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Google Finance Beta Released
t3rmin4t0r writes "Forbes.com is reporting that google has rolled out a finance site. The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together. The Forbes article mentions that "Google had previously provided financial information through a framed page featuring information from Yahoo! Finance, Fool.com, MSN Money Central and ClearStation " and that the information is collected from various sources rather than a direct feed from the stock exchanges, making it probably less useful for buy & sell decisions.
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Hey, the storied search engine has a plain starting screen too. Where this is cool is when you get into the detail page for individual stocks. Check out the price graph, which is much richer than what Yahoo has -- you can hover for the closing price on specific days, click and drag to move around in the history, and zoom however you like.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
"seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together"
Yeah, in the same way google.com looks "quickly hacked together"
Just for fun I pulled up my 401k investments. The time line was nice, and the information was good. But I figured I'd check out the 401k's investment since I started investing in it. I clicked the 3yr link at the top of the chart and it made a pretty cool re-size effect, and the top bar changed too. Looks like you can click and drag either side of the total time line bar to change the zoom to any time period for the fund.
Pretty neat, and definitely not 'quickly hacked together'
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That's probably because Google thinks its own index knows more about companies than folks like Hoovers do. Most search results for "wipro vivek paul" suggest that Paul is still with the company.
Google's search engine falls short in other ways, too. They think my employer is still at the same office it was at three years ago, for example, because all the copycat linkfarm sites they index say so.
For more information, click here.
Enter a stock and see the page that comes up. Despite the fact it uses Flash it is actually nicely implemented. Drag the viewing range of the stock around and you will see the associated news entries change to show what happened in those periods - nice!
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Want to know their daily historical prices going back to 1986? How about getting the percent of their float currently shorted as a gauge of bearishness on the stock? Or track insider trading as an indicator of management's confidence in their own company? Check the options chain for ways to hedge your positions or as a way of leveraging an investment in the stock? Yahoo provides all this and more.
At present Google Finance just gives you the thousand-mile overview and links you to other sites for anything more detailed. While this might improve in the future, at the moment the article summary's judgement on their scope is valid.
Where I do see an opportunity for Google Finance to one-up Yahoo is in their corporate news section. Yahoo mainly gets corporate news related to a company from news wires like Reuters or PR Newswire. As a result, a lot of smaller companies that analysts don't follow as closely have very few news stories associated with them. Of course, this same universe of small companies is where a diligent personal investor can uncover lots of value stocks overlooked by Wall Street. With their excellent Google News technology, this would be a great spot for Google to use their expertise at pulling in the latest news stories off all corners of the news world for all stocks, not just the big ones that are closely watched by the Street. That would certainly give me a reason to use their service to keep tabs on stocks I'm interested in following.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
uh, no it's not.
1. the data is sparse. no canadian stocks. no options. no bonds. no futures. StockCharts.com has all that, it's free, and the charting is better because:
2. no technical analysis
and Yahoo is still way better than Google finance... hopefully Google will improve, but right now, there are litterly hundreds of free, better, and more comprehensive financial websites out there.
Besides, the fact that they don't get their data directly from the exchanges is _completely_ bogus for anything serious. You can't use Google Finance for any real trading decisions.