There’s a ton of buzz about Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) replacing CEO Terry Semel with Jerry Yang. But in what seems to be becoming a trend for Yahoo, the market is yawning in the face of the news. We saw similar action in May, when news came out that Yahoo had discussions with Microsoft (MSFT) about a potential partnership and/or buyout. That news caused a huge gap up in Yahoo which was quickly faded. The stock finally closed that gap (and then some) a few weeks later. We’re seeing a similar market response on the current CEO change news. This is one heavy stock and clearly its due to institutions unloading into all the hype. When the ducks quack, feed them…

A longer-term chart shows just how tough the resistance from last summer’s gap down is. This is a classic case of trapped longs becoming overhead supply (resistance).

I totally agree with “The Fly on the Wall’s” take on the source of Yahoo’s problems:

What best symbolizes what went wrong at Yahoo Inc (NASDAQ: YHOO)? How it handled the rise of financial blogging.

When looking up stock quotes on Yahoo Finance, there is a financial blog section — but it only publishes blogs from Seeking Alpha and no one else. Why? Because Terry Semel, Yahoo’s ousted CEO, applied the old-boys media network model to Internet programming — partner with large and well-established media companies and split up the profits. Did this work? No…

Some VP from Yahoo approached me about 3 years ago telling me how they were going to integrate financial blogs into Yahoo Finance. Their plan back then was to have bloggers move their blogs inside of Yahoo’s semi-walled garden. (In other words, they wanted to serve ads against our content.) I never heard anything else about that until about a year later when I emailed and asked what was up. I was then told that they were going to build a directory of financial blogs within Yahoo Finance. That’s something that would take all of 30 minutes for somebody to build, yet two years later there’s still nothing.

Last year Yahoo’s own Jeremy Zawodny told us of the stagnation of Yahoo Finance:

It makes me sad because I end up thinking about how Yahoo! Finance has stagnated for a long time. It never really recovered from the pain of the dotcom crash. So many of my old Finance coworkers have either left the company or moved on to other groups (several moved into Search last year). Heck, I encouraged many of them to get out!

There was a lack of leadership and, even more importantly, a serious LACK OF VISION. It really disappointed me.

It makes me sad because virtually all of the new/innovative/cool features in Google Finance are things we talked about YEARS ago. Many of them I’d lobbied for repeatedly. Some were even prototyped.

  • A ticker search that doesn’t suck.
  • Charts with overlays for news events.
  • Blog integration.
  • Featuring discussions more prominently.
  • RSS support.

Who’s gonna get “credit” for all that now?

I’m not gonna name names (virtually none of them are around anymore anyway), but there was a real lack of leadership in Finance for long time and it really sucked the life out of the group. Users noticed. Finance employees noticed. Other Yahoos noticed. We all knew it. And, frankly, I was glad to be out when I moved on (and the next time and the time after that).

Over the years since leaving, I’ve made pleas to numerous people in the Finance organization: engineers, product managers, engineering managers, editorial, and so on–veteran employees and newbies alike.

Push into community more. Get more into personal finance, not just the high-end Wall Street stuff. Adopt blogging and syndication. Get around to those chart improvements we’d talked about. Fix up the message boards. (Remind me to tell the story of how they freaked out when I snuck RSS feeds out back in 2002. It took another TWO YEARS before someone re-did that work and finally shipped it. But the RSS train had already left the station by that time.)

And don’t even get me started on their search engine not indexing my site… [-x