Yahoo Finance getting in on the real-time game

who will buy Yahoo Finance?

Thanks to the ever-vigilant Felix Salmon (he’s a hawk, actually) who tweeted a job opening at Yahoo Finance.

From the job posting:

We’re looking for an experienced, versatile, high-motor blog editor specializing in business news targeted at both sophisticated and mass-market audiences. The successful candidate will write and report his or her own stories, as well as hire and manage a small team of professional bloggers to curate and create original content for the largest audience on the Web. This person will set the strategy for and oversee the publication of financial blog content for programming on Yahoo! Finance, the Yahoo! network and consumption on the Web at-large.

The move in context

So, like Forbes which recently announced its intentions and strategy to unload its Investopedia property and embark on a more real-time blogging/curating model, Yahoo Finance is moving towards its own real-time financial content aggregation model.  Whether you agree with Fobes’ decision or not (and Paul Carr most certainly doesn’t calling it the “death of a thousand hacks”), Yahoo Finance’s move is different.

Forbes and Forbes.com have always been about content.  Forbes has always employed professional editors in a mixed outside-inside model for content, blending its own staff reporters with content contributed from asset managers and thought-leaders in their field.  Never known for its ability to break stories, Forbes really was about highlighting interesting opinions from experts in their verticals.

But Yahoo is different than Forbes

Yahoo Finance is a different animal.  While Yahoo Finance hasn’t changed much in the past 10 years (much to my chagrin), this move changes its tack.  Remember, Yahoo Finance, as a giant financial portal, has always been about aggregation of both data and information, taking feeds from tens of information and content providers.  By the way, check out ValueCruncher’s CEO’s, Mark Clare, great breakdown of Yahoo Finance, its past, its business and potential to disrupt providers like Bloomberg in the future.

Yahoo Finance is still the 800-lb gorilla in online finance as evidenced by its majority of traffic in the online finance category (see graph to the right). What’s made Yahoo Finance so strong was an early-mover advantage and a site that just worked quickly and had enough information on it to act as a proxy for a research terminal (Why Google Finance still sucks at its news offering is beyond me).  With a deal it consummated with Seeking Alpha in 2007, Y! Finance dipped its big toe into the wild and woolly financial blogosphere.  Now, with the job posting mentioned above, it appears that Yahoo Finance is changing its strategy.

How this may play out

This is a risky strategy.  In essence, the financial portal is pitting itself opposite all its content partners — many of whom pay the portal for the firehose of traffic it throws off.   I’d be less willing to partner with a company that is introducing a product to compete directly with mine.  And this is a common problem with channel marketing for any platform — and Yahoo Finance is certainly a finance platform — in that the platform, given where it sits in the whole matrix of supply-demand, can always just mimic other offerings that are working.  This is the fear of developing any tools that work on Twitter of Facebook – that the social media platform can quickly just put you out of business.

Such is the life now for Yahoo Finance content partners.  If (and this is a big IF) the Yahoo Finance offering is a combination of serious, professional editorial oversight with smart curation with a good understanding of what’s important to Y! Finance readers (a-la Abnormal Returns) with thought-evoking and decision-supporting articles, Yahoo Finance can evolve itself from a financial resource to a must-see, must-read site for both individual and institutional investors.

What if it doesn’t work

If, however, Yahoo Finance doesn’t do this right and takes a half-assed, half-baked approach, the results could be pretty serious: both for the company/site and for content, in general.  As Steve Lubetkin argued with me yesterday in the comments on PRNewser’s article Is Steve Rubel the Future of Forbes, aggregation using free, contributed — outside content — risks turning everything into an “echo chamber” where the biggest voices (those voices appearing everywhere) drown out newer, more creative content by people who take content creation really seriously.  If Yahoo Finance’s own content offering isn’t managed well, it could cause other partners to leave the site, taking their money and their contribution to the estimated few hundred million dollars in annual revenue Yahoo Finance generated.

What this all  means for aggregation sites?  We’ll have to see how it plays out.   There’s most likely room for multiple aggregators if they end up focusing on slightly different readerships (a retirement investors reads different content than a day trader).

Top Warren Buffett resources

Warren Buffett is an investing legend to almost 3 generations now.  Here’s the best way to learn from and about Warren Buffett.

About Warren Buffett

Wikipedia: Warren Buffett: everything you wanted to know about Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (book): written by Alice Schroeder, former director at Morgan Stanley, hand-picked Buffett biographer

Buffett on Forbes’ Richest People list

About Buffett’s investment strategies

Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder letters: Go to the source for inside understanding of how Buffett looks at his own business and investing in others

MarketFolly: Buffett’s portfolio: Monitor the ins-and-outs of holdings in Buffett’s investment portfolio

Buffettology: the previously unexplained techniques that have made Warren Buffett the world’s most famous investor (book): Perhaps the best of the Buffett books, Buffettology is a great resource for investors to learn how Buffett values companies, complete with formulas

Buffett Beyond Value: Why Warren Buffett Looks to Growth and Management When Investing (book): With Buffett Beyond Value, you’ll learn that, contrary to popular belief, Warren Buffett is not a pure value investor, but a unique thinker who combines the principles of both value and growth investing strategies.

Warren Buffett Resources

CNBC channel on Buffett

GuruFocus’ tracking of Buffett’s investment holdings

Validea’s Buffett Portfolio: Screening for Buffett-like stocks and performance

Videos


Buffett takes heat on ownership of credit rating agencies.


Warren Buffett speaks to a class of MBA students.

Top 6 resources for piggyback investing

Piggyback investing is the art/science of building portfolios based on mimicking the stock picks of some of the best superinvestors — asset spyingmanagers who have exhibited long term market-beating results.

Early research (check out some here) has shown that investors can achieve similar returns by piggybacking as the can by investing directly with the asset managers themselves (something only a very wealthy investor can do).

Here are a few of the best resources I’ve found for piggyback investing:

  1. AlphaClone: My personal favorite (read my review of the site as a cure to investor insanity).  Beyond just tracking the portfolio moves of top asset managers around the world, AlphaClone has built a full-blown research platform that allows investors to test piggybacking strategies to optimize returns.
  2. MarketFolly: Great site with ongoing commentary on what guru investors are buying and selling and why.  You can get investor letters as well as some analysis on the stocks themselves that investors are buying.
  3. Manual of Ideas: You should be reading this as well as subscribing to the premium newsletters.  Great stuff here that analyzes top investors’ moves and puts together screens and portfolios of some of the best picks of superinvestors like Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman, and Joel Greenblatt.
  4. Covestor and kaching: Two leading investment communities where both professionals and arm-chair portfolio managers manage real (Covestor) and virtual (kaching) portfolios where outside investors can use to generate new ideas.
  5. GuruFocus: Interesting free and premium offerings that track top guru buys as well as insider transactions.  Can download results into spreadsheets for more analysis.
  6. HedgeFundLetters: This site links out to the monthly/quarterly/yearly letters top hedge funds and other asset managers send to their investors.  Reading the wisdom of guru investors — what they’re buying and why — and how they describe the investment process in general is an amazing educational resource.

Anything I missed?  Have your own favorite piggyback investing resource? Let me know in the comments below.

Additional Resources