New Yahoo Finance Called ‘Slow,’ Will It Remain Free With Verizon?

More than one user has voiced the opinion that the new Yahoo Finance, the most-read financial website and publication in the world, is “slow.” Leigh Drogen tweeted that the new Yahoo Finance is “interminably slow.” Investor Ideas called the new Yahoo Finance a “mess.”

Luckily for heavy users, Yahoo Finance Canada and Yahoo Finance U.K. are continuing the operate the old sites, which seem to operate much faster than the new U.S. Yahoo Finance.

So glad #Yahoo ( $YHOO) is being bought out – not sure how you feel but #YahooFinance is a mess – not happy with it all -Investorideas.com

— InvestorIdeas.com (@InvestorIdeas) July 28, 2016

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) has agreed to sell its “core business” to Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) for $4.8 billion, as reported by the Financial Post. The deal is expected to close in early 2017. The publication noted that Yahoo “blew” its once dominant position as leader of internet search in the 1990s. The $4.8 billion Verizon is paying for Yahoo is described as “what amounts to a fire price sale” compared to its top valuation of $238 billion at the height of the dot-com bubble.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) even offered $44.6 billion for Yahoo in 2008, almost ten times the current Verizon offer, and was summarily rejected by then-CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang.

Yahoo Finance is reported to have 70 million readers each month.

The Financial Post has speculated that Verizon may have plans on monetizing Yahoo Finance, stating that the day the financial portal’s “inherent value” will be recognized by a competitor is due.

“I expect I’ll be paying for Yahoo Finance in due course,” James West of the Financial Post writes. West also speculates that Yahoo Finance will receive upgrades in function that will bring it into the same realm as the Bloomberg Terminal.

Yahoo Finance contributor David Pogue hosted a walk-through of the new site. In the provided video, the new Yahoo Finance appears to run smoothly and fast, without the slowdowns being reported by users on Twitter, hopefully suggesting that there has been some bug in deployment and that the slow performance situation is a temporary one.

The new Yahoo Finance, running smoothly, does appear to be an appealing destination for financial readers. One big new upgrade is the addition of interactive charts on the quote page that allow users to change time-frames without reloading the page. Readers can quickly pinpoint prices and dates by rolling their mouse pointer over the new interactive Yahoo Finance summary charts.

Another big change in the new Yahoo Finance is how news stories are displayed on the front page. Previously, all users saw the same stories on the Yahoo Finance home page. Now, the site tracks which ticker symbols individuals search for and customizes a news feed to cater to them. Also, instead of listings of individual story titles, “clusters” of related news stories will appear together; clicking on one of the stories results in the other stories opening on the same page for easy access.

There have also been changes to the Yahoo Finance message boards, home to some of the most active, and colorful, discussions on stock trading on the internet. Now renamed “Conversations,” Yahoo Finance appears to be aiming to allow the more useful and relevant comments to rise to the top, while perhaps burying more mundane contributions. Comments can be previewed by clicking the comment icon, located in the upper right hand corner of article preview boxes; this causes the comments to expand below the preview box on the same page.

The new Yahoo Finance site still provides a plethora of statistics and financial data about every single stock traded in the world, the ability to create and customize portfolios to track individual investments, and interactive, full-size charts with just about every popular technical indicator available, the features that made it the top business news destination on the planet.

[Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images]