Trader Mike

Speaking of Yahoo and Google’s finance pages (in the previous post), I’ve been meaning to post about a quick way to search either site. Firefox’s search bar has long been one of my most used features. I added a few search engines to the default list back in the day but I hadn’t kept up on the hundreds of search engine add-ins (OpenSearch plugins) that have been built over the years. A few weeks ago I realized that there were engines for Google Finance and Yahoo Finance. Here’s a shot of my search engine list:

After adding both engines all I need to …

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 …

I just saw this on the Official Google Blog:

here’s what’s new at Google Finance:A new homepage design which lets you see currency information, sector performance for the U.S. market, and a listing of top market movers along with the relevant and important news of the day.A Top Movers section highlighting most active companies by price, market cap, volume, and popularity as determined by our own Google Trends.More comprehensive charts, which now display up to 40 years of data for U.S. stocks.Richer portfolio capabilities that let you import other online portfolios to Google Finance, use different views and add transactions to make it easier to track …

I’ve been meaning to post my top referrers for a while now. Last September, when I did that survey I was surprised at how many of my regular readers originally found my site via another blog. I had assumed that most people found this site via Google… and with good reason when you look at how many referrals I’ve had from oh mighty GOOG. But it seems that most of those search engine folks either don’t come back or they don’t like to fill out surveys. In any event, this is a token of appreciation for all the traffic & link love.

What I find interesting is how low Yahoo search is in the list. For some reason, they refuse to index my site. The only hits I get from Yahoo search are from people searching for “tradermike.net”. That in and of itself trips me out. If you already know my domain name why in the world are you searching for it just to get here? What kills me about Yahoo though is that you can do a search for “Trader Mike” and my site is nowhere to be found, yet most of the sites that come up in the results are linking to me. WTF? Is it any wonder why their stock chart is as ugly as it is?

Edit: I had to stick these graphs in as well. Talk about long tail… there were 1,590 referrers in the traffic report I used. From #674 on sent 5 or less visitors.

And here’s a pie chart (click to enlarge):

Here are the top 55 referrers from April 1, 2006 through September 30, 2006 (I had to go to 55 to sneak my man Howard in). Take a look through the list and pay a visit to any blogs you’re not familiar with.

Hot on the heels of Yahoo Finance’s new features announcement, Google Finance has some of its own:

And in response to these requests, we’re pleased to announce a few small new features, including a stock-market module on the business section of Google News and support for multiple portfolios. We’ve also added an auto-suggest feature to the search box to help you find the companies and funds you’re searching for more quickly, as well as an auto-refresh feature that keeps the data on your portfolio page current. In addition, rumor has it that a lot of users like to have the choice of reading message boards in reverse chronological order. So we’ve made sure our discussion …