Track Your Investments

Track Your Investments

Yahoo! Finance can help you track the performance of your stocks, bonds, or mutual funds.

Financial information that was once available only to brokers and Wall Street insiders is now available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Yahoo! Finance collects much of the information available about stocks, bonds, and mutual funds into a single site, and it's a fantastic resource for do-it-yourself investors. As financial guru Andrew Tobias put it, "You should manage your own money. No one is going to care about it as much as you." Managing your own investments means there's more work for you, but the online tools at Yahoo! Finance can help you get a picture of where your investments stand.

Get Quotes and News

Yahoo! Finance is well known for providing stock quotes and business news. (Even Yahoo! competitor Google sends people to Yahoo! Finance for more detailed information when they look up a ticker symbol.) Simply type a ticker symbol into the form at the top of the page at Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com) to see a detailed page with the current trading price (delayed 20 minutes) and information about the stock's activity for the day. Figure shows the stock detail page for Yahoo's symbol (YHOO).

Details about YHOO at Yahoo! Finance

Running down the left side of the page, you'll find links to detailed information about the stock, including a message board for discussing the stock with other Yahoo! users, lists of company insiders who have sold stock recently, opinions on the stock from dozens of industry analysts, SEC filings, and a history of the stock performance.

Feeling lost in all of the financial technical jargon? Yahoo! Finance provides a detailed glossary of financial terms at http://biz.yahoo.com/f/g.

Just below the numbers is a list of any current headlines about the company from about 50 different news sources, and they're all enabled by default. You can click the Edit link in the headlines title to add or remove news sources from the headlines.

Yahoo! Finance also offers RSS feeds for company news, so you can monitor media mentions of your favorite companies in My Yahoo! or your preferred newsreader. To put together an RSS feed, visit the feed generator at http://biz.yahoo.com/rss.html. From there, you can enter one or more stock symbols, and Yahoo! will assemble the proper URL. If you're a do-it-yourself URL builder, you can assemble a URL in this format:

http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=insertstocksymbol(s)

To watch more than one company, separate the stock symbols with commas. So an RSS feed combining news for Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, and eBay looks like this:

http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=yhoo,amzn,msft,ebay

In addition to the daily charts and numbers for U.S. stocks, Yahoo! Finance offers some other interesting information:

After-hours quotes

Even when the markets close for the day, Yahoo! gathers information about after-hours trading and displays it on the stock's detail page.

Stock options

Yahoo! offers information about stock options that you can look up via the company's stock symbol. Click Options on the left side of a stock's detail page. You can also add options to your portfolio by using the symbols on the options page.

International stock exchanges

You can access markets around the world at http://biz.yahoo.com/ifc. The Yahoo! International Finance Center includes links to localized Yahoo! Finance pages and financial facts about hundreds of countries.

Build a Portfolio

At its most basic, a portfolio is a way to watch a group of your favorite stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. Say you have an employee 401(k) plan invested in some mutual funds, a personal retirement account, and maybe some stocks at a brokerage. All of these would have their own statements at various web sites, with numerous logins to remember. If you wanted to track their progress on a regular basis, you'd need to visit all of the sites. With Yahoo! Finance, you can pull financial data together from various sources and turn it into a one-stop site for tracking your net worth.

You can set up a portfolio by clicking the Create link next to the Portfolios heading in the upper-left corner of the Yahoo! Finance page (http://finance.yahoo.com). Or you can browse to http://edit.finance.yahoo.com/eh and click the "Track a symbol watch list" link. Give your group of stocks a name, choose the currency you'd like to see the stocks in (U.S. Dollar is the default), and then add stock ticker symbols to the form, separated by spaces.

If you don't know the symbol for a company or mutual fund you'd like to track, look it up at http://finance.yahoo.com/l.

For example, you could add YHOO AMZN MSFT EBAY to the form to track the stock prices of Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, and EBay.

Click Finished, and you can view your portfolio at any time by clicking the Quotes link in the upper-right corner of the Yahoo! Finance home page. The basic view of your portfolio includes the ticker symbol, last trade, change, and volume, as shown in Figure.

A simple stock portfolio at Yahoo! Finance

If you use My Yahoo! to track information, you can also watch your portfolios there. Click Add Content at the top of the page at http://my.yahoo.com and then click Yahoo! Services on the list of choices. Find Stock Portfolios on the list and click the Add button. You should find your stock watch list as a content box on your My Yahoo! page, as shown in Figure.

A stock portfolio on My Yahoo!

You can also track your portfolio via a cell phone with a web connection. Point your phone to http://mobile.yahoo.com and choose Finance My Portfolios. You'll see a list of your stocks, just like you'd find on the web site. Figure shows the example portfolio on Yahoo! Mobile.

A stock portfolio on Yahoo! Mobile

As you browse the web site, you'll see Set Alert links in various places. Click the link to set an alert for a particular stock that can be sent to an email address, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, or a cell phone. With an alert set [Hack #50], you can be sure you'll be notified if there are any wild swings in the stocks you're watching.

To take your saved portfolios a step further, you can also add information such as the number of shares you own of each stock and the price you purchased them at. Click the Edit link next to the Quotes heading on the Yahoo! Finance page and scroll down to Advanced Features. From here, you can choose which personalized information you'd like to add.

Yahoo! Finance pages are not encrypted and could be subject to eavesdropping. If you consider your personal financial holdings confidential, do not add the number of shares, purchase price, or any personally identifiable information to your Yahoo! portfolios.

Once you've added the number of shares you own, you can click the Performance link above the basic view of your portfolio to see the value of your holdings. If you included your purchase price, the performance page will also tell you how much you've gained or lost since buying each stock in the portfolio.

Yahoo! doesn't offer brokerage services such as buying and selling stocks, so you'll always need to update your portfolio by hand after you've made any trades.