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Thursday, September 18. 2008Yahoo Finance: Pence, Pounds and Inaccurate Data
Lately Yahoo Finance has been having some serious trouble with UK stock price data.
First of all, there has been a recurring mix-up between pence and pounds in portfolios. UK share price values are normally listed in pence, e.g. a price of 211 means the stock is trading at £2.11 per share. Yahoo Finance manages to report the price correctly as 211p, but then sometimes calculates the value of an online portfolio, and the day's gain based on £211. This effectively multiplies your portfolio value by 100: while perhaps flattering, it is not terribly useful. This has been going on at least since yesterday, and has also happened at least once in the past. Also, during one day this week, the market data reported by Yahoo Finance was different from that reported by e.g. Google Finance and the Financial Times website. Even the FTSE100 index had a huge variation. The explanation seems to be that uk.finance.yahoo.com does not have data for a large portion of Wed Sept 17th intraday data, whereas finance.yahoo.com does. If you're reading this before the following Wednesday, you should be able to see the difference for the 17th on the 5-day intraday charts:
uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=^FTSE&t=5d http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^FTSE#symbol=^FTSE;range=5d compare also to data on Google Finance (it matches finance.yahoo.com): http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1... It would have been useful if uk.finance.yahoo.com displayed a message on the 17th stating they were having data feed problems. It would also help build trust in Yahoo Finance if they fixed their mix-up between pence and pounds once and for all. Always be prepared to check more than one data source if something seems fishy: especially if you're getting share prices from a company whose predominant concern is not market data. 
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