Which discussion board is best for Stocks Discussion – ADVFN?

Update [3/8/2013]:

There is a new platform out there which solves these problems. Readers should give it a shot: The TradeStreet. Lot of big shots in trading have joined the platform and traders are actively discussing various ideas and collaborating. You can see people’s success ratios and returns over past. Highly recommended to everyone out there.

I use three major message boards commonly utilized among the daily investors. I will dedicate this post to highlight the positives and negatives of each board.

Google Stocks Discussion Board

Google message board (http://finance.google.com) is great for its load speed and the ability to provide quotes on virtually any stock. It provides great search functionality within the boards, obviously thanks to its all time great search algorithm.

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One big negative about the Google Finance boards is their spam! I am actually surprised by the amount of spam it receives on a daily basis. What can be more annoying than the fact that its the same guys every day. Doesn’t google have the brains to block them from their boards? Or does Google really believe in Freedom of Speech, no matter how crap it is!! Google finance used to a great resource for serious discussion about various stocks but now it just seems like spam-hole which no one cares about but spammers.

Apart from that another negative about Google finance is inaccuracy of their information regarding company’s financials etc. Most of the time their information is either outdated or just flat out incomplete!

Yahoo Finance Discussion Boards

Yahoo fiance scores much better than Google for a change Information is nicely organized into various categories such as financials, SEC filings, various reports from analysts, key stats about the company. Most of this information is also available in Google finance but Yahoo info is more accurate I believe.

Primary reason for Yahoo info being more accurate is probably in the fact that Google is a mashed up version of info without much human input and Yahoo relies a lot manual editing of info as needed which makes it much more valuable.

Yahoo also has been able to cut out almost ALL spam, making their message boards much more meaningful. I recently stopped going to Google finance altogether just because of that fact.

One problem with Yahoo boards seems to be its less control over who is posting the messages. If you follow through the conversations, you will realize lot of people are just there to either bash or pump the stock without really the ability to provide proof to validate their claims.

ADVFN Message Boards

ADVFN boards are very similar to Yahoo with regards to the quality because just like Yahoo, ADVFN has lot of manual intervention it appears. ADVFN has the problem lot of ads showing up which can be avoided by nominal monthly fee. ADVFN adds lot more value to the discussion because several of their members are paying for the service and hence are lot more serious. If you are really in the market to make money, what is 30-40$ to get  the accurate and in-time information?

For more information on ADVFN, please visit: ADVFN

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