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Google Finance Beta Released 206

Posted by CmdrTaco from the money-money-money-money dept.
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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Google Finance Beta Released More

Google Finance Beta Released

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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 @11:32AM (#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.
      • You can get Canadian stock. Enter "ry.to" in the search and you'll get RBC on the TSX.

        The interface is pretty slick, but like you said, it could use a whole lot more features that are offered elsewhere.

      • IIRC google finance is getting their data directly from the following exchanges [google.com].

        Further, they say that they are getting the data direct in their blog [blogspot.com].

        Also, look again at the blog: Canadian Venture Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange.

      • One thing about Google is that they (sometimes) open up their APIs. For Free Software financial apps, it would be really great to have a free stock quotes feed that was realtime.
    • I think its neat they include blog post about the various companys.
  • 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 into different fields, they could spread themselves out too thin and could have it backfire on them. IMHO, they're a good company and I trust their products and services for the most part.
    • 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 you go around bars asking for sex, you'll eventually get some.

      Instead of Google being an unattractive slob, though, they're handsome and all the girls want to have sex with them. In other words, there are lots of people who want to use all the Google servic
      • "Think of it in terms of the theory that if you go around bars asking for sex, you'll eventually get some."

        Only if you're good looking. If you're ugly, you'll get charged with sexual harassment. If only I had a link to that SNL skit :)
    • Google's in the business of making information easy to find/access. I would say this falls under that category.
      • The catch in this case, it is going to be competing against a lot of it's customers, who likely prefered google prior to this over yahoo or msn. There are a lot of financial companies and brokerage services that provide this information who will now have to reconsider feeding their competitor. This was always going to be google's problem, expand services and alienate customers who they are turning into competitors, providing an opportunity for a new search only company.

  • Whew! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:40AM (#14963864) 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!")
    • 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).

    • Re:Whew! (Score:2, Informative)

      by DCstewieG ( 824956 )
      You mean like this [msn.com] or this [harrisbank.com]? The former connects to Microsoft Money. I tried both and now use Total Look...obviously I'm not a tin-foil hat type.

  • I like! (Score:5, Informative)

    by ggvaidya ( 747058 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:42AM (#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 @11:07AM (#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.

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

        by TopShelf ( 92521 )
        Another thing I like to use on Yahoo is to pull Real-Time ECN info for several stocks at once, to keep tabs on a watchlist. I don't see similar functionality in the Google page. Try the following:

        http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=e&s=ge%2Ctsn%2CMO, goog,jnpr,tsai [yahoo.com]

      • but.. but.. but...

        its got a cool sliding graph. Look!!!! Wheeeeeeee.
        Musta been some cool ajax behind that!
      • 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.

        While you've obviously spent the time to point out to everyone four things you like about Yahoo! Finance -- what did you *like* about Google's finance page?

        I took one look at it and immediately thought that relating TIMES of news releases to the stock's price history was awesome!

        If Google Maps or Gmail are any indication, Yahoo! Finance is in for a shake-up.

        How

    • 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 also like how you can follow the line with the mouse, and it will show the time and value of where your cursor is. The stock pages seem very polished to me, it is only the main page that appears to be quickly thrown together in my view.
      • Check this out, type "nanotechnology" in the finance search box or click [google.com].

        You get a list of 60 nanotechnology related companies. I'm assuming it searches by profile or industry. With a more advanced search language, you could pull up very selective lists of stocks. The hard part to trading is finding a stock in the sector that you like and then comparing it with a few competitors. Google could add some tags so you could do:

        nanotechnology industry:medical peratio:+10.1 eps:>.01

        and get a list of stocks

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

    by timster ( 32400 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:42AM (#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.

  • Very limited. (Score:1, Informative)

    by finnif ( 945981 )
    No stock news based on stocks in your portfolio... no real time quotes... no technical charting.. no options listings.

    Besides a somewhat nifty chart -- which most pro sites have already gone far beyond -- this is not very noteworthy except that all things Google are news, right? I'd use Yahoo Finance to get information on Google's stock before I used Google Finance.

  • I just noticed (Score:5, Informative)

    by Genevish ( 93570 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:43AM (#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 history of a stock over the course of a year though is open to debate.
      • 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 searches to find stock tickers - clearly it's tuned for that. E.g., "ms" gets you Morgan Stanley, not multiple sclerosis. Though doing a search for "ms" on Google's main page, Google Finance comes up at the top of the list.

    • 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 first time Google has built something using Flash instead of AJAX, so it's notable just for that.

      • 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?
      • Flash 7 works fine as well. My Mac has 7 installed, and I have never bothered upgrading.

  • 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, really slick. Head and shoulders above Yahoo.

  • Hacked Together? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SWeinig ( 546725 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:44AM (#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 @10:44AM (#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 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].
    • Usually when Google calls something "Beta" it at least shows one cool thing.
      Click and drag the chart a la Google Maps.
    • Problem with yahoo is they are crap for non US stocks. What's worse is they are less crap than all the others i've tried.

      I've got HK/CN,UK,NZ & AU stocks and they don't have feeds of exchange announcements, they don't have the P/E, you get different news items depending on if you go to finance.yahoo.com or au.finance.yahoo.com or uk.finance.yahoo.com, and often the news about an AU country will appear in the uk. and not the au. site.

      Then they keep getting confused several times a week over whether a lo
      • Sadly, I don't know squat about how they deal with foreign stocks. I wish I did; I'd love to be able to invest in them. But they're not readily traded in the US unless they've got a separate listing on a US exchange.

        I'd really kinda like to diversify my portfolio out of dollar-valued stocks because, well, as you might have noticed the economy of this country is doomed. No matter what the market seems to think today. The dollar is in a bubble of its own, and when that bubble burts... hoo, boy, is THAT gonna
        • I'd love to be able to invest in them.
          Can't you just open an account with a broker that deals in foreign markets? Is that why so many companies offer ADRs?

          In the UK just about every broker can trade stocks on the major US and EU markets. They'll usually charge you a fraction more brokerage than UK & IE stock though.

          Finding one to deal in your favourite asian, eastern european and middle eastern exchanges can take a little more shopping around. And with natwest who i went with in the end, they'll charg
          • Yeah, I think that's why major foreign companies usually offer ADRs.

            In the end I just went with a European stock mutual fund, which makes sense for (a) diversity and (b) the fact that I don't actually know which foreign companies to invest in. Being a tech nerd in America I know (or at least think I know) which American companies to buy.
  • 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 opportunities, investor relations, etc. It's nice to have all of those links in one place.

    Bad:

    - If you're looking for a lot of real information about a company's finances, you'll still have to go elsewhere. A few financial ratios are reported on each

  • Some nice features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:45AM (#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
    • It might not be a quick hack, but it definitely didn't go through a proper usability testing and evaluation.

      The fact that it does a cool zoom effect when you click somewhere does not excuse the absence of 'insider transactions' link on the stock page. And neither does it justify the presence of company address, summary and management list. Leave alone some useless blog links. The view is overcrowded with information that is not needed on a day-to-day basis. And it rather feels more like a 'miscellaneous inf
      • "Yahoo Finance [yahoo.com] got it nearly perfect."

        Other then the huge ass banner that takes up most of my browser window. Once you get to the actual fund view it is pretty slick.

        -Rick
    • Additionally, the "plain" styling took about one tenth as long to load as forbes page the submission also linked to.

      In all honestly, what got me started using google back in the day was not the quality of search results over yahoo (it helped, for a little while though), it was the fact that even on dial-up it loaded almost instantly.
  • 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 this and google wallet might work together and something big happens.

  • 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 wasn't the only article slashdot received on this since topic since it's been linked to on google.com all morning. I've got to wonder why this one made the site. I was going to write in about it, but figured it was non-news.

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

    by MoofOntario ( 937100 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:55AM (#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 @11:00AM (#14964006)
    How am I supposed to pump and dump? bash and stash?
  • 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 what got them where they are today.
  • 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 @11:19AM (#14964129)
    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.
  • Those obnoxious stock symbol links (AAPL) everywhere in Google News stories, then in all search results?

  • Long term view (Score:3, Interesting)

    by caudron ( 466327 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @11:27AM (#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]
  • before I RTFA'd I thought it might be a currency version of the G drive - just upload all your money to Google for safe keeping, where they will index all the serial numbers, and you can get to download it whenever you need it. And when the government come to ask for it, they will refuse as much as possible!
  • Google is now becoming more like yahoo.. which brings up the question... Why switch when yahoo does many things like these better? Have the tables turned? where the "innovation?, i just see some pretty graphs, and not even the same amount of info.

    PS: Yes, i do work for Yahoo, but not related to this product, so my opinions are just that, my opinions.

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

    by mixonic ( 186166 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @12:20PM (#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
  • As usual, this Google service is very US-centric. Too bad lots of US investors also invest overseas.

    I tried to import my portfolio from Yahoo! finance - "We will support international symbols shortly"

    Well, considering that I have been waiting for my Google Homepage to support them for about 8 months now, I wonder how long "shortly" will be.

    Simmilar problems exist trying to add weather on the Google homepage, even if you know the international airport code for the area, it will get you nowhere. Works fine on
  • I want a service that can handle and tabulate my finances online. That way, the IRS can just subpoena google every mid-april, and I don't have to file my taxes that year! Google can do it for me!
  • this [marketwatch.com] was the fourth headline on the page when i looked....

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

    by cyngus ( 753668 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @02:02PM (#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.
  • The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together.

    It's time to put down the pipe.

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