Yahoo
Yahoo! is not limited to providing just Forex and currency information and news. This huge sprawling conglomerate of a portal covers everything from all areas of finance (e.g. mortgages and shares, to pensions and property) to general interests and hobbies such as cars and horoscopes.
A lot of people like having Yahoo! as their main home page whenever they start up their computer, and it isn’t really surprising. It’s also a small wonder they have a currency converter within their many pages – but it might come as a surprise to know just how good that currency converter is.
Take me to the site! How do I get there?
You should know the Yahoo! address by now – it’s www.yahoo.com. And if you need to go direct to the currency converter they have available for your use, just head for http://finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter.
What does the site offer?
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 page on Yahoo!, you can expect to find three things brought together:
1. Published figures – for example the stocks and shares pages have current prices, big risers and 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 – but it always makes great reading.
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 too, so you will know how recent the data is.
As mentioned before Yahoo! also covers pretty much everything of interest to anyone in the world. Up to the minute news stories are very in depth and at the end of each one there are a number of related searches you are prompted to take. This reminds you of the fact that Yahoo! is of course a major search engine as well. But to think that its search engine is the main part of Yahoo! is to miss out on plenty more.
What is their currency converter like?
Using the currency converter is simplicity itself. The converter primes you with the phrase “I want to convert” so 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. So in this case do not insert 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 you should choose is the currency you wish to convert from. You do this by selecting one of the one hundred and fifty currencies and precious metals available in the first drop-down list. All of these are listed with their three letter international currency code, i.e. GBP = UK£, for ease of reference.
Finally you need to select which currency you wish to convert your initial amount into. You do this by selecting a second currency from the drop-down list marked “into”. As before there are one hundred and fifty currencies and precious metals to choose from and once again they all have their three letter international currency code.
When you are done click on the button marked “convert” and Yahoo! will display the results immediately. Included in the 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, you will see 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 twelve months. The graph is large, properly annotated and exceptionally easy to read. You can change the graph to display the same rates over the last five years, two years, three months, five 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.
Supposing I need some help and advice – can they help me with that?
It’s so tiny you might miss it, but in the top right hand corner of the website you will see a small ‘help’ link. The good thing about this is that if you are in the finance section of the site – as you will be if you are using the currency converter – you will be taken into the relevant section of their help pages.
From there you will also see an option to contact them if you have any further problems or questions. Don’t forget this applies to any part of using the site, and not just to any queries you might have about the converter. There are three email contacts given, but you’ll need the top one.
In conclusion
All in all Yahoo! is a mine of information, gathered in page which contain 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.
Rating (out of five stars)
We can’t give Yahoo! anything except five out of five – mostly for the sheer amount of content they give you on their site, and also for the sheer simplicity of their currency converter. Some sites strive to make theirs overly complicated, but as you will see here there is simply no need for that at all. Thanks, Yahoo!
- 5 Stars
Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter