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!

Over the last month or two, we’ve been working hard to connect some of the web’s best financial bloggers. The result — the Wikinvest Wire — is here. The Wire syndicates related investing content and adds a mini news feed to the bottom of our blog partner’s posts, something like this:

In addition, we include links to related blog posts directly on Wikinvest articles.

The Wire is designed to give you, the reader, even more information about stocks and investing ideas. Readers of Wikinvest Wire partner blogs will be able to find more blog posts about their favorite topics. If they decide they need a bit more of a neutral voice, they can hop over to the one of our related, neutral Wikinvest articles. (The same goes for readers of neutral Wikinvest topics looking for some good ol’ fashioned blogger spin.)

For all of you bloggers out there, the Wire will syndicate your content and make it available on Wikinvest and over 100 Wire partner sites, including Kudlow’s Money Politic$, Random Roger’s Big Picture, Financial Armageddon, and Pharma’s Cutting Edge. Keep an eye out for the Wikinvest Wire on your favorite financial blogs, and if you don’t see it, tell the blogger to get with it and sign up for the Wikinvest Wire!

Coming soon, you’ll even find the Wikinvest Wire on several mainstream media sites…

We’ve been working with the team at Netvibes to build a widget that lets you track your stocks directly from Netvibes.  Enter in a list of stocks you track, and you can get stock quotes, WikiCharts, and some Wikinvest analysis right from your Netvibes homepage.   It’s still in beta, so let us know what features we should add to the widget!

You can add the widget to your Netvibes by clicking here:
http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/294187/wikinvest-stock-widget

Today, Wikinvest launches the web’s first-ever interactive, embeddable stock chart. The charts are as easy to embed as a YouTube video, and your users can click, drag, pan, zoom, and play with no page refresh. And it’s all completely free.

If you’ve ever tried to include a stock chart in your blog, you know it’s a real pain: Press prnt-scrn while you’re on some finance website, paste it into a photo editor, crop the image, save, upload the image to your blog, include it in your post. No longer.

Our charts are zippy and responsive, because we think there’s nothing worse than a slow stock chart. Here’s an example chart, for Yahoo over the last seven months. You’ll also notice wikinvest’s user-generated annotations explaining major price movements:

The charts are fully customizable - you can embed a chart for almost all companies traded on U.S. and international exchanges, as well as commodities traded on CBOT and other exchanges. You can select zoom levels, date ranges, size, and whether or not to display annotations.

You can create your own custom chart at http://www.wikinvest.com/special/Embed_Stock_Chart

We have gotten a lot of positive feedback about the content on our site, but quite a few people expressed interest in seeing more data. A few months later, WikiData was born. We wanted the feature to contribute to the overall effort of providing community members with a cohesive narrative on the companies and industries in which they are interested in investing. This meant that we needed more meaningful data. Revenue and net income have an obvious place in the valuation of companies, but understanding the factors that influence these two omnipresent metrics can be invaluable to investors. For instance, showing that net income has fallen because the price that an airline pays per gallon of fuel has doubled over the last 3 years adds a whole new dimension of value. Providing a mechanism for comparing the fuel costs for multiple airlines adds an another facet by allowing the community to see how industry wide trends can affect individual companies within an industry in different ways. WikiData is still in its infancy, but it is growing rapidly and will eventually cover thousands of companies across more than 100 industries.  Here’s a list of industries that have already been populated with WikiData.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of interest in the Bulls and Bears sections of articles. We originally envisioned the bulls and bears articles developing in ways similar to the neutral articles - one cohesive story woven together in a narrative. Sometimes we found people doing that, but a lot of the time, we saw contributors come in and add a specific bulls or bears reason, and it was often hard to rank the importance of any given reason compared to the others. So we’ve been working on the next iteration of the Bulls/Bears feature which we’re launching next week. There are two big improvements to how it works:

1. You can now create individual Bullish or Bearish reasons for a stock (instead of needing to incorporate them into an article). Of course, like most things on Wikinvest, you can improve an existing reason by editing it. An added bonus: all your editing is done in-line!
2. We want the Wikinvest community to help determine the relative importance of the reasons by voting whether they agree or disagree with the reason.

Check out the new feature by clicking on the Bulls or Bears tab on a company article.

We really should have done this awhile ago, but we heard from enough of you that you wanted to be able to subscribe to a feed of the Daily Angle that we decided to build the feature last week. Over time, we’ll add more things you can subscribe via RSS for all you feed demons - send us feedback if you have any particular requests.

When you contribute to an article, you develop a sense of attachment to the article. It’s not that surprising - you helped make it better, and so you want to watch it grow and see who else is editing the article too. So we’re launching a feature that helps you do that - the Article Tracklist.

We think the Tracklist will help you keep track of what’s changing to the articles you care most about. How does it work? It’s pretty simple, when you edit an article, we’ll give you an option to track changes to the article. If you decide to track changes, we’ll add it to your tracklist, and then we’ll email you when the article changes (unless you opt out). If you ever want to stop tracking an article, you can do that on the article page itself, or manage it on your tracklist settings page.

It’s that sense of passion and ownership that we think helped Wikipedia’s contributor base grow to be as good and as broad as it is, so we’re hoping the Tracklist will help you too. As with all new features we launch, please send us feedback!

We’ve got one more new project that we just added to the How To Contribute page - annotate a WikiChart. As for suggestions on what to annotate, we built some logic to help detect the most significant changes in a stock’s price in the past week. Go check it out, even just browsing the big jumps. For you value investors out there, this could be a way to discover some stocks that have been recently hammered - and for you growth investors, maybe you’ll find some interesting momentum rides (and hopefully the WikiChart annotations will help you figure out what’s actually going on!)

Ever wanted to get involved, but not sure where to start? Well Anton’s been hard at work building a cool new How To Contribute page that we’re launching today. Right now, there are three projects highlighted: Start an article, Fix some grammar, and Define a term. For each project, we’ve tried to suggest some of the most useful places where Wikinvest could be improved or expanded upon, so if you’re looking for somewhere to get involved that will have a big impact, go check it out. We plan on adding more projects over time, so send us your ideas for what else we should include on this page! Over time, we see the page evolving to become a Contributor Central of sorts.