The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

Well, currently most of the Finance Channel pages are using copies of exactly the same pages the UK uses. But in a separate directory for the US and we're going through them one at a time to Americanize them not only in spelling and word usage, but in look, feel, and functionality that is more useful not only to American eyes, but usage patterns.

For example, day-trading is a much bigger deal here than it is there. As is stock ownership in general. In the US, people from all walks of life and with widely varying levels of experience and expertise are "playing the market".

Also, I think it only fair to point out that I always qualify my opinion of the ADVFN homepage with "To my American eyes". It really does work in the UK. Take a look at the Alexa ranking. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/advfn.com

It's the 400th most popular site among UK internet users. For a Finance site, that's HUGE. The stock market is a comparatively small area of special interest to internet users, especially when compared to dating, cars, motorcycles, or even antique tractors.

I've forced myself past my revulsion at the homepage and dug in a little bit, and it's no wonder they're big among internet sites there and enjoy total dominance of the Finance side of things there. Yes, we have no viable competitors there.

I liken it to this huge Snap-On tool cabinet I recently got. Bigger than your average truck and all of my tools are in it now that my farmhand has moved them all.

The analogy stays intact for a little while.

Since he put the tools where he thought it made the most sense, it's always difficult for me to find anything, but when I do it's a "Eureka!" moment.

ADVFN's website is the same way. Dig in and there's some seriously cool chit there! The Time and Sales I mentioned earlier is a good example. I use it all the time because it's superior to even what's available at my online brokerages. And will become even better (for my personal use) when we move on to that page and Americanize it.

Which also means Matt and I are in a pretty cool position. We've got a crew of geeks at our disposal who have written some really cool stuff for monitoring and researching companies. The same crew whose stuff crushed all competitors in the UK makes new versions of the same stuff so it's to our liking. On the Quotes page, we're making sure it has what we need in a snapshot and only what we need, but also some cool stuff few others are doing or in some cases, nobody is doing.

For example, market cap is dynamic rather than based on yesterday's close. One of our competitors is doing this. Something we'll soon be doing that I haven't seen anywhere else is dynamic dividend yield. I mostly buy dividend payers and if one of them has gotten cheaper, I don't want to have to use my calculator to figure out what the dividend yield is now. Soon, our Quotes page will update this info based on the displayed (whether delayed or realtime) price. Much handier for me. And we'll be doing a neat thing with relative volume that I've seen done elsewhere, but we're going to make it more informative and useful.

When I refer to our competitors, I'm no longer referring to Yahoo Finance's message boards. I'm referring to Yahoo Finance, period. We'll make sure we're still the best when it comes to message boards (and simplicity is SO important there), but we're really putting a lot of work into making the Finance Channel stuff palatable to Americans and the best that can be found. Especially for the price.