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Google Finance Beta Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Mar 21, 2006 09:35 AM
from the money-money-money-money dept.
Google The Almighty Buck
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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  • Woo hoo! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's exactly like Yahoo! Finance, only with no ads (Google can't put ads on beta sites for legal reasons) and cool Flash charting. This is probably the best financial site ever created.

    • Re:Woo hoo! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SparafucileMan (544171) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @10:32AM (#14964211)
      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.
      [ Parent ]

      • Re:Woo hoo! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Uber Banker (655221) *
        You may want to check your source. Gmail, Google Groups, and Froogle (and probably others that I haven't bothered to check) are all technically beta, and all have ads.

        He/she may indeed like to check their source. I believe only Google News cannot disp

      • Re:Woo hoo! (Score:3, Informative)

        by thrillseeker (518224)
        cant seem to figure out how to get google finance to show me indexes or exchange rates

        The indexes come up if entered without the upcaret, i.e.: ^IXIC is shown at IXIC [google.com]

  • This is just another thing google is getting itself into. This could be good or bad, depending on how you want to think about it. It's good that they are trying to broaden their scope on the internet further. The bad is that if they continue to stretch
    • How, exactly, could it backfire on them? As long as they remain the best in some fields (which they will in search), isn't it only good for them to stretch their legs out a bit and see what else they can do well?

      Think of it in terms of the theory that if y

  • Whew! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suso (153703) * on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:40AM (#14963864) Homepage Journal
    For a second there I thought that Google had created some web application for people to track their personal expenses. That could be dangerous in a lot of ways.

    • Re:Whew! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Bohiti (315707)
      I thought the same thing (web application) but with a different impression ("Whew! Google's smart, maybe they can keep my checkbook balanced!")

    • Re:Whew! (Score:2)

      by c_forq (924234)
      Yeah, I was thinking Google was doing some sort of Quicken-like finance application, or a tax service (thought it was a little late to be releasing tax software though).

  • I like! (Score:5, Informative)

    by ggvaidya (747058) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:42AM (#14963886) Homepage Journal
    "looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together."

    Really? Check out their MSFT [google.com] page - it really is a lot better organised than Yahoo's [yahoo.com]. Once they support Singaporean stocks (they already have lots of information), I'm gonna be all over these guys.

    Good job, Google!

    • Re:I like! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tessaiga (697968) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @10:07AM (#14964053)
      Really? Check out their MSFT page - it really is a lot better organised than Yahoo's. Once they support Singaporean stocks (they already have lots of information), I'm gonna be all over these guys.
      Have you ever actually used Yahoo Finance to do any in-depth analysis? The depth of information you can dig up from their site is astounding.

      Want to know their daily historical prices [yahoo.com] going back to 1986? How about getting the percent of their float currently shorted [yahoo.com] as a gauge of bearishness on the stock? Or track insider trading [yahoo.com] as an indicator of management's confidence in their own company? Check the options chain [yahoo.com] 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.

      [ Parent ]

    • Re:I like! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by c_forq (924234)
      Every page for a stock I have looked at is real sharp, especially the board members with pictures and descriptions on mouse-over. The news following the time line, and the ability to move the time line with the bar and by dragging is good thinking too. I

  • Plain? Don't talk nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timster (32400) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:42AM (#14963888)
    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 just noticed (Score:5, Informative)

    by Genevish (93570) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:43AM (#14963892) Homepage

    I was just about to post a story about this. I went to pull up the info on a quote from my Google news page and saw the new format.

    The main page may look plain, but the detail on a stock is beautiful:

    http://www.google.com/finance?client=ig&q=AAPL [google.com]

    The stock ticker is draggable, like Google Maps, and shows a marker for each news item (listed on the side). Also, as you scroll the ticker (by dragging it), the news items change to show items relevant to the timeframe displayed.

    I'd say well done Google.

    • I was just about to post this comment. It's completely unlike the rest of the stock tickets out there, where you have to click on a specific date range to see the picture. How this draggable interface will be useful to someone who wants to track the hist
      • My bad, I didn't notice the zooming. This just became SWEET. A real improvement over existing finance charts.
      • It isn't a pro-level tool by any stretch yet (five days of intraday data isn't much), but the way it automatically tracks what you've been doing (go back to the home page after searching for some stocks and see how it changes) is quite useful. And Google s

    • Re:I just noticed (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mblase (200735)
      The stock ticker is draggable, like Google Maps

      Not quite like Google Maps; this stock chart is produced with Flash 8, not AJAX/DHTML/JS/whatever you want to call it.

      Not a problem for me, or (I expect) for its target audience. Still, I think this is the fir

      • Re:I just noticed (Score:3, Informative)

        by Ced_Ex (789138)
        Not a problem for me, or (I expect) for its target audience. Still, I think this is the first time Google has built something using Flash instead of AJAX, so it's notable just for that.

        Doesn't Google Video use flash?

  • Uhhh.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Uhh...

    Maybe if the submitter took a few steps beyond that first page, he'd see how mind-crushingly awesome this service is. I mean.. they made a crawler to actually get pictures of company officers?

    Not to mention that their graphing software is really, re

  • Hacked Together? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SWeinig (546725) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:44AM (#14963905)
    I would hardly call it 'hacked together', the graphing utility alone constitutes real UI thought.

  • Nothing to see here (Score:4, Informative)

    by jfengel (409917) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:44AM (#14963908) Homepage Journal
    Wow, that's just about nuthin'. The portfolio page asks for Stock, Amount, and Price, but not Trading Date (necessary to figure out annual yields). The resulting page doesn't list news for those companies, just the current stock price.

    I use the Yahoo Finance page to track my portfolio. It's redundant with my actual brokerage page, but the brokerage is much more paranoid about automatically logging me out, so a simple check is often a pain. Fortunately, for me keeping the two in synch is easy because I trade only a few times a year.

    Google's got a loooooong way to go before I abandon that. I have faith that they can, but for the moment I wouldn't call this Beta. Usually when Google calls something "Beta" it at least shows one cool thing. This is just a "me, too" page.

    • Re:Nothing to see here (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mblase (200735)
      The resulting page doesn't list news for those companies, just the current stock price.

      Really? I clicked on the link to AAPL [google.com] and saw not just stock info and news--linked to dates on the chart, no less--but Company Facts, Company Summary, Company Financial
  • Good:

    - The scrollable graphical price history is pretty neat. You can also easily expand the time horizon. There isn't really a lot you can do with it, but I think it's a fun little toy.

    - Important links to each company are included: news, employment

  • Some nice features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RingDev (879105) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:45AM (#14963913) Homepage Journal
    "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
  • the interface is good, though it is the same as typing "Goog" as google's search query [google.com] and the first result it returns is same as that got from Google finance [google.com],

    They just separated a separate "finance" section by channeling queries and news to it. Maybe th

  • It seems like this submitter has a problem with Google going into the post with remarks on how it looks "too plain" and "quickly hacked together". If by too plain the author means "simple and clean like most people like it" than I'd agree. I'm sure this wa

  • Not replacing Yahoo Finance yet... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MoofOntario (937100) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:55AM (#14963974)
    Add CM to my portfolio....

    hmm.. "Could not find the requested symbol"

    Right, and no symbol search for the noobs.. that's going to be convenient. Oh well, try Adding CM.TO instead.

    "We will support international symbols soon"

    Right. Then maybe I'll give it a try "soon". Back to yahoo for me. (Add this to the other complaints people are having)

    -Moof

  • Bah! No message boards ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack (534373) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @10:00AM (#14964006)
    How am I supposed to pump and dump? bash and stash?

  • plain and hacked together? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tvon (169105)
    Would you prefer if there were obfuscated controls and banner ads?

    Do you want to go ahead and quickly hack up a page like this:

    http://finance.google.com/finance?cid=16701613 [google.com]

    ?

    Google thrives on the simple and powerful interfaces they create. It's half of wh
  • I thought you had to pay a lot of money per user to display realtime quotes. Is Google really doing that, or are we about to seem them get slapped by the NYSE & Nasdaq?

  • Plain? Are you kidding? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pedrito (94783) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @10:19AM (#14964129) Homepage
    The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together.

    Obviously you didn't get past the first page which is thankfully as close to plain as it can be. Here's one very good argument for having a very plain front page: It loads fast. Then you get where you really want to be faster.

    Even on the main page there's some technically cool stuff. Hover over the market indexes and the graph changes to the one you're hovering over. They've got that in a few places. Go to the main page for a ticker and hover over individuals listed in Management and it gives you more info. In fact, if you do it on the GOOG ticker, it even shows pictures in the pop-up.

    Trying hovering over the graph and it gives you data specific to the day or time that you're hovering over in the upper right. You can scroll the graphs to look back in history instead of having to change the time periods. You can select a fixed time period like Yahoo, or you can drag the start and end of the time period for the graph. This is some cool stuff.

    Now, when you call it "plain", what are you comparing it to? Yahoo? Because Yahoo isn't anywhere near this tricked-out. As for the data, it doesn't appear to be any more out of date than Yahoo's data. It has the real time ECN just like Yahoo and the rest of the market data is probably 15-20 minutes delayed just like every other free financial site on the web.

    Personally, my first impression is that it's exceptionally well designed. It's a great first cut and barring any major disasters, I suspect I'll switch over to it from Yahoo Finance.

  • Long term view (Score:3, Interesting)

    by caudron (466327) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @10:27AM (#14964180) Homepage
    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.

    Yes, but the nature of the data collected and the way in which it is presented (the clear connection between event and price change and other things) makes it quite useful for planning investment strategy for a given company.

    As with any such site, more research would have to be done for a given long term investment, but this does make a great starting place for that research. That is the great benefit to being the aggregator rather than the source. They pull together a lot of data from some other great sources and put it together in a way that makes the whole better, in some ways, than the sum of the parts. (C.f., Google News for another example)

    At risk of sounding like a GOOG fanboy, they've batted another home run. We get a solid resource for long term investment, and they get access to our portfolios. Everyone wins (excepting the privacy concerns that are a legitimate tangent to nearly every google story).

    Tom Caudron
    http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]

  • Actually, a pretty neat community awareness thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mixonic (186166) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @11:20AM (#14964537) Homepage
    So I looked at this initially with the same elitism and disdain of any slashdotter...but take a look at this link of google: http://www.google.com/finance?q=google&btnG=Search &hl=en [google.com]

    Ignore the stupid sliders, and maybe yahoo already did all this but...

    - Flags on signifigant news and where it fell on the stock's timeline, COOL

    - Blog posts about the company, ties into the current buzz, COOL

    - Hooks into google groups to see discussions going on about said company, COOL

    Simply a great way to see where a company is both financially, and in the net community's eyes. Simple, but neat.

    Oh, and check out Viacom: http://www.google.com/finance?cid=703770 [google.com]
    The blog posts about tom cruise and south park? see, that is damn cool.

    -mix

  • Looks good, charts lacking... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cyngus (753668) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @01:02PM (#14965409)
    Overall I think it looks good. One thing I really like about the chart is that as you change the date it updates the news articles to that time period, which is great if you're just looking at a new stock and want to see what that 30% dip 10 months ago was about. On the downside, the little boxes linking to the news stories are nice, but overall annoying, there should be a way to turn them off. Having them on the chart makes it much harder to read technically. Charting should also have at least basic technical analysis tools like Yahoo! Finance where you can get moving averages, volatility metrics, etc. Plus, you've got to have the ability to view the chart on a logarithmic scale. Its a nice start, but its not enough to get me to start using it instead of Yahoo! Finance. If they enrich the charting capabilities, then we might be in business.
    • Sites like these provide important economic indicators that help you determine when its the right time to buy a car or a house or go Kwanzaa shopping. I wouldn't dare spend my money unless I felt that it was ok to do so.

      • correction. (Score:2)

        by suso (153703) *
        Damnit, that was supposed to have <sarc> tags around it. I don't really think like that. I guess that's why they made the preview button.
    • That's a great idea! My only request is that I get to be an Alpha.
    • No stock news based on stocks in your portfolio... no real time quotes... no technical charting.. no options listings.

      No usless real time stock ticker (are you a speculator or investor?), links to more technical charting, links to options listings...

      It'

    • No over the counter bulletin board stocks. Wake me up when they support em :P

    • Take a look at stock page (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Midnight Thunder (17205) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @09:58AM (#14963989) Homepage Journal
      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!

      [ Parent ]
    • Needs more features. Exactly. My wish list for a site:
      • Index data, not stock data. And not dodgy price return indices like the DJIA, but total return indices preferably MSCI Global series
      • Bond and property markets included in the index data, not only st

      • I can't visit Yahoo finance anymore. The ads give me seisures.

        This is exactly how Google killed them years ago.

      • There's a good test to see whether a site is clean or just lacking features:

        What do you want it to do that it doesn't already do?

      • Re:Quick. Clean. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hey! (33014) on Tuesday March 21 2006, @10:25AM (#14964161) Homepage Journal
        It's not a bad way of doing things.

        One thing Google learned from search is that people prefer simple. Provided an app does something useful, it's better in my view for it to start lacking some features than for it to drag useless, distracting, and poorly thought out features along for the rest of its natural lifespan. Let the users clamor for what they want, and cherry pick the low hanging fruit, repeating ad infinitum.
        [ Parent ]

      • Re:Quick. Clean. (Score:3, Informative)

        by christopherfinke (608750)

        It's clean because it doesn't do anything...there's a few lines of text and...not much else....
        Try signing in and clicking on the Portfolio link in the upper right. It allows you to enter what stocks you own, how many shares, and what price you bought t
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