Google Finance Beta Released 206
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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Whew! (Score:3, Interesting)
Plain? Don't talk nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
Some nice features (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:First Error??? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Woo hoo! (Score:3, Interesting)
He/she may indeed like to check their source. I believe only Google News cannot display ads (due to legal threats), probably including Google's personalised home page as it has Google News contents.
Take a look at stock page (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I like! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I like! (Score:3, Interesting)
Long term view (Score:3, Interesting)
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]
Re:Woo hoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I like! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=e&s=ge%2Ctsn%2CMO
Re:Very limited. (Score:2, Interesting)
unless, of course, you consider the real time quotes.
search for a ticker symbol. right above the chart, you'll see a line that starts "Real-Time ECN:" that is a real-time quote.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Financials, Management, Related Companies, and links to Blog Posts (courtesy of Google Blog Search, natch) and discussions hosted by Google. That's almost twice as much information as I got from Yahoo's default page [yahoo.com].
Actually, a pretty neat community awareness thing (Score:3, Interesting)
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