13 ms·

Google Finance Finally Updated

224 points by jbverschoor 6y ago

sakopov 6y ago
Looks like it's still missing portfolio functionality, which, as I read somewhere not long ago, will be part of Google Finance soon.
tantalor 6y ago
Sep 9, 2020: https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-investing-information-more-accessible/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-inv...
wittyusername 6y ago
Gosh, it's amazing how they just refuse to make this tool powerful. Still can't set a custom date range, or add technical indicators. I mean these are like 2003 requirements for a decent site let alone 2020. Just off the top of my head..historical data, SEC filings, better volume data, options pricing..
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  I don't think they're trying to compete with Bloomberg here. This is for casual "how's the stock doing" type queries.
  - fibers 6y ago
    They don't need to compete with Bloomberg when they could compete with yahoo instead.
    - three_seagrass 6y ago
      I think Yahoo! Finance is an outlier in that it was pushed by internal management at Yahoo as something they wanted personally, rather than meeting the needs of a large userbase. At least that was the rumor I heard.
seanf 6y ago
Still missing transaction tracking. Hopefully it will come back some day. I migrated to https://wallmine.com/ https://wallmine.com/ when Google Finance announced it was neutering itself. However, I've noticed Wallmine's listings are not always complete. As a couple examples: the insurance company Root isn't listed, the label for JAMF isn't correct. Haven't looked at what is out there in a while, any other alternatives people are using?
flowerlad 6y ago
Their flash-based control was more powerful, for drilling into a time range. This is what that used to look like: https://infovis-wiki.net/wiki/2006-03-27:_Google_Finance_-_Interactive_Flash_graphs_to_explore_stock_price_data https://infovis-wiki.net/wiki/2006-03-27:_Google_Finance_-_I... The new SVG replacement is not as good.
- kyrra 6y ago
  Highchart's has a UI that is very similar to this and is SVG based (I believe): https://www.highcharts.com/demo/stock/stock-tools-gui https://www.highcharts.com/demo/stock/stock-tools-gui Sadly this seems to continue down Google's trend of simplified controls, fewer power-user type interfaces.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    That's because Google aims itself at the mass market; power users will be on, well, power user tools. Google and Yahoo Finance are fine for a quick glance for me, but I spend at most a few hours a year looking at these things.
- xibalba 6y ago
  Yes. And the timeline was annotated with significant news events, which was truly fantastic. This used to be an amazing product. Still, it's free, so I'm not going to complain too much.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  The irony is that Google actually maintains an SVG version of the old chart in their charting library, which works pretty well: https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/annotationchart https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery...
- kevindong 6y ago
  That flash applet was the best that flash could be. It flew through every action without ever hiccuping for me.
tekmaven 6y ago
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F01qztv https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F01q... Google trends predicts interest on the "Stocks" topic is about to go through the roof in the US. Interesting.
standardUser 6y ago
I thought they killed this of many years ago, but maybe that was just the portfolio piece? Hard to want to delve into a Google product these days when the norm is many years without meaningful updates and the constant possibility of the project being killed.
- tsjq 6y ago
  Yes. "ADHD at industrial level", as someone said .
- danesparza 6y ago
  Oh don't worry -- I'm sure they'll kill it off soon enough. I'm still bitter about Google Reader.
kordlessagain 6y ago
RIP SWI: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SWI:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SWI:NYSE
oramit 6y ago
What a bizarre press release that accompanies this... https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-investing-information-more-accessible/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-inv... Google Finance used to have all these features. They were already implemented and working fine in 2009! The original chart tool was much better than the current version. You could see every dividend that was issued, splits, add moving averages, etc. Then they "simplified" it by removing all the best features and are now adding them back? Why would I bother to use this when they have so thoroughly torched their goodwill by senselessly killing off working (and good!) products?
- londons_explore 6y ago
  The world of computers is "reinvent, but slightly different". Remember the "Briefcase" sync feature of windows 95... Now compare that to Dropbox syncing... Pretty much the same thing 25 years on. Different UI, same principle.
  - adwww 6y ago
    I never did get what the Briefcase was supposed to do. It was so poorly explained that that was it's purpose. Perhaps because I didn't have any networked computers, and the utility of a Dropbox via floppy disk was so limited...
    - helmholtz 6y ago
      Completely off-topic rant incoming, but Microsoft has very often sucked at advertising itself. Here's a more recent example. I bought a Windows Phone way back when. It was amazing. My favourite feature of it, believe it or not, was the keyboard. I have a sneaky suspicion that they used MS Word's dictionary somehow, because it could correct typos not just when the wrong letter was typed (for instance, typing 'aentence' instead of 'sentence'), but also words typed in the wrong order ('snetence'). It was delightful. I could type as fast as I wanted, confident that auto-correct would take care of any errors. Then I moved to Android, and I could not believe how appalling the keyboard was. But it seems that no one else was talking about it, because android users just didn't know of the excellence that existed out there. Then, at some point, Microsoft went ahead and ruined their keyboard when they went to Windows Phone 10 or 8.1 I can't remember, and I've been searching for perfection ever since. GBoard, with it's fucking emoji page is an affront to engineering.
voisin 6y ago
Has anyone made a robust tool for analyzing the XBRL data the SEC mandated companies file with their 10-Q’s and 10-K’s? Seems like a big opportunity.
- eigenvalue 6y ago
  Not a good one that is targeted at non-professional investors. I agree, it's a good opportunity. The issue is that companies have a lot of latitude in how they use XBRL once you get outside of the totally standard financial metrics like revenue, gross profit, total liabilities, etc. And those are the metrics that are already largely available in services such as Yahoo Finance for free. What would be really valuable is taking company specific metrics such as unit volumes, orders, backlog, etc. And that requires a ton of work for each company and some knowledge of what the business does. Also, a lot of that data is not yet broken out into XBRL. For example, look how much data from THO (an RV manufacturer) is useful but not detailed in XBRL fields: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/000073026320000019/tho-20200731.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/00007... You can see which parts have XBRL tags by the red lines above and below. If you search the document for "orders" or "units" you can see lots of great information that is basically stranded. I've always thought that it shouldn't be that hard to use a bunch of heuristic rules to find data that is present in the last N 10-K or 10-Q filings (particularly because they tend to reference the previous year results, so you can search for numbers that are the same that are located within K words of certain strings). But it's hard to do something really useful as a one-person effort with some clever coding, which is probably why the services that are out there are niche and expensive.
  - bfrink 6y ago
    Calcbench (https://www.calcbench.com/ https://www.calcbench.com/) does this, but as others point out, XBRL is a bit of a mess
  - phyalow 6y ago
    CAPIQ basically do this, they normalise it with a human analyst too. Credit Suisse's Holt product also does this.
aminozuur 6y ago
Wow. I am impressed, it looks good. I was disappointed when Google Finance was demoted a few years ago, and many of its handy features were stripped away. I hope it's back for good, and that Google will continue to improve it.
wiredfool 6y ago
Perhaps they could make it into a threaded chat product.
aminozuur 6y ago
I was just playing with building a tiny stock tool for fundamental analysis a few days ago[0]. It's in the extremely early stage and currently uses Polygon's API (made by ex-googlers), although we're looking for an alternative. Polygon's data is often flawed, buggy, absend or outdated. [0] https://eftegarie.com/StockDNA.html https://eftegarie.com/StockDNA.html
- derivagral 6y ago
  I did this a few years ago with a friend. We settled on using a thing or 2 from Quandl as the best fit (hundreds of $ instead of tens of thousands) after we realized XBRL was a nightmare. We did this privately for investment purposes; if you're making a user-facing thing, perhaps their terms won't fit your case.
  - aminozuur 6y ago
    I have looked into Quandl, as well as other finance API's. I just had a call with Intrinio, which will offer me a demo soon. I will have another demo from S&P Global, which I fear will be unaffordable, but it's always worth a try. May I ask what specific usecases your internal tool was built for? And were you in the end able to build it to your satisfaction? I welcome any thoughts.
    - derivagral 6y ago
      At the time, there was nowhere that we knew of on the net that showed fundamental data and metrics yearly or quarterly in columns and didn't cost many thousands. Google Finance used to sort of do this for 2-3 periods, but the available fields were limited and the UI was not friendly to research. So we made a tool where you could: select various series of data, see their historical series, and also visualize your selections. This was helpful to assist our manual screening after we ran our automated filters (think Morningstar, just as a database query). A real manual screen setup might start with something like: "I want retained earnings, outstanding debt, and fully diluted share counts for the last 5 years for AIZ and their top3 competitors". Plotted out, perhaps you notice that property insurance segments are fairly cyclical (weather/season) which can be a useful thing to tease out for an outsider/amateur. Or maybe you note that companies don't always break their revenue sections out the way you want, so you can't even do this analysis! (Looking at you, Alphabet & Youtube.) We started with Yahoo prices and Yahoo fundamental data, but eventually realized that we still had to verify a lot of their data (against EDGAR). Quandl was a step up in price but we worried a lot less about data integrity with that, and by this time we were seeing some confirmation of results for our strategy. We had a good ARR sustained over a couple years. However, the scalar value of the (risky!) gains was far too small to justify either quitting our tech jobs or sustaining an extra 40+ hours a week. The lessons were great, and seeing shenanigans in real life (looking at you, TSLA) but not in headlines is always fascinating. We did do some concepting of a subscription for the research product, but I'd be surprised if that was realistic given our lack of marketing knowledge (and $). RH is a thing now though, so perhaps we were wrong.
derivagral 6y ago
I miss their old version. Both for the basic info and "competition" for Yahoo, as well as pretty good representation of some quick fundamentals. I haven't used the crippled version in years, why would I ever go back?
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
And you still can't do a basic slider to set a time range? I want to see a zoom of how the stock did from 2012 through 2015. This functionality was stripped and still not returned? This is the equivalent of having 5 inconsistently scaled preset zoom levels on Google maps. Zooming in isn't complex, and a lack of it completely weakens how you used a map product (or stock viewer). It's amazing to me that they still haven't fixed what they tore out. Google really struggles with supporting customer products.
vorpalhex 6y ago
Oof, this is like a glorified "my first stock monitor" app. No options drill down, no relevant news or dates, not even comparisons! This is sad and significantly inferior to the old experience - certainly material UI alone wasn't THAT big of a feature?
homero 6y ago
Finance is one place Yahoo is incredible at. I use their app all the time.
- jdofaz 6y ago
  I don't use their app but when I want to look up a stock price finance.yahoo.com is still the first place I think to look
syntaxing 6y ago
A bit off topic, but does anyone know of a good competitor to the old Google Finance? I loved the old site where you can stack indicators and fancy box and whisker charts.
- lwh 6y ago
  yahoo finance is okay, not 100% replacement but easier to look at overall and has many of the chart tool google removed
Wonnk13 6y ago
The original from years ago had a solid portfolio management tool where you could track your cost basis and positions. Still haven't found another replacement for that other than good 'ol Excel...
- nilsb 6y ago
  Yahoo Finance isn't too terrible for that, but I definitely preferred the old Google Finance portfolio feature.
KingMachiavelli 6y ago
Decent interface. Not quite as useful as Yahoo or Marketwatch but good enough 95% of the time. Biggest gripe is that the URL format can't be user to directly open a stock's page without remembering the exchange a given stock is on. This URL will bring up Google's stock: > https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG:NASDAQ This URL will not: > https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG
- jordache 6y ago
  Are symbols not unique across exchanges?
  - KingMachiavelli 6y ago
    I don't think Symbols are technically unique between exchanges, since some exchanges are very old, although I would have trouble coming up with an example where the major US exchanges have conflicts. Given that the Google Finance has a search bar prominently on the page. I would expect/hope that the top result would be used in the event of a conflict. It's very probably in the event of a conflict that one of the potential companies is very common while the rest are niche listings on foreign exchanges anyway.
  - rodiger 6y ago
    They're generally unique within a country but not between countries. Eg "Intrepid Mines trades in Canada on the TSX as IAU whereas in the US, IAU is the iShares gold trust ETF" [0] [0] https://www.quora.com/Can-2-publicly-traded-companies-have-the-same-ticker-symbol-across-the-worlds-various-exchanges https://www.quora.com/Can-2-publicly-traded-companies-have-t...
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      There are also exchanges that use numeric symbols like the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong, but ADR shares won't. It's actually quite a shitshow.
  - 6y ago
dmw_ng 6y ago
The new search box is hilariously slow. Let me guess, another Angular monstrosity?
TooCreative 6y ago
Too bad you cannot embed the charts. Are there any good embeddable stock widgets out there?
mynameishere 6y ago
Has the same bizarre bug as yahoo finance. Go to the search box and type "F" without the quotes. That's Ford Motor's stock symbol. Press enter. What does it bring up? The first match for "F" which was "FTSE 100". Dumb dumb dumb. If you want "F" [1] you have to click the 2nd or 3rd or whatever result. Painfully bad design. [1] Or TIPS or IEF or SHY or basically everything I've tested.
Miner49er 6y ago
Doesn't even show significant figures beyond a cent. For stocks below a dollar that matters a lot, it just rounds to the nearest cent, it seems.
mimikatz 6y ago
I used to love this product. They explicitly told users to go away a couple years ago. These updates still pale to the old functionality and I am not putting my data back into Google Finance because at some point they will get tired of supporting it and tell me to go away again.
enos_feedler 6y ago
Google Finance seems like a slam dunk for Google's mission of organizing the worlds information and making it universally accessible and useful. Investing is literally gathering this info and making it useful with trading. I am very surprised they don't make a core product for this out of finance. Maybe with the growth of retail investing and the new class of "Robinhood" traders they will start to prioritize this.
ogre_codes 6y ago
I don't use either now, but Google Finance always felt like an also-ran product. It started out with some good features but never quite matched Yahoo Finance. In particular, the GF portfolio tool was quite basic next to Yahoos. That said, it's been a few years since I've used either. Dealing with options on GF was a bit of a pain also. Now, I either stick to the really basic stuff in the stocks app or use Amaeritrade's iPad app which is pretty decent for low level research and I can trade from it. Feels like the days of having a stocks/ business web page are gone, at least for me.
- ant6n 6y ago
  It was a great product until Google soft-killed it.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    It had great potential, the tools they launched were better than Yahoo Finance, but Google Finance never felt finished to me. There were always big pieces of their toolkit missing. Someone mentioned one of them I'd forgotten about which is a portfolio tracker where you could effectively track your cost basis.
supernova87a 6y ago
I just never understood how Google, with 100,000 employees, could let such a mainstream product display such shoddy functionality that is not rocket science. Their interface couldn't drag and drop stock tickers, reorganize your list, update correctly, etc. Basic usability. Maybe I don't know how tech companies' product management works, if it's underresourced or what, but such a giant company allowing a product (a simple, basic, not even requiring huge product innovation) to sleepwalk is hard to understand. Do their team not get rewarded for working on basic, non-flashy products? Is that why it stagnated?
- adventured 6y ago
  There isn't much money to be derived from the product (as is) and it takes a small team of people to focus on it in order to maintain it. Someone with at least a modicum of influence has to care about the product and drive resources at it persistently so it doesn't rot. Google is unlikely to want to go further and build or acquire a stock broker business, so they're going to struggle to extract much money out of the category over time. This is Google doing the bare minimum as an alternative to just shutting down another product. I'm surprised it has survived this long.
- brown9-2 6y ago
  Institutionally, Google has a hard time caring about things that won’t scale to large revenue.
- htrp 6y ago
  Professionally, googlers don't care about products that won't get them promoted, google finance was about as boring as it came.
1980phipsi 6y ago
On the top they have US, Europe, Asia, Currencies, Crypto. Crypto? They should have interest rates well before crypto. Commodities are also far more relevant than crypto.
- htrp 6y ago
  not to the gPM who owns the product
pratyushmittal 6y ago
Please try out https://www.screener.in https://www.screener.in for Indian stocks. It is Bloomberg for common man. We provide 10-15 years of financial history in a simple interface. Plus lots of tools for finding and analysing companies.
ipozgaj 6y ago
Most of the "new" features are just eye candy, but usability is still very poor and way behind what they had 10 years ago. You can't do even the most trivial things, like sorting stocks in your watch-list by market value or P/E ratio, comparing two stocks side by side etc.
jliptzin 6y ago
Looks nicer I guess, still missing a lot. No option chains, etc. Still pretty useless in my opinion.
1970-01-01 6y ago
Great! Where is the "Google Finance Privacy Policy" Oh, they forgot to update that part.
- ElliotH 6y ago
  Here: https://policies.google.com/privacy https://policies.google.com/privacy you scroll to the bottom and press Privacy.
  - 1970-01-01 6y ago
    There's nothing here for Google Finance or portfolio data. https://policies.google.com/technologies/product-privacy https://policies.google.com/technologies/product-privacy
pm2222 6y ago
The old one is better. And I'm no longer a google finance user due to the disruption.
popara 6y ago
Shameless plug, different way to visualize investments and risk. https://chartbehavior.com/ https://chartbehavior.com/
- hwatkins 6y ago
  Good looking charts, interesting you show declines
  - popara 6y ago
    Thank you, what are you seeing on those charts are real risks, that would reflect on your balance statement. Very useful if you are comparing two competing investments eg: https://chartbehavior.com/app/v/IWD,%20IWF/2019/2020/cy_4!25?show= https://chartbehavior.com/app/v/IWD,%20IWF/2019/2020/cy_4!25...
davidkuennen 6y ago
Shameless Plug: I created https://stockevents.app https://stockevents.app a year ago. It has somewhat of a different approach to track stocks.
snakedoctor 6y ago
Google Finance looks similar to Robinhood's UI. Though I've heard rumors of Google having an internal team 'google treasury' that trades stocks. I would actually be surprised if Google didn't have an internal team doing so. Similar to Jane Street/Rentech/TGS. Google has loads of more data though.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  Is that the same sort of idea as Apple’s Braeburn Capital?
- htrp 6y ago
  It's definitely not the actual google treasury team.... and knowing the shitstorm that they would get from that getting leaked, I doubt there's a shadow hedge fund running in google.
  - Maven911 6y ago
    Maybe not HF but they have a pretty serious group of traders / setup that parallels some WS firms from what I heard too
    - filoleg 6y ago
      Yeah, def not a team doing the trades, but more like a finance/trading club within Google (among many other ones they have, like some sports clubs and such). Most big tech companies have that, I bet. I can confirm that MSFT has a "financial advice" club where people discuss trading strategies and such (among other things). It is just an employee club though, not something those people do as a part of their job responsibilities.
- anomaly_ 6y ago
  Every large company has a corporate treasury function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_management
sleepy_keita 6y ago
Google Finance actually used to have a pretty good API. My first iOS app was a client to that API, I was pretty bummed when they shut it down. I'm not surprised that it hardly gets updates though -- it was neglected back then as well.
minouye 6y ago
If anyone is looking for alternatives, I've found Atom Finance to be quite solid - https://atom.finance/ https://atom.finance/
justicezyx 6y ago
Besides the obvious waste and weird decision making of this event, I want to share a bit how this affect the engineers working on the product. I was directly involved in the internal (open) debate (as a bystander and G Finance user at the time) when GFinance team were disbanded and the decision were made to fold it into Search. Back then myself and the then TL of GFinance were engaged in some not so pleasant private messaging over internal mails. And I eventually asked HR to step in so that we can both stop engaging with each other. At the time I was very confused why he would be defending the decision, which was obviously nonsensical, given how different are Finance data and Search, and how valuable is the finance data. Now I can see he probably were too professional and would want to still believe the company actually still cares about the little piece of product area that he has devoted a part of his career into. Fast forward in 2019, I was directly hit by a reorg, where my own project, which I need to work with my manager to directly appeal to the Great Urs Hozle to get an approval (Urs personally rejected the staffing plan previous year), was transferred from Sunnyvale to Warsaw, during the time I am on a baby-bounding leave, and without consulting myself... Well, at the moment I see how futile was it to spend my quickly diminishing creative life at this giant bubble. That's when I joined PixieLabs (https://pixielabs.ai/ https://pixielabs.ai/).
ogre_codes 6y ago
Google: We're launching a new version of Google Finance! Users: But this isn't as good as it was previously! Google: I am altering the Deal, pray I don't alter it any further
spullara 6y ago
Still lacks all the licensed in-depth content about companies that are on Yahoo finance.
arthurcolle 6y ago
But still no finance API. For shame, Google.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Still doesn't seem nearly as good as the Flash version was.
magmasystems 6y ago
Ah, Google Finance. Something close to my heart. In 2011, I was heading development at Citadel's Investment Bank (Citadel being a large hedge fund), after finishing a stint as Citigroup Investment Bank's Chief Architect. I used Google Finance to track my personal portfolio, and I had always wondered about using the scale of Google to make Google Finance a competitor to Bloomberg and Reuters. Someone reached out to me and asked me to interview for the position of "CTO of Google Finance", and I jumped at the chance. First interview was with Phillip Brittain, who was the new Head of Product of GF, having come from Bloomberg. The interview went great ... a complete meeting of the minds as far as where we wanted to take GF. Then I was invited in for the normal in-person Google interview process. I did well enough on my second round to be asked back to do the whole-day set of interviews. The interviews were really fascinated ... a lot of system design questions. But when I described some of the solutions in terms in terms of some of the platforms that financial companies use (ie: Tibco EMS for messaging), I was told by the interviewers to not bring them into my domain. Funny enough, ove rthe two days of interviews, not a single person asked me a question about Google Finance or what my vision was for GF. After several weeks, I heard that I did not have enough support of the Hiring Commitee to be hired. I was a bit puzzled, because I though that I knocked the interviews out of the park, but I went back to my job at Citadel and stayed there until they dissolved the investment bank a few months later. Google never hired anyone for that position. Several years later, a Googler that I knew confided to me that I did not get the job mostly for the reason that Google had quietly decided to sunset GF ... or, at least, reduce its capabilities. No desire for a Bloomberg killer. What a shame. I still think of what I could have done with GF given the scale of Google.

224 points by jbverschoor 6y ago

Looks like it's still missing portfolio functionality, which, as I read somewhere not long ago, will be part of Google Finance soon.

tantalor 6y ago

Sep 9, 2020: https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-investing-information-more-accessible/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-inv...

wittyusername 6y ago

Gosh, it's amazing how they just refuse to make this tool powerful. Still can't set a custom date range, or add technical indicators. I mean these are like 2003 requirements for a decent site let alone 2020. Just off the top of my head..historical data, SEC filings, better volume data, options pricing..

howlgarnish 6y ago
I don't think they're trying to compete with Bloomberg here. This is for casual "how's the stock doing" type queries.
- fibers 6y ago
  They don't need to compete with Bloomberg when they could compete with yahoo instead.
  - three_seagrass 6y ago
    I think Yahoo! Finance is an outlier in that it was pushed by internal management at Yahoo as something they wanted personally, rather than meeting the needs of a large userbase. At least that was the rumor I heard.

seanf 6y ago

Still missing transaction tracking. Hopefully it will come back some day. I migrated to https://wallmine.com/ https://wallmine.com/ when Google Finance announced it was neutering itself. However, I've noticed Wallmine's listings are not always complete. As a couple examples: the insurance company Root isn't listed, the label for JAMF isn't correct. Haven't looked at what is out there in a while, any other alternatives people are using?

flowerlad 6y ago

Their flash-based control was more powerful, for drilling into a time range. This is what that used to look like: https://infovis-wiki.net/wiki/2006-03-27:_Google_Finance_-_Interactive_Flash_graphs_to_explore_stock_price_data https://infovis-wiki.net/wiki/2006-03-27:_Google_Finance_-_I... The new SVG replacement is not as good.

kyrra 6y ago
Highchart's has a UI that is very similar to this and is SVG based (I believe): https://www.highcharts.com/demo/stock/stock-tools-gui https://www.highcharts.com/demo/stock/stock-tools-gui Sadly this seems to continue down Google's trend of simplified controls, fewer power-user type interfaces.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  That's because Google aims itself at the mass market; power users will be on, well, power user tools. Google and Yahoo Finance are fine for a quick glance for me, but I spend at most a few hours a year looking at these things.
xibalba 6y ago
Yes. And the timeline was annotated with significant news events, which was truly fantastic. This used to be an amazing product. Still, it's free, so I'm not going to complain too much.
Denvercoder9 6y ago
The irony is that Google actually maintains an SVG version of the old chart in their charting library, which works pretty well: https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/annotationchart https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery...
kevindong 6y ago
That flash applet was the best that flash could be. It flew through every action without ever hiccuping for me.

tekmaven 6y ago

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F01qztv https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F01q... Google trends predicts interest on the "Stocks" topic is about to go through the roof in the US. Interesting.

standardUser 6y ago

I thought they killed this of many years ago, but maybe that was just the portfolio piece? Hard to want to delve into a Google product these days when the norm is many years without meaningful updates and the constant possibility of the project being killed.

tsjq 6y ago
Yes. "ADHD at industrial level", as someone said .
danesparza 6y ago
Oh don't worry -- I'm sure they'll kill it off soon enough. I'm still bitter about Google Reader.

kordlessagain 6y ago

RIP SWI: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SWI:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SWI:NYSE

oramit 6y ago

What a bizarre press release that accompanies this... https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-investing-information-more-accessible/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-inv... Google Finance used to have all these features. They were already implemented and working fine in 2009! The original chart tool was much better than the current version. You could see every dividend that was issued, splits, add moving averages, etc. Then they "simplified" it by removing all the best features and are now adding them back? Why would I bother to use this when they have so thoroughly torched their goodwill by senselessly killing off working (and good!) products?

londons_explore 6y ago
The world of computers is "reinvent, but slightly different". Remember the "Briefcase" sync feature of windows 95... Now compare that to Dropbox syncing... Pretty much the same thing 25 years on. Different UI, same principle.
- adwww 6y ago
  I never did get what the Briefcase was supposed to do. It was so poorly explained that that was it's purpose. Perhaps because I didn't have any networked computers, and the utility of a Dropbox via floppy disk was so limited...
  - helmholtz 6y ago
    Completely off-topic rant incoming, but Microsoft has very often sucked at advertising itself. Here's a more recent example. I bought a Windows Phone way back when. It was amazing. My favourite feature of it, believe it or not, was the keyboard. I have a sneaky suspicion that they used MS Word's dictionary somehow, because it could correct typos not just when the wrong letter was typed (for instance, typing 'aentence' instead of 'sentence'), but also words typed in the wrong order ('snetence'). It was delightful. I could type as fast as I wanted, confident that auto-correct would take care of any errors. Then I moved to Android, and I could not believe how appalling the keyboard was. But it seems that no one else was talking about it, because android users just didn't know of the excellence that existed out there. Then, at some point, Microsoft went ahead and ruined their keyboard when they went to Windows Phone 10 or 8.1 I can't remember, and I've been searching for perfection ever since. GBoard, with it's fucking emoji page is an affront to engineering.

voisin 6y ago

Has anyone made a robust tool for analyzing the XBRL data the SEC mandated companies file with their 10-Q’s and 10-K’s? Seems like a big opportunity.

eigenvalue 6y ago
Not a good one that is targeted at non-professional investors. I agree, it's a good opportunity. The issue is that companies have a lot of latitude in how they use XBRL once you get outside of the totally standard financial metrics like revenue, gross profit, total liabilities, etc. And those are the metrics that are already largely available in services such as Yahoo Finance for free. What would be really valuable is taking company specific metrics such as unit volumes, orders, backlog, etc. And that requires a ton of work for each company and some knowledge of what the business does. Also, a lot of that data is not yet broken out into XBRL. For example, look how much data from THO (an RV manufacturer) is useful but not detailed in XBRL fields: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/000073026320000019/tho-20200731.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/00007... You can see which parts have XBRL tags by the red lines above and below. If you search the document for "orders" or "units" you can see lots of great information that is basically stranded. I've always thought that it shouldn't be that hard to use a bunch of heuristic rules to find data that is present in the last N 10-K or 10-Q filings (particularly because they tend to reference the previous year results, so you can search for numbers that are the same that are located within K words of certain strings). But it's hard to do something really useful as a one-person effort with some clever coding, which is probably why the services that are out there are niche and expensive.
- bfrink 6y ago
  Calcbench (https://www.calcbench.com/ https://www.calcbench.com/) does this, but as others point out, XBRL is a bit of a mess
- phyalow 6y ago
  CAPIQ basically do this, they normalise it with a human analyst too. Credit Suisse's Holt product also does this.

aminozuur 6y ago

Wow. I am impressed, it looks good. I was disappointed when Google Finance was demoted a few years ago, and many of its handy features were stripped away. I hope it's back for good, and that Google will continue to improve it.

wiredfool 6y ago

Perhaps they could make it into a threaded chat product.

aminozuur 6y ago

I was just playing with building a tiny stock tool for fundamental analysis a few days ago[0]. It's in the extremely early stage and currently uses Polygon's API (made by ex-googlers), although we're looking for an alternative. Polygon's data is often flawed, buggy, absend or outdated. [0] https://eftegarie.com/StockDNA.html https://eftegarie.com/StockDNA.html

derivagral 6y ago
I did this a few years ago with a friend. We settled on using a thing or 2 from Quandl as the best fit (hundreds of $ instead of tens of thousands) after we realized XBRL was a nightmare. We did this privately for investment purposes; if you're making a user-facing thing, perhaps their terms won't fit your case.
- aminozuur 6y ago
  I have looked into Quandl, as well as other finance API's. I just had a call with Intrinio, which will offer me a demo soon. I will have another demo from S&P Global, which I fear will be unaffordable, but it's always worth a try. May I ask what specific usecases your internal tool was built for? And were you in the end able to build it to your satisfaction? I welcome any thoughts.
  - derivagral 6y ago
    At the time, there was nowhere that we knew of on the net that showed fundamental data and metrics yearly or quarterly in columns and didn't cost many thousands. Google Finance used to sort of do this for 2-3 periods, but the available fields were limited and the UI was not friendly to research. So we made a tool where you could: select various series of data, see their historical series, and also visualize your selections. This was helpful to assist our manual screening after we ran our automated filters (think Morningstar, just as a database query). A real manual screen setup might start with something like: "I want retained earnings, outstanding debt, and fully diluted share counts for the last 5 years for AIZ and their top3 competitors". Plotted out, perhaps you notice that property insurance segments are fairly cyclical (weather/season) which can be a useful thing to tease out for an outsider/amateur. Or maybe you note that companies don't always break their revenue sections out the way you want, so you can't even do this analysis! (Looking at you, Alphabet & Youtube.) We started with Yahoo prices and Yahoo fundamental data, but eventually realized that we still had to verify a lot of their data (against EDGAR). Quandl was a step up in price but we worried a lot less about data integrity with that, and by this time we were seeing some confirmation of results for our strategy. We had a good ARR sustained over a couple years. However, the scalar value of the (risky!) gains was far too small to justify either quitting our tech jobs or sustaining an extra 40+ hours a week. The lessons were great, and seeing shenanigans in real life (looking at you, TSLA) but not in headlines is always fascinating. We did do some concepting of a subscription for the research product, but I'd be surprised if that was realistic given our lack of marketing knowledge (and $). RH is a thing now though, so perhaps we were wrong.

derivagral 6y ago

I miss their old version. Both for the basic info and "competition" for Yahoo, as well as pretty good representation of some quick fundamentals. I haven't used the crippled version in years, why would I ever go back?

BoiledCabbage 6y ago

And you still can't do a basic slider to set a time range? I want to see a zoom of how the stock did from 2012 through 2015. This functionality was stripped and still not returned? This is the equivalent of having 5 inconsistently scaled preset zoom levels on Google maps. Zooming in isn't complex, and a lack of it completely weakens how you used a map product (or stock viewer). It's amazing to me that they still haven't fixed what they tore out. Google really struggles with supporting customer products.

vorpalhex 6y ago

Oof, this is like a glorified "my first stock monitor" app. No options drill down, no relevant news or dates, not even comparisons! This is sad and significantly inferior to the old experience - certainly material UI alone wasn't THAT big of a feature?

homero 6y ago

Finance is one place Yahoo is incredible at. I use their app all the time.

jdofaz 6y ago
I don't use their app but when I want to look up a stock price finance.yahoo.com is still the first place I think to look

syntaxing 6y ago

A bit off topic, but does anyone know of a good competitor to the old Google Finance? I loved the old site where you can stack indicators and fancy box and whisker charts.

lwh 6y ago
yahoo finance is okay, not 100% replacement but easier to look at overall and has many of the chart tool google removed

Wonnk13 6y ago

The original from years ago had a solid portfolio management tool where you could track your cost basis and positions. Still haven't found another replacement for that other than good 'ol Excel...

nilsb 6y ago
Yahoo Finance isn't too terrible for that, but I definitely preferred the old Google Finance portfolio feature.

KingMachiavelli 6y ago

Decent interface. Not quite as useful as Yahoo or Marketwatch but good enough 95% of the time. Biggest gripe is that the URL format can't be user to directly open a stock's page without remembering the exchange a given stock is on. This URL will bring up Google's stock: > https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG:NASDAQ This URL will not: > https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG

jordache 6y ago
Are symbols not unique across exchanges?
- KingMachiavelli 6y ago
  I don't think Symbols are technically unique between exchanges, since some exchanges are very old, although I would have trouble coming up with an example where the major US exchanges have conflicts. Given that the Google Finance has a search bar prominently on the page. I would expect/hope that the top result would be used in the event of a conflict. It's very probably in the event of a conflict that one of the potential companies is very common while the rest are niche listings on foreign exchanges anyway.
- rodiger 6y ago
  They're generally unique within a country but not between countries. Eg "Intrepid Mines trades in Canada on the TSX as IAU whereas in the US, IAU is the iShares gold trust ETF" [0] [0] https://www.quora.com/Can-2-publicly-traded-companies-have-the-same-ticker-symbol-across-the-worlds-various-exchanges https://www.quora.com/Can-2-publicly-traded-companies-have-t...
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    There are also exchanges that use numeric symbols like the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong, but ADR shares won't. It's actually quite a shitshow.
- 6y ago

dmw_ng 6y ago

The new search box is hilariously slow. Let me guess, another Angular monstrosity?

TooCreative 6y ago

Too bad you cannot embed the charts. Are there any good embeddable stock widgets out there?

mynameishere 6y ago

Has the same bizarre bug as yahoo finance. Go to the search box and type "F" without the quotes. That's Ford Motor's stock symbol. Press enter. What does it bring up? The first match for "F" which was "FTSE 100". Dumb dumb dumb. If you want "F" [1] you have to click the 2nd or 3rd or whatever result. Painfully bad design. [1] Or TIPS or IEF or SHY or basically everything I've tested.

Miner49er 6y ago

Doesn't even show significant figures beyond a cent. For stocks below a dollar that matters a lot, it just rounds to the nearest cent, it seems.

mimikatz 6y ago

I used to love this product. They explicitly told users to go away a couple years ago. These updates still pale to the old functionality and I am not putting my data back into Google Finance because at some point they will get tired of supporting it and tell me to go away again.

enos_feedler 6y ago

Google Finance seems like a slam dunk for Google's mission of organizing the worlds information and making it universally accessible and useful. Investing is literally gathering this info and making it useful with trading. I am very surprised they don't make a core product for this out of finance. Maybe with the growth of retail investing and the new class of "Robinhood" traders they will start to prioritize this.

ogre_codes 6y ago

I don't use either now, but Google Finance always felt like an also-ran product. It started out with some good features but never quite matched Yahoo Finance. In particular, the GF portfolio tool was quite basic next to Yahoos. That said, it's been a few years since I've used either. Dealing with options on GF was a bit of a pain also. Now, I either stick to the really basic stuff in the stocks app or use Amaeritrade's iPad app which is pretty decent for low level research and I can trade from it. Feels like the days of having a stocks/ business web page are gone, at least for me.

ant6n 6y ago
It was a great product until Google soft-killed it.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  It had great potential, the tools they launched were better than Yahoo Finance, but Google Finance never felt finished to me. There were always big pieces of their toolkit missing. Someone mentioned one of them I'd forgotten about which is a portfolio tracker where you could effectively track your cost basis.

supernova87a 6y ago

I just never understood how Google, with 100,000 employees, could let such a mainstream product display such shoddy functionality that is not rocket science. Their interface couldn't drag and drop stock tickers, reorganize your list, update correctly, etc. Basic usability. Maybe I don't know how tech companies' product management works, if it's underresourced or what, but such a giant company allowing a product (a simple, basic, not even requiring huge product innovation) to sleepwalk is hard to understand. Do their team not get rewarded for working on basic, non-flashy products? Is that why it stagnated?

adventured 6y ago
There isn't much money to be derived from the product (as is) and it takes a small team of people to focus on it in order to maintain it. Someone with at least a modicum of influence has to care about the product and drive resources at it persistently so it doesn't rot. Google is unlikely to want to go further and build or acquire a stock broker business, so they're going to struggle to extract much money out of the category over time. This is Google doing the bare minimum as an alternative to just shutting down another product. I'm surprised it has survived this long.
brown9-2 6y ago
Institutionally, Google has a hard time caring about things that won’t scale to large revenue.
htrp 6y ago
Professionally, googlers don't care about products that won't get them promoted, google finance was about as boring as it came.

1980phipsi 6y ago

On the top they have US, Europe, Asia, Currencies, Crypto. Crypto? They should have interest rates well before crypto. Commodities are also far more relevant than crypto.

htrp 6y ago
not to the gPM who owns the product

pratyushmittal 6y ago

Please try out https://www.screener.in https://www.screener.in for Indian stocks. It is Bloomberg for common man. We provide 10-15 years of financial history in a simple interface. Plus lots of tools for finding and analysing companies.

ipozgaj 6y ago

Most of the "new" features are just eye candy, but usability is still very poor and way behind what they had 10 years ago. You can't do even the most trivial things, like sorting stocks in your watch-list by market value or P/E ratio, comparing two stocks side by side etc.

jliptzin 6y ago

Looks nicer I guess, still missing a lot. No option chains, etc. Still pretty useless in my opinion.

1970-01-01 6y ago

Great! Where is the "Google Finance Privacy Policy" Oh, they forgot to update that part.

ElliotH 6y ago
Here: https://policies.google.com/privacy https://policies.google.com/privacy you scroll to the bottom and press Privacy.
- 1970-01-01 6y ago
  There's nothing here for Google Finance or portfolio data. https://policies.google.com/technologies/product-privacy https://policies.google.com/technologies/product-privacy

pm2222 6y ago

The old one is better. And I'm no longer a google finance user due to the disruption.

popara 6y ago

Shameless plug, different way to visualize investments and risk. https://chartbehavior.com/ https://chartbehavior.com/

hwatkins 6y ago
Good looking charts, interesting you show declines
- popara 6y ago
  Thank you, what are you seeing on those charts are real risks, that would reflect on your balance statement. Very useful if you are comparing two competing investments eg: https://chartbehavior.com/app/v/IWD,%20IWF/2019/2020/cy_4!25?show= https://chartbehavior.com/app/v/IWD,%20IWF/2019/2020/cy_4!25...

davidkuennen 6y ago

Shameless Plug: I created https://stockevents.app https://stockevents.app a year ago. It has somewhat of a different approach to track stocks.

snakedoctor 6y ago

Google Finance looks similar to Robinhood's UI. Though I've heard rumors of Google having an internal team 'google treasury' that trades stocks. I would actually be surprised if Google didn't have an internal team doing so. Similar to Jane Street/Rentech/TGS. Google has loads of more data though.

mcintyre1994 6y ago
Is that the same sort of idea as Apple’s Braeburn Capital?
htrp 6y ago
It's definitely not the actual google treasury team.... and knowing the shitstorm that they would get from that getting leaked, I doubt there's a shadow hedge fund running in google.
- Maven911 6y ago
  Maybe not HF but they have a pretty serious group of traders / setup that parallels some WS firms from what I heard too
  - filoleg 6y ago
    Yeah, def not a team doing the trades, but more like a finance/trading club within Google (among many other ones they have, like some sports clubs and such). Most big tech companies have that, I bet. I can confirm that MSFT has a "financial advice" club where people discuss trading strategies and such (among other things). It is just an employee club though, not something those people do as a part of their job responsibilities.
anomaly_ 6y ago
Every large company has a corporate treasury function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_management

sleepy_keita 6y ago

Google Finance actually used to have a pretty good API. My first iOS app was a client to that API, I was pretty bummed when they shut it down. I'm not surprised that it hardly gets updates though -- it was neglected back then as well.

minouye 6y ago

If anyone is looking for alternatives, I've found Atom Finance to be quite solid - https://atom.finance/ https://atom.finance/

justicezyx 6y ago

Besides the obvious waste and weird decision making of this event, I want to share a bit how this affect the engineers working on the product. I was directly involved in the internal (open) debate (as a bystander and G Finance user at the time) when GFinance team were disbanded and the decision were made to fold it into Search. Back then myself and the then TL of GFinance were engaged in some not so pleasant private messaging over internal mails. And I eventually asked HR to step in so that we can both stop engaging with each other. At the time I was very confused why he would be defending the decision, which was obviously nonsensical, given how different are Finance data and Search, and how valuable is the finance data. Now I can see he probably were too professional and would want to still believe the company actually still cares about the little piece of product area that he has devoted a part of his career into. Fast forward in 2019, I was directly hit by a reorg, where my own project, which I need to work with my manager to directly appeal to the Great Urs Hozle to get an approval (Urs personally rejected the staffing plan previous year), was transferred from Sunnyvale to Warsaw, during the time I am on a baby-bounding leave, and without consulting myself... Well, at the moment I see how futile was it to spend my quickly diminishing creative life at this giant bubble. That's when I joined PixieLabs (https://pixielabs.ai/ https://pixielabs.ai/).

ogre_codes 6y ago

Google: We're launching a new version of Google Finance! Users: But this isn't as good as it was previously! Google: I am altering the Deal, pray I don't alter it any further

spullara 6y ago

Still lacks all the licensed in-depth content about companies that are on Yahoo finance.

arthurcolle 6y ago

But still no finance API. For shame, Google.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Still doesn't seem nearly as good as the Flash version was.

magmasystems 6y ago

Ah, Google Finance. Something close to my heart. In 2011, I was heading development at Citadel's Investment Bank (Citadel being a large hedge fund), after finishing a stint as Citigroup Investment Bank's Chief Architect. I used Google Finance to track my personal portfolio, and I had always wondered about using the scale of Google to make Google Finance a competitor to Bloomberg and Reuters. Someone reached out to me and asked me to interview for the position of "CTO of Google Finance", and I jumped at the chance. First interview was with Phillip Brittain, who was the new Head of Product of GF, having come from Bloomberg. The interview went great ... a complete meeting of the minds as far as where we wanted to take GF. Then I was invited in for the normal in-person Google interview process. I did well enough on my second round to be asked back to do the whole-day set of interviews. The interviews were really fascinated ... a lot of system design questions. But when I described some of the solutions in terms in terms of some of the platforms that financial companies use (ie: Tibco EMS for messaging), I was told by the interviewers to not bring them into my domain. Funny enough, ove rthe two days of interviews, not a single person asked me a question about Google Finance or what my vision was for GF. After several weeks, I heard that I did not have enough support of the Hiring Commitee to be hired. I was a bit puzzled, because I though that I knocked the interviews out of the park, but I went back to my job at Citadel and stayed there until they dissolved the investment bank a few months later. Google never hired anyone for that position. Several years later, a Googler that I knew confided to me that I did not get the job mostly for the reason that Google had quietly decided to sunset GF ... or, at least, reduce its capabilities. No desire for a Bloomberg killer. What a shame. I still think of what I could have done with GF given the scale of Google.