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Friday, November 20, 2009 05:05 PM
Our new market spotlight tool
Scott Adams
You may notice a big improvement to the Globe Investor homepage today -- the large market charting tool you see under the main navigation at the top of the page has been redeveloped.
The original tool had technical problems and was far too slow, but our developers have solved the problems and are close to finishing other work that will make the site much faster as well. They have been very busy during the past few months improving the backend infrastructure and software code of the site, as well as developing new features, such as company financial data. More is on the way soon and making the site faster is a continual project for us.
Link to this post
Friday, November 20, 2009 08:53 AM
Deeper financial data, live now
Scott Adams
We’re closing in the next major phase of the project to reinvent Globe Investor here at the Globe and Mail.
We’re putting the final touches on new company financial pages that will help you drill into company results more quickly and deeply than ever before. We’ve quietly rolled out the annual data already (many thanks to those of you who noticed — it does make us feel good to know that you are out there keeping a close eye on the site) and there’s much more on the way.
Sunday, August 2, 2009 03:40 PM
Globe Investor reporters get personal on Twitter
Roma Luciw
Since we revamped and improved our personal finance site this spring, I’ve been twittering on a near-daily basis through @globemoney. The tweets give you instant updates on our personal finance stories, columns, and blogs, as well as other fun things I stumble across on the web. Last week I twittered about frugal fashion week, five must-haves for people looking to flip a house and tips for choosing the right kind of life insurance.
Twitter allows me to keep afloat on what is happening in the world of personal finance and provides me with another venue for communicating with some of our most dedicated readers. Through Twitter I found out about new financial literacy programs, reached out to fellow tweeters about their experiences with mortgage renewals and stumbled across interesting discussions on money-related subjects.
One of the benefits of social networks like Twitter is that they allow reporters and editors to emerge from the newsroom and reach out in a way that is more personal. Globe Investor also has a selection of investment, stock market and personal finance tweeters – all of whom communicate their pithy wisdom in 140 characters or less.
In addition to @globemoney, there is the main @globeinvestor headline news feed. Fans of David Berman’s daily stock market updates can find him at @marketblog, while Andrew Willis’s timely updates on developments on Bay Street come out through @streetwiseBlog. Investment reporter Steve Ladurantaye has taken a different approach with Twitter, combining personal with the professional updates on @ladurantaye. So if you want some snippets of baby rearing and rock and roll mixed in with your investment updates, he’s your guy.
Any comments or questions, please email me at rluciw@globeandmail.com. Or you can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/globemoney.
Monday, July 13, 2009 07:12 AM
Finding your favorite columnist
Scott Adams
One of the complaints we've had with the beta site is that it's sometimes hard for people to find their favorite columnists. It's certainly a fair point, especially with search functionality being so erratic (yes, this is something we also hope to fix in the short to near-term).
What we've tried to do now is to make the Investment Ideas page a home for columnists. Down the left-hand side you'll find the most recent columns that have run on the site, and below that a list of our regular columnists.
Another hint, when you are reading a column you can click on the columnist name to get to a page of all their most recent columns with a bio. Same goes with clicking on the column name in the banner at the top of the page beside the words Globe Investor Beta.
One other hint on the site, if you're looking for more news on the homepage, click on 'View more top stories' under the stack of Top Stories. There you will get a history of all the stories that appeared under Top Stories for the past couple days or more.
Hope this helps.
Friday, July 10, 2009 07:27 PM
Hot or cold, commodities have a big impact on your money
Pierre Javad
It’s difficult for a Canadian investor to ignore the commodities market. At last count, resource stocks made up nearly half the market capitalization of the S&P/TSX Composite Index.
With that in mind, we’ve significantly changed how we present information on the industry. For starters, we’ve included it in the main navigation bar.
Then we brought in a new data feed for futures trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, COMEX and Chicago Board of Trade. Prices are updated every minute, nearly 24 hours a day. We even went so far as developing our own logic for rolling to the next front-month contract. It all comes down to getting you the most accurate data.
In the table at the top of the page, you get a snapshot the major commodity prices in energy, precious metals, base metals and agriculture sectors.
We are also trying to weave stock and commodity price data more tightly together. The layers in the middle of the page have three tables. The first shows you the price activity for all of the commodities in each sector. The second, exactly which companies’ fortunes are changing based on that data and in the third, all of the latest news and press releases influencing those moves.
For mutual fund investors, we’re crunching the day’s data to highlight the gainers and losers in the precious metals and natural resources categories.
There are still two things we’re working on. Want to keep an eye on commodities in your Watchlist or add them to a chart? That’s another reason why we switched data feeds, and we’re working on adding that functionality soon.
Check out the new commodities section. Let us know what you think by posting a comment below or sending your suggestions to pjavad@globeandmail.com.
Thursday, June 25, 2009 09:36 AM
Your money's new best friend
Roma Luciw
Over the last several weeks, we have ramped up our personal finance coverage and, as of this week, you can find it alongside the other core areas of Globe Investor in the navigation bar or by bookmarking http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finance/ .
With the economy, labour and stock markets struggling, how to handle money - your money - has become one of the hottest topics out there. Readers have demonstrated a huge appetite for personal finance stories the last couple weeks. Stories and online discussion such as how to hand down the family cottage and a good time to lock in your home mortgage have proven very popular.
My name is Roma Luciw and I'll be the web editor as well as one of the writers for this section. I encourage you to come and explore our site, including Monday's story on couples who fight about money and the online discussion Tuesday at noon ET.
Who am I? I began my reporting career at the Victoria Times Colonist and started with the Globe & Mail in 2001, writing for and editing the fledgling Globe and Mail website.
As we mentioned on a previous blog, I am just one of a number of people dedicated to bringing you top-notch personal finance coverage. When Globe Investor launched its beta site in April we added Chaya Cooperberg as a personal finance blogger and Angela Self of the Smart Cookies as a weekly columnist. Many of you are likely already familiar with our veteran personal finance columnist Rob Carrick and our tax expert Tim Cestnick
As the summer advances, we'll be adding tools and calculators to the personal finance hub. Let us know what you think of our expanded coverage. Pass along any comments, questions, suggestions or story ideas to rluciw@globeandmail.com. I am also on twitter @globemoney.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 12:29 PM
Where is that loonie?
Sonali Verma
The loonie's been on a tear in recent weeks. No wonder, then, that we've been getting emails every day asking where you can find a quote for that surging Canadian dollar.
Here's the easiest way to find a chart and a quote: Look for the tab on the Market Spotlight box that says Dollar.
If you look at the Market Spotlight box, you'll see the names of different stock indexes as well as oil on the tabs across the top. There's an orange chevron to the right of these that helps you scroll through even more tabs.
If you click on the chevron, you can see the tabs for gold and the elusive dollar as well.
And when you click on the dollar tab, it should pull up a quote for the Canadian dollar against the U.S. dollar as well as a chart. You can customize the date range on the graph to see how the loonie's done over the past day, the past five days and the past year.
You can also check out our How to use Market Spotlight tutorial for more information on how it works, and what you can do with it.
We're also working on a design for a more sophisticated quote page, but there are still a few bugs to be ironed out. To give you an idea of what's to come, here's an early design reference for the Currencies section under markets, including Canadian and U.S. quotes for the major currencies and a full cross table.
At the moment, we are still concentrating on the foundation of the Beta site and addressing the performance issues that you've no doubt noticed, but new pages like the one above and a lot of other new features are on their way.
Let us know what you think. Drop us a line in the comments below or via email at globeinvestor@globeandmail.com.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 02:28 PM
Improved personal finance hub
Scott Adams
If you haven't seen it yet, we've started building out our personal finance section. You can find it under the Ideas tab in the navigation bar or by clicking here. We’re making a commitment to improving our coverage of the area. Want to know how to set up your household finances, structure your taxes or deal with your credit card debt? Look no further.
Roma Luciw, just back from maternity leave, will be the web editor as well as one of the writers for the section. You can see the kind of stories and topics she'll be covering in the cottage succession story and online discussion. Roma began her reporting career covering traffic accidents and bake sales for the Victoria Times Colonist. She started with the Globe & Mail in 2001, writing for and editing the fledgling globeandmail.com site. If you have story ideas you can reach her at rluciw@globeandmail.com . She is also on twitter @romaluch.
Roma joins a growing team covering personal finance. When we launched the beta site in April we added Chaya Cooperberg as a personal finance blogger and Angela Self of the Smart Cookies as a weekly columnist. Together with our veteran personal finance columnist Rob Carrick and our tax expert Tim Cestnick, we think we have a strong team.
We'll be adding tools and calculators to the personal finance hub and making more improvements to the beta site as a whole as the summer moves along. Next up also is our new commodities hub.
Monday, May 25, 2009 11:42 PM
Keep up with the markets, 140 characters at a time
Gordon Edall
In addition to getting the new Globe Investor beta site of the ground over the last few weeks, we've been trying to make sure we are reaching out to more people in more ways. We have a lot of new tools to help us do that and I wanted to touch on a few of those this week.
If you don't have much time to stay on top of the markets, the new Globe Investor Twitter feed may be your new best friend - follow us and you won't miss a bit of the news that moving the markets.
If you want a little more depth and some context for the news, you can also follow David Berman's Market Blog as well as Andrew Willis's Streetwise Blog on Twitter. Streetwise contributor Boyd Erman, Globe Investor writer Steve Ladurantaye, personal finance writer Roma Luciw, Home Cents blogger Chaya Cooperberg and the deputy editor (me) are all there as well.
Friday, May 22, 2009 12:29 PM
New newsletter for our readers
Pierre Javad
Last Friday we rolled out the first member in Globe Investor’s revamped newsletter lineup. In the weekly Personal Finance Reader, Rob Carrick pulls together the most relevant ideas on banking, savings, debt and retirement from websites and blogs around the web. In addition to the roundup, the newsletter contains links to some of the most popular features in the weekend Report on Business, Me & My Money and Financial Facelift.
We’ve received a great number of compliments on the first edition. Thanks for all of the encouraging messages. We’re glad it is the informative read you expect from Globe Investor in a concise format. There have been a couple of reports of a rendering glitch for those of you using Internet Explorer 7. It’s being fixed and we’re testing the patch before we release the update.
Why not sign up to receive this must-read from Canada’s best personal finance columnist? To subscribe you’ll need to have a member account and be logged in order to sign up. If you are, you can sign up for the newsletter now. Just scroll to the bottom of the page. Select Personal Finance Reader under Newsletters. Click Save Changes.
For everyone without a member account, it’s free. Click Register at the very top of any page and follow the instructions. Once you’re registered, click Profile and then click Alerts to sign up for the newsletters you want.
Globe Investor Contributors
John Stackhouse
John Stackhouse is the editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail. He was previously the editor of the Report on Business as well as the newspaper's national editor, foreign editor, correspondent at large, and for seven years, from 1992 to 1999, he was the development issues correspondent based in New Delhi.
Scott Adams
Scott Adams is the investment editor for Report On Business and Globe Investor. He has been a business journalist for more than 10 years, worked as an associate analyst on Bay Street and has been The Globe and Mail Investment Editor since spring 2007.
Pierre Javad
Pierre Javad is the digital product specialist for Globe Investor. He has been a contributor to eight Report on Business magazine Top 1000 issues and has worked on feature enhancements and launches of the Globe’s finance websites for over five years.
Gordon Edall
Gordon Edall is the deputy investment editor for Report On Business and Globe Investor. Prior to joining The Globe and Mail in fall 2006, he worked for BNN producing TV shows including Squeezeplay and Market Call.
Sonali Verma
Sonali Verma has worked as a reporter, editor and producer of business news at Reuters, CNBC and Bloomberg News since 1995. Before moving to Toronto, she worked in New Delhi, London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Manila. She has been an editor at the Report on Business since July 2008.
Roma Luciw
Roma Luciw began her reporting career at the Victoria Times Colonist. In 2001, she started writing for and editing business news at the fledgling globeandmail.com site. She has been the reporter and web editor of the Globe Investor personal finance site since May of 2009.
