As we mentioned in our last post, Wikinvest now features lots of new data features and interesting visualizations on our Data Central and Financial Statement (Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Cash Flow Statement) pages.  With all of this new information on Wikinvest, though, we realized we’d need a better way to navigate through it all.

Meet Bling — our new financial metric search engine. Have you ever tried searching the web for GE’s 2004 market cap? Or Bank of America’s Pre-Tax Income trend for the past 5 years?  Maybe you have a presentation and you need to find Sony’s revenue for the past 14 years?  Now, you can use Bling to search for and satisfy any and all of these data needs.

For example, search for “GE 2004 market cap” or “BAC Pre-Tax Income” or “Sony Revenue” and you’ll get the following, respectively:

• General Electric’s 2004 Market Cap
  
• Bank of America’s Pre-Tax Income
  
• Sony’s Revenue
  

Note: Bling searches will also work in the standard Wikinvest search bar.

These new data pages show how a particular metric has changed over the past several years and quarters as well as an assessment of whether this is a High, Low, or Average value compared to the rest of the industry.  Using the sidebar, you can jump to another year using the Time Machine or jump to a similar metric page for one of the company’s competitors.  If you want to read more about what a metric means, just use the Dictionary in the right sidebar to find out how it’s used, how it’s calculated, and a few examples of how this information is used.

As usual, all of our charts on these data pages are available for you to embed on your blogs.  Happy searching and feel free to let us know what you think of the new stuff!