Wordpress Plugin: Stock Tooltip

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I often make  blog posts about stock picks and pans.  As such I often link out the stock ticker to Yahoo! Finance.   I found an excellent Wordpress plugin that will handle this for me.  In fact it creates a “tool tip” style stock chart when you hover over the ticker.

It is quite easy to install.

1. Simply download it from Andy Hill’s website.
2. Activate it in your plugins console.
3. Go to Options and put in the ticker symbols you want to translate to the stock.

Now step 3, they give examples such as “google => GOOG”.   Everytime you have “google” in your blog entry it will create a tooltip for it.  I didn’t like this behavior.  If I’m talking about Google Gears I don’t necessarily want to create a stock tooltip.  Instead I put in “GOOG => GOOG”.   When I’m talking about a company in the context of its stock I will always put in the ticker symbol.  I feel this is a cleaner way to go.

The only downside with this is that you have to go manually put in all the tickers/stocks that you would like to be converted into tooltips.  Not a big problem for me.  I usually stick to my trifecta of Google [GOOG], Apple [AAPL], and Valero [VLO].   If the plugin is working as expected, you should see the tooltip over the ticker symbols if you hover over.  If you click on the tooltip you’ll be directed to the Yahoo! Finance page for the stock.