The financial sector might be the most important when it comes to breaking news. A beta release of AOL Money & Finance shows AOL wants to ride on that keen edge of coverage, and take on Internet financial news leader Yahoo Finance.

AOL has placed a lot more information within easy on-screen reach of the financial news visitor. In the beta site, real-time headlines from news, trade publications, blogs, and other sources may be accessed from a tabbed interface within a stock’s page.

Like Yahoo does, AOL’s beta has a left sidebar of links to stock related details like business profiles, earnings analysis, and various financials. An interactive chart allows the viewer to see ranges of a stock’s ups and downs over a given period of time.

As a beta product, AOL Money & Finance still has some little kinks to work out. A section under the stock price that allows people to set alerts based on a stock doing something like hitting a high or low refused to recognize a valid AOL login, despite repeated tries and a password change.

In the coming months, AOL expects to launch richer datasets for public and private companies, and for mutual funds, in AOL Money & Finance. Technical charting and a new platform for portfolios should be in the mix too.

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