For many years, I have used My Yahoo as my start page. It kept up with stock prices, sports scores, news, weather, and Yahoo mail. They kept changing the design of it, but I kept trying to keep it looking the same as it ever did, which is heavily text focused and in three columns and minimal ads. I could copy and paste the stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet in order to update all of the prices of my stocks and mutual funds. A week or two ago they put in a banner that they were discontinuing it in favor a new improved page, which of course is terrible. It had none of what made My Yahoo great. Today My Yahoo actually went away.
The first problem I had was how to get stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet which I do at least a few times a week and sometimes every day, around 6 PM when the mutual fund prices would post. Yahoo Finance already has my My Yahoo portfolio, but you can’t copy and paste the text because the stocks are now little widgets instead of text. I went looking for web portals like My Yahoo and found one called ProtoPage that was supposed to be decent, but it didn’t do everything that My Yahoo did and it didn’t seem to let you set up a portfolio of stocks and funds. Somehow I found out that Google Sheets, the spreadsheet web app, has a function that pulls over all kinds of information about a given stock or fund into a spreadsheet. So that would be really easy to copy and paste from anyway. I set that up, which took a little doing for gold and silver spot prices, since that isnt built in to the googlefinance() function. I even thought maybe I could convert my investment spreadsheet from Excel to Sheets. But then tonight I noticed that the mutual fund closing prices weren’t coming over. They still haven’t come over and it almost midnight. That’s not very helpful. In doing this, I also learned about the Google Finance page, which has some neat things going for it, similar to Yahoo Finance. But it didn’t have updated mutual fund prices either. I thought maybe Microsoft would have a finance page and they do via MSN. It lets you put in a portfolio and they were updated at least by 9 PM when I started messing with it, plus I could copy and paste all the quotes at once to dump them into my spreadsheet (from the manage list screen).
MSN might not be a bad portal replacement for My Yahoo either. It has weather at least. While it lets you enter your favorite sports teams, it still shows you a bunch of scores of random teams. I will still need to check my Yahoo Mail though. So what I’ve done is now bookmarked a bunch of different pages that do most of the things separately that My Yahoo did all at once: sports, headlines, weather, stocks. I can’t believe Yahoo would blow this and nobody is ready to take their place.