News: Timeliness (2 of 2)

Now that I'm back from the long weekend here is part 2 of my article on news timeliness. Part 1 is here.

For some years now I have used MyYahoo as my main navigation page for markets and stocks. It suits many of my needs despite some shortcomings. I supplement it with a wide variety of other news sources. Right now I'll focus on how MyYahoo meets my criteria for timeliness. If you use it you'll know that they have recently modified their home page design, which both improved and degraded its timeliness performance. That makes it an interesting study for this post. I'll also compare MyYahoo with a few others.

In regard to the market, I listed my priorities in part 1. Let's look at any one particular stock. What I want to know is, the price quote and volume (the basic metrics), what's new, what's recent, and any related news to is relevant to the stock but not about it specifically.

To track stock price and price movement and news I created a variety of portfolios. These are, variously, organized by business sector, how I am monitoring (current holding or with an intent to trade), broad market indices and sector indices (including ETFs and commodity futures).

In the morning, pre-market open in New York and Toronto (9:30 EST/EDT) I want to find any new articles about all the stocks and indices in my portfolios. In the previous version of MyYahoo there was a '*' placed next to each symbol if there was news in the previous 24 hours. This was very helpful. It is no longer there in the new version, much to my dismay. I am now required to touch every symbol or troll through every portfolio and figure it out myself.

When I do touch a symbol or a portfolio within the home page (not navigating to a stock or portfolio page) I am presented with some recent news items, timestamped with minutes, hours or days before present. However if you navigate to a stock page (example) or portfolio page, they continue to give you articles timestamps with the date and time. The latter is what I strongly prefer, and here's why.

Imagine that I touch/open a symbol and it tells me that a company I follow closely or even hold a position issued a press release saying they are pre-announcing upside earnings. This is urgent market-moving news. It then says the news is 15 hours old. This is insufficient. I need to know the exact time of the announcement so that I know: was this after the previous day's market close, during extended-trading hours, and how any price or volume action in response to the news. I now much mentally calculate the time myself or open the article to learn if it contains a better timestamp. For more recent news (where time-before-present is shown in minutes) I must find the base time Yahoo is using, which is elsewhere on the page, and mentally subtract those minutes from that time (not the present time).

At least Yahoo does show detailed timestamps on their stock- and portfolio-specific pages, and I fervently hope they do not change this. Google finance uses these relative timestamps for all their news, which is very inconvenient and one reason I make only limited of use Google finance. One good feature of the new MyYahoo home page is the ability to mouse over a stock to call up the daily price chart; that's nice, even without the volume data.

Stock and index prices are also news. There are 3 types of price: real-time, delayed, and extended hours. Yahoo supports all of them. Unfortunately their real-time and extended hours quotes have degraded to unreliability since they partners with a single quote service (BATS) a few months ago. The reason is that one service sees a fraction of trading activity, resulting in real-time and extended hours quotes that are often missing entirely or indeterminately late for stocks other than those with the highest volume. This is one place where Google surpasses Yahoo nicely, and I use it for that purpose. Unfortunately real-time quotes are only for US stocks; I do not know of any reliable and free real-time quoting services for TSE-listed stocks. If you are a day trader (I'm not) you'll want to subscribe to a good provider of Canadian and US real-time quotes - it is essential news and well worth it.

Let's call up that example Yahoo stock page again. Here we see the news items ordered by timestamp, which is how I like it since I can easily relate the items to price quotes. They also have a rich selection of news sources, including, importantly, common venues for company press releases and financial filings with market regulators. Many of their news feeds are, to my needs, worthless, so I am also happy I can customize them. Another downside of their many feeds is that popular stocks are overflowing with news, making it difficult at times to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Price quotes, which as I mentioned is also news, is continually updated while the page is loaded, both delayed and real-time quotes. Their recently-introduced scrolling stock ticker is useless to me since, like streaming media, I have to sit on my hands and wait for something of interest to appear, which I will not do. In comparison, Google provides a non-scrolling list of recently-quoted stocks on their finance home page, which is updated while the page is loaded.

One curiosity of Yahoo's news feeds is they now have a separate list for blogs. This betrays some confusion on their part as to what is news. It's gets more confusing since many of these blogs items also appear in the news list. Hopefully they'll figure this one out eventually.

Now let's briefly look at Google finance using the same example. As with all Google news properties they use the time before present timestamp method, which I criticized earlier. Their choice of news feeds is small, eschewing many important news items, making it unreliable for stock trading purposes. They do however include some feeds that Yahoo does not, which seems to be particularly better for stocks that trade on overseas markets. Neither Yahoo nor Google uses good Canadian news sources, which makes it dangerous to rely on either for Canadian stocks; we need to supplement both with sources such as Report on Business and the Financial Post, to name two mass media sources.

Google's stock page, like Yahoo's, includes real-time quotes for US markets. These quotes are far better, reflecting the volume and quality of their quotation sources. What they don't do is supply delayed quotes if real-time quotes are available. This is a minor issue since I like to compare real-time and delayed quotes since it gives me a quick indication of how the price is trending.

I have picked on Yahoo and Google since I am most familiar with them and they make suitable examples to illustrate my points about market-related news timeliness. There are many other choices out there, some of which I also use. One gap in my comparison is that I did not include Google's tools for personalizing my finance home page (similar to MyYahoo), though from what I've seen it offers little different from what I discussed above.

Seeking Alpha, which I monitor for stock and market news and analysis, includes some useful news articles and analysis from various blog writers, selected using a modest amount of editorial control. Their list of stocks is, regrettably, not ordered only by time, but also (from what I can glean) by popularity of the articles and of the authors, and the home page shows no timestamp at all. Their sector-specific pages do better in this regard. Market Currents on their home page (and available by RSS feed) and Wall Street Breakfast (also available by email) provide time-sensitive stock and market-moving news during the day and before market open, respectively. Seeking Alpha does include some news on Canadian stocks, from writers who follow Canadian markets, especially (these days) commodities.

Now let's briefly move on to more general news sources.

Even two (vaguely) similar sources of non-urgent, though hopefully important, technology news like Light Reading and Internet News use timestamps differently. On its home page, and on its newsfeeds page, every article has a date. This is not true of Internet News; even the dated box for "Latest News" that show today's date does not match the timestamp for the articles it contains. Before their latest redesign, Internet News did show dates on their home page; now I have no idea of the timeliness of any of their articles, making them a poor source of news.

Mainstream publications, especially the online properties of newspapers, do better. Look at the home pages of The Globe and Mail and the New York Times. At the least the top item in every category has a timestamp, often including time of day, and within categories articles are generally ordered by time. This expands in the same way when you navigate to a category like Report on Business. This is helpful. However, since their redesign (and removal of the annoying 'please pay us' pages) the Economist has eschewed timestamps entirely on their home page. This is disappointing, and certainly irritating. Just how old is their news? I can't tell within a lot of clicking around, which I will not do.

Closer to home there's the Ottawa Citizen. They opt for ordering by time within category (though not always), and their news feed on the right used the elapsed time before present format. Not ideal, but sufficient for a general source of local news. The CBC is an oddity. Especially for local news, apparently news doesn't happen when they're not in the office; you often have to wait until the following business day for news to appear, and even their RSS feed is severely delayed. CBC online is not a good source of timely news.

That's all I want to say about timeliness. When I next talk about news the subject will be relevance.