Yahoo Finance Launches Investor Sentiment
I was doing my daily read over at The Big Picture yesterday and found Barry talking about how Yahoo Finance launched a new investor sentiment tool. What it basically tells is what the overall community of everyone that lists their sentiment for stock picks thinks about those stocks. As a result you get a list of bullish and bearish picks from the whole community which you can see below:
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Though I find this pretty interesting, I personally don’t think it will be regarded that highly. Why? The Yahoo Finance message boards already have enough knuckleheads as it is, and most sentiments are just pumping or bashing.
If you head over to MarketWatch, they have a page dedicated to breaking down the opinions of Yahoo Finance and you can predict if stocks will close up or down the next day.
To take this information seriously I would find a way to go through and pick out the best writers and their picks and just follow their opinion. Hmm… I don’t know about you but that sounds a whole lot like Covestor.com to me.
When you really break this down it is simply another sign that market data is well on the move of being condensed and used as a tool to pick out the best picks from a whole community base. More and more web 2.0 stock picking communities are emerging, but should they all be seen as credible? In the end your opinion is what matters most, but I say take Yahoo Finance bashers and pumpers with a grain of salt.
Excellent post. I’ve never found much use from those kinds of ratings sites. Taking the aggregate of all opinions just seems counterproductive. Plus, the larger the sample size, the closer you would expect to approximate the market as a whole. At that point, just buy a broad index fund (VTI, for example).
The other problem with stock picks like this is that there’s no context for your overall situation. Just because Krispy Kreme is a BUY doesn’t mean it’s a buy for you.
What I’ve hoped that we’ve been able to provide with SteamStreet (http://www.steamstreet.com) is a place to collaborate with people you know and trust to help make the best decisions. And we organize around your portfolio, instead of just individual stock picks. We’re still building, but I hope everyone takes a look and lets us know how we’re doing. Since the review on this site, we’ve made some big improvements.
I hjad not considered this idea after reading “CAPS” from over at the fool. The aggregate of all sentiments = the market. Maybe this is the dawn of a new form of Technical Investing, we read the caps ratings then follow the pump, then be ready to take the dump before everyone else. It can be called Toilet technicals……
sounds like fun
I agree with the fact that this is unlikely to very useful. The Yahoo message boards have just gone downhill by the month lately, with almost nothing good coming out of them anymore. This will likely not be looked upon very favorably.
Same as Jon, I don’t really agree or use such things. Worth a try maybe later.