Happy Birthday Google Finance!

Monday, March 21, 2011 at 1:27 PM

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

Monday, March 7, 2011 at 10:51 AM

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!

Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 11:14 AM

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

Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:17 AM

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

Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 1:34 PM

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.

Google Finance adds multiple sign-in

Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:39 AM

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Google offers multiple sign-in, which allows you to use more than one Google Account in the same browser session for a limited set of Google products. Today we are pleased to announce that Google Finance has joined that group.

Gone are the days of switching between browsers to see your personal vs. professional financial portfolios, news, and charts. With multiple sign-in, you simply switch between accounts using the upper right hand navigation tool. The site will smoothly transition to your other account, allowing you to view other account portfolios in the click of a mouse.

To activate multiple sign-in, click on your username in the upper right hand corner of any Google page, including Finance. Click on “Google Account Settings” and you’ll be taken to your Google Profile page.

Then click on “Edit” next to the Multiple sign-in setting and you will be taken to a page which explains how multiple sign-in works and allows you to enable this feature for your account.

For more information on using multiple sign-in, visit the Help Center and suggest additional Google products for which you’d like to use multiple sign-in. As always, for the latest from the Google Finance team, follow us on Twitter.

Mobile Finance gets smarter, faster, better

Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 8:30 AM

Posted by Philip Brittan, Director of Product Management

We first announced Google Finance for smartphones in August, bringing your latest portfolio quotes and market charts to your fingertips, even when you’re away from your desk. But what about mutual funds and portfolios? Today we’re pleased to announce a number of improvements to the mobile site that will make it easier -- and faster -- to get your key finance updates on the go.

Mutual Funds
Now in addition to seeing the latest stock and market index quotes on the mobile site, you can view mutual funds’ prices, performance and key statistics on your smartphone just by entering the ticker into the search box.

Big Charts in Landscape
Chances are your smartphone has a much bigger screen than prior phones you had, so take advantage of it. You can now view wider stock charts just by turning your phone on it’s side and looking in landscape view, as in the photo above.

Portfolio Performance
View more than just the last price and market cap for stocks in your portfolio; now you can see how your portfolio is performing right this minute, no matter where you are. Simply click the Performance tab from the Portfolio page to see the Market Value, Day’s Gain, and Overall performance of your custom Google Finance portfolio.

Speed
We all know the feeling. You’re on the run and using your smartphone for information you need right away...and the page takes forever to load. Well, we can’t help when the mobile networks get overloaded or you’re out of the 3G zone, but we are doing everything we can to help you get the information you need as fast as possible. We now cache the CSS and Javascript from pages on the mobile site so that reloads are faster than ever.

So hop on that smartphone of yours and start trying out the new features. And be sure to catch the latest from the Google Finance team on Twitter.

Share your Stock Screener Scenarios with the Google Finance Team

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 9:47 AM

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Here on the Google Finance team we love to use the Stock Screener tool to make investing decisions or have fun exploring the performance of various stocks across industries.

We’re starting a series on our blog and Twitter accounts promoting interesting screening scenarios and results, and we’d love your input. Here’s a few of our favorite examples so far:

• Which large cap utilities command the highest operating margins?
• Which stocks are currently delivering the highest dividend yield?
• What are the most active penny stocks?
• What stocks have had the steepest 5-year revenue growth?

To submit your own stock screener scenarios for the chance to be featured in our blog or Twitter stream, just start screening for your favorite real-life or fantasy stock decisions and submit the results to our dedicated group with a brief explanation - the more details you provide around why you chose to screen the way you did, what your reaction to the results was, and why you think it’s an interesting screen - the better! If you’d like more information on all the options the stock screener offers, take a look at our latest blog post.

As always, for the latest updates from the Google Finance team, just follow us on Twitter.

Product Ideas Submissions: Coming to a close

Friday, September 24, 2010 at 8:09 AM

Posted by Laura Hughes, Consumer Operations

Here on the Google Finance team we are committed to adding valuable new features with every launch. Six weeks ago we launched a ‘Product Ideas page for Google Finance’ push in which we invited you to submit and vote on feature ideas for our site. During the series, over 5,000 of you submitted 3,700 ideas and 38,000 votes. Now, as the series is winding down, here’s a look at some of your top ideas and what we have implemented so far.

What you voted for:

Launched! New Mobile Interface: A new mobile interface was the top idea on the Product Ideas page before we launched it.

Launched! Big Charts : Bigger charts have always been a top feature request and since launching this feature in August it’s become one of our favorite tools.

Top Ideas
The top ideas are a mix of portfolio charting, data/market requests, and education tools. Although we don’t have these yet we’re always working on new ideas.

• Portfolio Charting: "Show historical graph of portfolio, complete with dividends, splits, etc." "A chart to see how your earnings fluctuated in your portfolio's investments...”

• Alerts: "Generate alerts based on stock, option, indices events. For e.g. change in volatility,"

• Institutional and Insider Ownership: "Show % of outstanding stock held by institutional investors, and insider holdings/transactions."

• Dictionary: "The ability to click on different financial terms (like p/e, market cap, etc) and get background on them"

• Economic Indicators: “Add historical data for CPI, GDP, unemployment rate, etc. (Ability to compare graphically vs. the S&P500)"

You have a few more days before this series of Google Finance Product Ideas is closed, so jump in and vote now.

Thank you for all the valuable feedback and Ideas. Stay tuned as we implement your top ideas on Google Finance and catch the latest from the Google Finance team by following us on Twitter.

Revisiting Domestic Trends

Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 10:07 AM

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

A couple weeks ago we showed you our best tips for the Google Finance Stock Screener. But this tool is just one of many features on the site that is designed to help you make informed investing decisions. Today we’d like to reintroduce you to Google’s Domestic Trends - a powerful tool for exploring the economy and financial markets.

We first introduced Google Domestic Trends last September in partnership with Hal Varian and the Google team of economists. The ultimate goal was to explore the link between relative search query volume of terms related each of 23 major economic industries in the United States and stock market performance. In this way, we sought to provide unique insight into the broader economy and help users to take a holistic view of the market.

The tool is easy to use - just select the industry you’re interested in to see a sample of the keywords we track for that industry. Then, compare searches for those terms with price performance of the major market indices or individual stocks. As a reminder, each index value is set to 1.0 as of January 1, 2005 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts.

To mark the anniversary of these tools, the Google Finance team decided to have some fun with the data to see what interesting trends we could find. Here are some of our favorites:

Luxury Goods

Over the past year, the luxury goods index has shown a predictable pattern with spikes in searches for terms related to jewelry, diamonds, and more around the winter holiday season and Valentine’s day. However, the comparison chart below shows that the traditional luxury goods stocks did not show huge spikes during those periods and instead followed the trend of the broader market index (in this example, the Dow Jones Index), including a continued trend upwards in spring of this year even as relative searches for luxury goods fell, with the exception of the Valentine’s day spike in February.


Automotive Index

Over the lifetime of the Domestic Trends Index, we’ve seen a regular spike in search traffic for automotive related queries each summer - regardless of broader market performance. In 2010, however, the spike was significantly smaller, as shown in the graph below.


The stock performance of most major automotive stocks for 2010, reflects this trend. With the marked exception of Ford Motor Company, which is up nearly 19.7% as of September 14, and Tata Motors which is up 40.8% for the year, other major automotive stocks are all down for 2010.


Explore Domestic Trends to discover more interesting trends and indicators for the economy and markets. And to catch the latest from the Google Finance team, follow us on Twitter.