WebProNews

AOL will go head to head with Yahoo Finance as well as competition from Google and Microsoft, with all of these big Internet players looking for valuable financial news readers. The Blogging Stocks and Blogging Buyouts websites from AOL arrived to complement AOL Money with the kind of breaking coverage people crave from their online resources. Resource Shelf pointed out the oncoming revamp from AOL for its financial pages.

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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