The Yahoo! Finance Message Boards Team announced some new functionality in the beta version.

We don't talk finance here much (but they sure do over at bloggingstocks) so a little background might be useful before getting to the topic at hand.
If you have an interest in a stock or mutual fund, search for its name or symbol (e.g. YHOO) either in Y! Search or in the Y! Finance Search.


Follow the "Financial Information" link and you'll get a detailed overview of the stock/fund.


On the left-side navigation panel, under News & Info, click on "Message Board" and you'll be taken to a public discussion regarding this stock/fund. It is here you will find the emotion behind the trading.

This brings us back to the topic at hand... The beta version of the Message Boards has been out since early April and provides for much needed thread tracking, message ratings (off-topic/awful, good, excellent, etc.), filtering out poorly rated messages (me likey!), RSS feeds from the board(s) you want to follow and better message searching.

There was a release of new beta functionality recently. With this new release comes

• Advanced search capabilities enable limiting your search to a specific stock/fund, date range and poster/author.
• Apply a profanity filter to your search results (these are often emotional sentiments).
• Navigation to adjacent topics no longer requires scrolling to the bottom of the page. Quickly jump to the next or previous topic using static links at the top of th page.
• And, most importantly, if you stumble across a post which intrigues you, you can quickly see all other posts by the same person by using the "View Messages" link. Unfortunately, these search results do not show you the ratings for each post so you can't see at-a-glance the overall quality of an individual poster. Instead you'll need to click through each post.
  

The Yahoo! Finance Message Boards do have their trolls but they have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than, say, the Yahoo! News Message Boards which only serve as magnets for undesirables, keeping them so busy spitting on each other there that they aren't inflicting their drivel on the other user-contributed Yahoo! properties. What I'm trying to say is, use the Y! Finance Message Boards. There's some quality conversation and perspectives there.