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Happy Birthday Google Finance!

admin — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:27:00 +0000

Posted by Karolina Netolicka, Product Manager and Laura Hughes, Consumer Operations

Google Finance celebrates its fifth birthday today. We thought this would be a great opportunity to look back on the last five years and highlight some of the most exciting features we have launched.

Google Finance launched on March 21, 2006 with pricing data from the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Amex and Euronext. Our most innovative feature at the time was the now-familiar interactive chart that seamlessly scrolled, zoomed, and showed a timeline of news coverage for each company. Later that year we added the ability to track your investments in a portfolio.

New Features

In 2007 we added some major new ways to access Google Finance. We launched our first mobile application and iGoogle gadget. In addition, we added the GoogleFinance functions which allow you to easily incorporate financial information into your Google Spreadsheets.

In 2008 the big addition was the Stock Screener. In 2009 we added Google Domestic Trends, which uses search data to track the state of the US economy. Finally, last year we added options data and the ability to chart the performance of your portfolio.

Apart from these big launches, we’ve also made countless smaller improvements. Both charts and quotes now automatically update while you’re viewing the page. You can display technical indicators on the chart, view after-hours trading data, and expand the chart across the whole page. You can see information on related companies for all US public companies. And your portfolio now adjusts your holdings for splits and dividends.

Data Coverage

Over the years we have expanded our data coverage to 24 exchanges in 15 countries. More importantly, though, Google Finance has pushed for consumer access to free real-time quotes. In 2008 we were the site to launch real-time quotes for NYSE and NASDAQ
to non-logged-in users. Since then, we have upgraded all of our data in China and India to real-time.

Today, Google Finance continues to deliver timely financial data to users all over the world. Our users rely on us for our stability – Google Finance was one of the few services to stay up during the flash crash on May 6, 2010. As much as you rely on us, we also rely on you. Last year we launched a Product Ideas page, receiving over 5,000 feature ideas. This type of user engagement is what has allowed us to offer you the product we present today. Thank you all for a great five years, and here’s to many more ahead!

Then (2006):

Now (2011):

Getting Defined

admin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:51:00 +0000

In July we asked you, our readers, what new features you wanted to see on Google Finance. We received and enthusiastic response with over 3,700 ideas and 38,000 votes. One of the top 10 requests with over 700 votes was a Dictionary function for key financial terms and ratios:

We’re happy to announce that we have launched this feature for the financial terms at the top of the company page. To see the definitions, go to a company page on Google Finance and hover your mouse over the financial ratios beside the stock price.

Other definitions include 52 week, Shares, Vol/ Avg and Div/yield.

To see other launches that have come from your feedback visit our Product Ideas blog post . If you’re curious to see all ideas that were submitted, take a look through Google Finance Product Ideas.

Welcome, Google Apps users!

admin — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:14:00 +0000

Posted by Karolina Netolicka, Product Manager

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of exciting Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google Finance is now available to our Google Apps users for free with their Apps accounts.

Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps used by over 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. If your organization hasn’t gone Google yet you can learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity and collaboration with Google Apps.

For those Finance users who have a Google Apps account, if your administrator has already transitioned your organization to the new infrastructure, you can now use Google Finance by signing in at google.com/finance with your existing Apps account.

For more details, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly available services for Google Apps users.

Invest Smarter: Stay on top of the latest Trends

admin — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:17:00 +0000

Posted by Laura Hughes, Consumer Operations Associate

We all know that to invest wisely, you need to keep an eye on broad market and economics trends. But did you know that Google Finance can help you do that in the blink of an eye? Right on the Google Finance homepage, we have a box dedicated to real-time trends that can help you make investment decisions, or just satisfy your curiosity.

This section allows you to see which companies are the biggest movers across many categories, each on a separate tab. Stay informed of big changes in basic stock metrics like price change, market cap, and volume as well as the unique market insight gained from knowing which companies have seen the biggest increase and decrease in searches on Google.

Here’s a look at what the trends we we display and what they mean.

Popular: The stocks that people are searching for most on Google
Price: Top gainers and losers in terms of % price change vs. the prior day’s official closing price
Mkt Cap:Top gainers and losers in terms of change in absolute market capitalization vs. the prior day’s official closing market cap
Volume: The stocks with the highest trade volume

Note: Price, Market cap, and Volume exclude stocks with market caps less than $1 billion and stock prices lower than $1.

Happy Investing!

Show Me (All) the Money! Google Finance rolls entire portfolios into one chart

admin — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:34:00 +0000

Posted by Patrick Coskren, Software Engineer

Any investment advisor’s first tip to new investors is to look at their investment portfolio as a whole, rather than banking on individual stocks. So for most of us, the most important metric for our investments is how our portfolio performs, especially relative to broader markets.

To make it even easier to track your portfolios, today we launched Portfolio Charting on Google Finance. Now you can graphically track your portfolio’s historical performance either individually or versus a specific stock or market index to get an instant snapshot of how you’re doing. For the first time on Google Finance, you can see a visual representation of an entire portfolio as well as track it over time, rather than graphing each stock individually.

To get started, visit your Portfolio page and scroll down under ‘Portfolio related news’. From here you can see your portfolio’s total value over time or zoom to a specific date. Use the graph to compare your portfolio to indices like Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ, or enter a symbol to compare your portfolio to a particular stock.

The graph uses the transaction data you’ve entered or uploaded for your portfolios to display the market value of each portfolio at a given time. If you haven’t entered transaction information for a portfolio, we make some assumptions to give a general overview of the stocks you’ve selected. For a full breakdown of the assumptions we make, visit the Help Center.

Try this feature out and let us know what you think or submit your suggestions for Google Finance on our Product Ideas page. Stay tuned for more as we keep building out Google Finance and catch the latest from the Google Finance team by following us on Twitter.