An Unpaid Review Of YCharts.com
posted on: 2009-12-27 11:07:36 by Soo-Young
tags: misc

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Introduction
The other day I was bumbling around Twitter and came across the profile for YCharts.com, a stock charting and research website. YCharts is a clean, well designed, and helpful website, and as a web developer and investing geek, I can really appreciate that. I haven't been asked or paid to write this blog post, I simply agree with what they're doing and hope to point other investors in their direction. In this blog post, I'll show how to use YCharts and talk about it's main strengths and weaknesses.

Researching Stocks With YCharts
You can start researching a stock by simply typing in its symbol in the search field at the top of the site. Pretty standard procedure. After typing in a stock symbol, you'll be forwarded to a page that looks like this:


At the top there is a detailed quote for the stock, and below are 9 small charts that are broken up into three categories: Valuation, Growth & Profitability, and Fundamentals. I haven't come across a tool with this much information summarized in one little page. Under each category heading, you have the option to add or remove charts depending on what you're interested in researching. When you click the link to add charts, a small menu slides down using Javascript, which is a nice little feature that the web developer in me can really appreciate. It's slick, you should try it out for yourself.

I've visited the site a few times in the past week, and it seems to remember what boxes I checked which makes it easy to customize once, and revisit over and over. I like how it automatically remembers these things without requiring me to create a user account or anything like that. Is the site easy to use? Absolutely!


You can also chart multiple stocks at once by separating stock symbols with a "vs" in the search field. If you're narrowing down the stocks you want to invest in, or researching the competition of a particular stock, this feature is very helpful.


Where Does YCharts Shine?
Definitely the best part about YCharts is that it gives you a lot of information in one little snapshot. Instead of scouring tables of figures and ratios, you get a nice clean set of charts that visualize the data on a dime. You can customize which charts show up in each snapshot to best suit your strategy and research goals. YCharts also has a very clean and easy to use interface and has very few advertisements. YCharts also makes good use of current web technologies like javascript and AJAX to make features that are actually useful, and not just eye candy.

Where Is YCharts Lacking?
Now you may be wondering if I have any problems with YCharts, and I do. YCharts does a great job of putting together a quick snapshot of any particular stock, but getting more detailed charts is a bit of an issue. Currently, the only option for chart time periods are 3 years, 5 years, and all. The charting intervals are currently not customizable, and are locked to chart everything by quarter. This is great if you have a long term investment strategy, but if you have a more short term investing strategy, then smaller intervals would definitely be a nice feature. I do understand that YCharts is more for fundamental research, which is more long term, but it would still be nice to have the option of adjusting the chart point intervals. If YCharts allowed for more fine tuned chart customization, it would be a more robust research tool.


Conclusion
The bottom line is that YCharts is a very useful research tool. Their charts are limited, so YCharts won't be your one stop research shop, but YCharts is still worth adding to your research regimen. The main reason why YCharts is so useful is because it condenses so much information into just one page, and it's easy enough to use for investors of any skill level. I would also recommend reading their blog, which shows samples of how to quickly research stocks using their site. I really hope that YCharts grows in popularity as it is a smartly designed, and hugely helpful website. It's only 6 months old, so I'm sure many new features and upgrades are just around the corner.