Yahoo!
Yahoo! are not limited to providing just forex and currency. Their huge sprawling conglomerate of a portal covers everything from all areas of finance (e.g. mortgages, to shares, to pensions and property) to general interests and hobbies such as cars and horoscopes. There is too much content to comment on every aspect of what Yahoo! does, but in simple terms, if you go to any specific topic's page on Yahoo!, you can expect to find 3 things brought together:
1. Published figures – e.g. the stocks and shares pages have: current prices, big risers, big fallers
2. Links to news articles relating to the big news stories of the day so that you can (hopefully) see why certain specific things are rising or falling
3. Links to forums where members of the general public discuss specific stocks, shares, current events and the impact various sets of circumstances may have on individual price movements. As this is contributed by the general public it ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.
All in all Yahoo! is a mine of information, branching-off the page that contains all the current data in a very pleasingly logical way.
As a criticism, you can generally find both better quantity and quality of news stories by searching Google news, but as a place that aggregates so much information together, Yahoo! takes some beating.
In the case of forex you're greeted with a table of cross rates, for instant reference. Not only is the data displayed, but the actual time that the rates were trading is displayed to, so you can know exactly how recent the data is.
Using the converter is simplicity itself. The converter primes you with the phrase “I want to convert” So that your brain automatically follows the logic of what to do.
The first box is a number field. So, if you want to convert £300 Pounds GBP, you would insert 300 into this box. Always insert the value being converted without the relevant currency symbol (i.e. In this case do not inset the “£”) - just the raw numeric amount only.
If you leave the value at 1 you will get the straight ex-rate between the two currencies you select.
The next thing that you should chose is the currency that you wish to convert from. You do this by selecting one of the 150 currencies and precious metals available in the first drop-down list. All are listed with their 3 letter international currency code (e.g. GBP = UK£) for ease of reference.
Finally you need to select which currency you wish to convert into. You do this by selecting a second currency from the drop-down list marked “Into”. As before there are 150 currencies and precious metals to choose from and all have their 3 letter international currency code.
When you are done click on the button marked “convert” and Yahoo! will display the results immediately.
Included in the display results are the amount in the start currency, the amount in the destination currency, and the exchange rate used for the transaction.
Not only that, the Bid and Ask prices are listed for spot trader's reference.
Below the output results is a graph of the exchange rate requested over the last 12 months. The graph is large and properly annotated and easy to read. You can change the graph to display the same rates over the last 5 years, 2 years, 3 months, 5 days or just the last day.
All in all Yahoo! is a great forex trader's resource and the currency conversion tool is easy to use and offers a lot of data with little prompting.
Rating (out of 5 stars):
- 4 Stars
Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/currency?u