Hello Yahoo! Finance - What if?
November 30, 2007 – 5:23 amA thank you to Penelope Trunk is in order for mentioning and linking to me in her Yahoo! Finance article. I hope that those of you who have come here, well, there, enjoy your visit :)
While I did use to work as a financial adviser assistant doing mutual fund analysis for clients, I won’t pretend to know tons about finance anymore. Instead, I will share with you all a tool I’ve learned to use because of all my social media marketing endeavors. Maybe this will be a brilliant tool that helps some of you track financial information, and maybe it will be worthless to others. It’s all a matter of how you choose to embrace it, I suppose.
Using Google Alert to receive reports of the financial information you want to know about.
I know Yahoo! Finance provides news articles on various information about companies that you can invest in (at least I’m pretty sure I saw that last time I looked). But in this case, I am talking about getting comprehensive information either as it happens or in a daily report delivered to your e-mail (or RSS). Want to know how Apple stock is doing? Create an alert based on your search terms to receive a daily report about it in your e-mail. It’s pretty simple to do, really. If you happen to be a Bloglines user, then I also have a process that converts this e-mail into an RSS feed for you :) Here’s the process:
Note: If you don’t use RSS and would rather just have it sent to you in an e-mail, skip Step 1 and go straight to step 2.
Step 1: Setting Up Bloglines
- Goto bloglines
- Goto your Account Info (click Account)
- Click the “Blog Settings” link
- Type whatever you want your username to be, then click save
- On your left hand side (where all your blogs are listed) click the “Create E-mail Subscription” link.
- Type the name of the subscription & whatever folder you want it to go to. Eg: “nathan snell” and folder “nathan snell”.
- Click the “Create E-mail Subscription” button
Now that page will reload and give you an e-mail for that subscription. Copy the e-mail, which will look something like usernameyoutyped.randomnumbers
Step 2: Setting Up Google Alerts
Unfortunately you cannot edit your existing alerts, you will have to re-create them from Google Alerts with the new e-mail.
- Goto Google Alerts (signup if you haven’t yet)
- In the Search Terms field enter in the financial search term you want to track. For example: “Google stock increase”. Keep in mind, if you want the exact phrase, quotes are necessary.
- Set Type to comprehensive.
- Set How Often to what ever you prefer. The options are pretty straight forward.
- Important: If you don’t want to read this in Bloglines (the RSS reader) then for the e-mail simply enter the e-mail you wish to receive the updates at. If you do want to read this in bloglines, enter the e-mail that Bloglines gave you in step 1.
- Click Create Alert.
Google Alerts now requires confirmation e-mails for the alert. This is a bit of a hassle but also a great way to make sure you’re receiving updates. If you’re doing the Bloglines step then once you’ve created your new alert, do the following. Otherwise, you’re done!
- Goto Bloglines
- Look for your e-mail subscription name in your feed list (mine would be nathan snell).
- Click on your e-mail subscription
- Confirm the Google Alert
That’s it! Now you will receive Google Alert reports on whatever search terms you create an alert for. Let me know if you have any questions!
