ResearchBuzz

More and more resources that I would imagine as regular Web sites are now getting Wiki-ized. Wikinvest, at http://www.wikinvest.com/, provides stock information as Wiki. It’s not comprehensive (looks like about 275 companies are listed), but makes good use of the format.

From the front page you can browse company names or concepts (concepts, for the most part, appear to be industries.), but you can also do a search. As I noted, the stock list is not complete — IAC and LOOK do not have articles here. I did a search for YHOO and did get an article page. The Yahoo Page had an overview of the company, several charts related to its growth, usage, and revenue, and a list of related articles and stocks.

An interesting use of the Wiki format is the “Bulls & Bears” section. Bulls can list/edit ways that Yahoo is good investment, while Bears can do the opposite. Stock charts can be annotated with news/releases to show events that have had an impact on the stock price.

The concept pages are similar to the individual stock pages, except of course they don’t include stock charts. However they do include places for bullish and bearish comments and charts relevant to that industry. Not all industries are available, either — I didn’t see anything for mobile advertising, for example.

Editing the wiki requires absolutely no registration — IP addresses will be recorded for anonymous edits. To get a sense of what’s available here you can browse the listed companies or check out the concepts.

Google has announced some new features at its Google Finance property, available at http://finance.google.com/ . As you might expect, Google Finance allows you track stocks, get business information, etc. It’s in beta, as usual.

And watch videos. One of the improvements announced for Google Finance is the addition of finance-related videos, including content from CBS, Forbes, and First Business. There are just a few at the bottom of the page, and then you’re prompted to link directly to Google Video for a search for Finance. (Did I miss that Google Video is now providing RSS feeds for search results? Look to the right of the search results count.)

Google Finance has also extended its stock charts. Stocks now show prices from extended hour markets. You have to set that, though, when you’re looking at a chart — it’s not a default view. Charts run from one-day view to one-year view.

The third item was the ability to drag-and-drop portfolio stocks to put them in an order other than alphabetical, but I couldn’t get that to work. I even tried it on the Google homepage.

Despite that third item I really like Google Finance; I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with it. I like the autocompletion of stock symbols, the integration of news points onto charts, the detailed news listings, the instant refresh of charts, the uncluttered interface. Going to spend more time over here!

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Ahh.. the concept of tag clouds applied to specific information. What fun. Though I think in this case the clouds are going to have to be a bit more specific before it’s particularly useful.

Stock Cloud (available at http://www.stockcloud.net/ ; in beta) is just what it sounds like, it’s a “tag cloud” that consists entirely of stock symbols. The larger the symbol, the more press releases it has issued. The press wire being used in generating the cloud is Market Wire; a good wire but it would be amazing to see this with a wire that has monster traffic — Business Wire, maybe?

Anyway, click on a symbol and you’ll get a page of information. The page will tell you the number of releases encountered, provide a chart with stock information, list business partners and contact information, and provide a list and links with the latest press releases concerning that company. (The “About” page for Stock Cloud says “We’ve been a bit less then successful extracting business partnership data” so I don’t know how far I’d trust those business partnership listings.)

What a great idea; unfortunately it just left me hungry for more. I would love to see the following things:

1) More wires! If I were PR Newswire I would jump at the chance to provide press releases for a site like this — it’s a unique interface to what’s often a huge hard-to-browse mass of information.

2) An attempt to discover timing — A lot of the stock symbols I looked at ended up being penny or low-price stocks. If I could discover patterns in press release timing and then map them against the stock’s performance, I think I would find interesting data points.

3) The ability to filter by time — There’s no indication on the front page of the timeframe for the cloud. It would be interesting to see how a cloud of a day, week, month, etc. changes. (Comparing cloud snapshots over a series of weeks would be awesome.)

4) The ability to filter by sector — A cloud that has any ol’ symbol is missing a bit of context. How about the ability to show clouds by sector? Or by geographical area? Or search for a keyword and then generate a cloud?

A very cool site. Unfortunately it’s so cool I can think about a hundred more things I’d want to do with it!