Yahoo finance, pros and cons

Yahoo! Finance has gained popularity for being user-friendly and full of useful information. Here are some pros and cons to using Yahoo! Finance for your financial needs.

Advantages:
- Provides a lot of information in an easy to use format.
- A lot of useful links.
- Easy to navigate.
- Can create as many portfolios as you want and you can put as many stocks into the portfolio as you want. Because the site is fast it is a snap to update your portfolio throughout the day. Four different views for your portfolios:
o Basic: which includes Symbol, Name, Last Trade (With Time), Last Trade (Price Only), Change and Percent, Change, Volume, and Average Daily Volume.
o Fundamentals: Earnings/Share, P/E Ratio, Dividend Pay Date, Ex-Dividend Date, Dividend/Share, Dividend Yield, and Market Capitalization.
o Details: Bid, Ask, Previous Close, Open, Day's Range, and 52-week Range
o Portfolios: Shares Owned, Price Paid, Commission, Holdings Value, Day's Value Change, Holdings Gain and Percent, Holdings Gain, Trade Date, Annualized Gain, High Limit, Low Limit, Notes.
- Can add outside accounts to your home portal page

- You can personalize your home finance page and keep track of finance information in other countries.
- Can get financial information from mobile devices not just from your home computer. This way if you are on your way somewhere and you just remembered about a stock you wanted to sell you can sign into Yahoo! Finance from your cell phone.
- Everything on Yahoo! Finance is free except for a few services. If you do not already have online bill pay you can use Yahoo! Finance to pay your bills online. Yahoo! Finance also offers loan quotes for cars, car insurance, and mortgages. You can also prepare your taxes through Yahoo! Finance using H and R Block.
- You can download you portfolio into a spreadsheet format by turning it into an Excel file.
- Has a financial glossary where an average user can look up terms for finance, accounting and economics that you may not understand.
Disadvantages:
- Message boards can be a waste of time. People who are responding on the message boards can be antagonistic and sometimes will try to pick fights to help back up the stock they are invested in. The message boards also contain a lot of spam and the language is not always censored so it is not always professional.
- News is not very in depth. The Yahoo!Finance News section is not very in depth, it is usually a lot of "fluff" that is not very relevant to items you might be looking for. Your best news is usually obtained under the quotes section.
- Stock research is limited. If you are trying to find the perfect stock to invest in your search functions are pretty limited. While you can lookup almost any information on a specific company Yahoo!Finance, unlike a personal stock broker, will not give you any information on whether they think it is a good investment, even for a fee.
- Does not offer real time quotes. When trying to manage your investments it is pretty important to receive real time quotes, but for some reason Yahoo!Finance is fifteen minutes behind Nasdaq and twenty minutes behind all other quotes.
- The site only allows you to search for stocks, if you want to search for anything else that is finance related you need to go back to Yahoo! to do a search.
- Website is not very appealing. The website uses the traditional colors that are associated with Yahoo! which can be hard on your eyes. Besides that the layout is not very appealing or easy to find things. It seems that everything is crammed onto one page.