Yahoo! announced in a press release that many long-awaited upgrades were soon to appear on Yahoo! Finance, albeit some only in beta form.

Stock Charts - Google showed us that they could beat Yahoo! to the punch with their Ajaxy charting tools. Unfortunately for Google, the financial users are a pragmatic bunch and need more than the "kewl" factor to make them switch as indicated by Yahoo! continuing to hold the financial users' interest. According to this recent announcement, Y! Finance users will soon be enjoying new kewl dynamic charting tools which take advantage of Flash and DHTML . It pays to be patient, eh?

Message boards - Yahoo! has been upgrading its message boards throughout its many sites for many months now. Yahoo! Finance has seen some of these changes already. Easier search, threaded views and now a rating system to quickly locate quality contributors to the conversation.

Y! Finance Badge - Y! Finance badges for your website have been out in beta for a while now but according to this announcement are out of beta and available for general consumption.

Y! Finance Videos - Y! has made huge advances recently in its ability to serve video regardless of where it is hosted. This is spreading to various Y! sites including Y! Finance. Today's announcement points out that video from several news sources are being made available via the Y! Finance site.

The new stock charts are being evasive. Hopefully we will see them in action soon even if only on a beta version of the Y! Finance site.

UPDATE: The new chart tools are being rolled out to small percentage of users for now. This is much as the ! home page revision was revealed to only a few users for their feedback before opening it up to all Y! home page visitors. More Y! Finance users can expect to see the new chart tools as time goes by.