This morning my yahoo finance portfolio page changed format. I like the old version better?

• Answer:

  I agree that the new Yahoo portfolio pages are atrocious. They were launched in Canada a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve watched aghast as they’ve gone from bad to worse. The one bright spot was that I could still open my portfolios on the U.S. site, finance.yahoo.com. This morning I was dismayed to find that I can no longer access the old format on that site: everything’s changed over to the new format. Yahoo has taken a set of fully-functional, reliable, well-presented pages, which did everything I wanted them to do, and - for reasons best understood to Yahoo - turned them into an error-riddled, clutter-filled, difficult-to-load, less-useful and less-versatile suite, with no possibility for the user to return to the old system. I’ve used the ‘Please provide your feedback’ option at the top of the portfolio pages to forward my criticisms to Yahoo. The glitches I’ve come across so far include … - page not loading at all: - page loading but displaying ‘No fields are selected for this view. Please edit the view to select the fields to display’ message; - page loading but displaying blank fields and incorrect ‘last trade’ dates; - takes up to 20 tries to finally load the page I want; - data for some stocks disappears, reappears, half-appears; - calculated fields sometimes remain empty, even when correct holdings data is visible; - ‘total percent gain’ displays absurd figures; - ‘detailed view’ page now has 1-day charts, rather than 1-year, with no option to change the chart; - dividends and yields for all Canadian, (and, now, U.S.), companies have vanished; - a whole assortment of problems with the ‘add/edit holdings’ option, including the loss of the ability to arrange or rearrange the order and grouping of holdings I’ve sent numerous other complaints to Yahoo Finance, related to recent changes in formatting, including … hundreds of redundant currency units splattered all over the place; percentage change expressed as a dollar value; display of varying and inconsistent numbers of decimal places; misleading or contradictory or wrong instructions, etc. etc. etc. None of these has any financial consequence, but they all combine to make the whole bundle appear, in my opinion, sloppy and amateurish, compared with the clarity and conciseness and basic correctness of the old version. As a result of all this, I regret to say I’ve lost confidence in the accuracy of anything that appears in my portfolios. And I’m angry about that: I’ve trusted Yahoo Finance for 15 years to deliver reliable information, and to have that reliability trashed in the haste to roll out a ‘sleek new design’ (Yahoo’s own description) is just infuriating. From what I’ve read today, for some users this ill-advised change has already moved beyond ‘infuriating’ and has taken on the proportions of a personal catastrophe. I would hope that, the more Yahoo hears of the chaos they’ve sown, and the anger the change has caused amongst their users, the more likely they may be to try and fix it. I urge anyone encountering these or other difficulties with the new portfolios to use the ‘Please provide your feedback’ button on the portfolio pages. (Some pages have it: some don’t.) From what I’ve seen emerging over the past month, I imagine there are other nasty surprises lurking in there, just waiting to be discovered. One ironic note: the main advertiser on the Canadian portfolios pages is Canada’s second-largest bank, TD, which generally trades over 1 million shares a day as TD.TO. I am sure they would be less than amused to know that, although their logo is there at the top of each portfolio page, they are now displayed sporadically in my portfolios as ‘No such ticker symbol. Try symbol lookup.’