on the stock market.

http://www.pageflakes.com/sdrivani/21094401

On the right side of the page I have linked to a few blogs that I think are useful. I used to use a blog on the Wall Street Journal’s website but that requires a subscription I realize and it wouldn’t work for me to link it to everybody. I still like that blog but will not be referring to it here, fortunately there are many blogs about the stock market out there. I put them in order from top-to-bottom of which ones I like most. Each blog is good because they give different views on what is actually happening with the market. Additionally, I tried to use bloggers that would range in their techniques and focus. So some are for bulls and some are for bears, some are for day traders and some for people who spend a lot of time keeping up with the market.

In the middle I have listed a few sites that are general news site that cover main events in the market. One that I find pretty interesting is the third one down that tracks all stocks that are expected to be hot for each day of the week. Personally, I like to use this resource to grab the names of some of the companies expected to be hot and take a look at why it may be like that, perhaps there are similar stocks promising similar outputs. The bottom two are from Marketwatch.com and I find myself using the resources on that site more often than any other sites, above those I have Fool.com and CNN Money. Fool is a good resource as it takes the everyday user whether they are stock savvy or not and gives them hints about investing for the future and has many good resources to tell the reader about the stock market. I put CNN money up there because I found that they update their site quite frequently and they will usually only deal with the biggest headlines, so I would like some of those to be on the fore-front.

On the left side of the page I have some things I figured would be a little more interactive. First, there is a quote monitor that will give live graphs on any company that you input the stock symbol. As a default it monitors the DOW on a graph. Underneath that I have a link to MSN Money’s page with news about AMD, yes the chip-manufacturer. Since I am looking mostly at tech stocks I decided to use AMD as a model to help learn about the market and some of the risks involved. For instance, just about a year ago AMD stocks were trading at near 17 dollars and two months ago that number dropped to 5, since then it has been jumping up and down but never going above 7. While this is happening I check the news on AMD to see what is going on with the company to deserve these kinds of numbers. Also, I can click on that link and type in any other company name and get a list of news articles directly related to their company. On the bottom, I left a feed to TheStreet.com’s Video page that has lots of news videos about a variety of different subjects, but they all relate to the market. This is a fun feed and once you start catching some videos you like it is always fun to keep on clicking to see what the next video has to say.

http://www.pageflakes.com/sdrivani/21800468

On the next tab I have a few searches prepared for any of my visitors. Personally, I am not the biggest fan of these features but they do help make any PageFlake become more comprehensive of a research tool for the person on the run. One is a universal search of the web for any subject that the user defines, as a default search I have “treasuries” set up so that people can quickly look at what the internet has to say about the current Treasuries. I also have a blog search that quickly looks up blogs related to “stocks”. Both of these are interesting but of the two I find that the blog search becomes more helpful as there are better ways to search the internet than through a feed on my PageFlake.

http://www.pageflakes.com/sdrivani/21800491

Next, I have my Zotero Bibliography. This section will most likely become the epicenter for notes I like about the stock market and articles I think are interesting. Additionally, every once in a while I will post something up here that will be a little more random and fun. This tab will soon hold much more information than any other tab as it will carry relevant research to the things I will care about, like introduction to stocks and the market of tech stocks.

http://www.pageflakes.com/sdrivani/21800512

Along the way of scanning the internet to find good, viable information there have been a few sites that I will turn to guide me in the right direction. These two sites are Diigo and Del.icio.us, and on my fourth tab I have a feed that have some of my favorite sites that I have found on their website. Some of the links are also feeds on my first page but others are not and this is where any visitor can come to check out links to articles and blog articles that I like. This tab becomes more of a detailed view into what I am studying as it does not just show the websites I like in general, but also allows me to show some of the specifics of the market that I find interesting through unique links. Of course, this site will constantly be updated and there many more links to come. By the way I really recommend the top link about the “Map of the Market” on my Diigo tab.

http://www.pageflakes.com/sdrivani/21800526

My virtual soulmate is the man behind kirkreport.com, although I don’t think he is aware of this. He is a basic model of what I would like to achieve through the stock market. He is able to make a living off the market while constantly learning new things about it through reading, browsing, and writing. Right now he is on vacation but he is very helpful with his information and never afraid to share. I have already learned a lot from him and plan on reading much more to keep on learning.

I am so amazed at how far the internet has come and it is PageFlakes that make me realize this. In the beginning days of the internet the most customizable page was the search results from Yahoo but now I have an entire 5+ tabbed webpage of my own that is completely customizable from top-to-bottom. I don’t think I could have ever seen this coming, and if I could then I also never thought that the internet could be this organized either but I realize now that this is a user’s world on the internet and for the most part, the users are smart and are not trying to burn the house down anymore with virus and complete junk. The good finally outweighs the bad and the internet has become my friend again. In the words of Parliament more or less, “make my flake the P-Flake, I wants to get flaked up”.

-Specs (FoneBooth)