I've found their financial page to be one of the best free offerings around. Some of the data and its update frequency are additional monthly fees with my brokerage.
Yes! Back in the day (around 2012-2015) I did a bunch of regressions in R using YF data to land on my target portfolio value tilt. Certainly not something anyone has to do, but interesting for a finance nerd.
Oh man. I forgot about Yahoo Finance. We had a class project in Econ in college circa 2005 that involved making market predictions based on Yahoo Finance with a couple points of your grade based on how well you did.
Google Finance is a much nicer looking product in terms of design, but the data it has is pretty weak.
Yahoo Finance has much more detailed financials for a whole bunch of asset classes. For ETFs it has detailed performance data. For equities, you can get (and download) data on stuff like dividend history, stock splits.
Just see for yourself. Pick a few assets and compare. It's night and day how much more detailed YF data is. The only real thing that GF has going for it is in Google Sheets you can put =GOOGLEFINANCE("symbol") and get the current price of that asset (you can also give it a second argument for other attributes, but the data on offer is pretty limited compared to YF).
I was unaware this existed but when comparing a ticker on both platforms Yahoo offers a lot more information and metrics, it's nice that there's no click bait news articles being shown for every ticker you look up on Google Finance though.
Google Finance looks nicer on the surface, but doesn't have nearly as much data. It doesn't have options for example. I feel like Google had a great opportunity with finance and let it wither like so many other things.
I remember having a made up portfolio on Google finance where I pretended to invest money in the stock market by pretending to buy a d sell shares and record my performance.
It was terrible I lost a lot of imaginary money. Made me realize I'm not good at picking stocks. Anyway the point is that portfolio no longer exists on Google Finance. I think they rewrote the code behind Google finance at least twice.
Anecdotally, I still use finance.yahoo.com because it's one of the best free sites out there for financial data. I also use fantasy.yahoo.com for some fantasy sports leagues I'm in.
For those unaware, Yahoo Japan is a separate company, with a somewhat parallel history.
It was a joint venture owned 50% by SoftBank. It went public as a separate company, and in 2018 took back all its ownership from the former Yahoo. In 2021, it merged with Line (also owned by SoftBank,) and bought the Japanese Trademark to Yahoo.
I used Yahoo about twice. Then, a couple of months later, I tried this new thing called google and I don't remember visiting Yahoo again. So I'm equally surprised that they still exist after all those years.
"Yahoo! Japan" is a different company altogether from this Yahoo though. They were founded by the original Yahoo! and SoftBank.
After the original Yahoo was mostly acquired by Verizon, the remains of it were spun into a company of its own "Altaba", which was later acquired by SoftBank and then made a part of Z-Holdings a joint venture of SoftBank and the Korean Naver Corporation.
And just recently it was announced that the individual companies of Z-Holdings will be merged into one big company.
The Japanese internet business is quite the rabbit hole! (Disclaimer, I work for LINE Corp, another subsidiary of Z-Holdings)
2 of my family members are still using Yahoo. I haven’t heard any issues from them for several years. Compared to Gmail which you can expect a downtime any month from now.
