Kudos to the Google Finance team. While Google Finance’s first lead, Katie Stanton is off galavanting somewhere within the Obama administration (go Katie!), Google Finance hasn’t missed a step. While I may be criticized as a G Finance pump monkey, I’ve always enjoyed their simple platform. For looking up quotes, monitoring the portfolio and simple charting, it’s always been my first stop online. For more in-depth research, like poring over balance sheet info or looking at industry information, I still use Yahoo Finance and a slew of others (I really like what Wikinvest is doing with their data — check it out).
For a simple overview, check out my article comparing both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.
While Yahoo has always been the 800 lb gorilla in online finance sites, Google has not seen a lot of success here. I think a lot of this had to do with the sheer amount of information Yahoo has on its platform. From press releases to news to blogs, Yahoo’s effort was about creating a good user experiences across numerous different content and data sources. Google Finance, as per its search background, was always about figuring out what users were looking for in the research process and just pointing them there. Less time on the site the better. Outside of some basic charting and portfolio tracking, Google Finance was classic portal.
So, without much fanfare, Google Finance rolled out a slew of new functionality and a nicer interface last week. While there is nothing groundbreaking here, I do think that the new changes represent a change of thinking on the Google Finance team. Instead of merely pointing users out of Google and sending them on their way, this new iteration of Google Finance understands that online finance users are looking for an environment that has a unified feel to it and doesn’t require hunting down information on numerous other sites.
I just wanted to call out a couple of interesting things here in the new version of Google Finance:
Some Changes
Homepage
- Improved layout and customization elements: I’ve always liked that you could get everything that you needed on a stock in one page on Google Finance. That overarching usability is improved upon and Google has added more to a single page and still retained its usefulness. Users can add, subtract or move different modules on the homepage (I want to see top news first and then, portfolio-related news or vice-versa).
- Recent activities module: Both Google and Yahoo allow you to see instant stock quotes on recently viewed stocks. Google Finance takes this a step further and allows you to retrace any of your previous activities. This is really useful for those of us with ADD stock research tendencies. In seriousness, stock research is frequently interspersed with other activities and more often, when we see one data point, it requires us to jump to another. These research bread crumbs allow us to retrace our activities to recalibrate. It’s useful. By the way, you can also create a quick watchlist portfolio populated by recent stock quotes. I see how this can be useful if you are in heavy research mode.
- World markets module: It’s nice to see currency movements AND how other markets performed on the homepage.
- Bond yields: Also important and useful to have here.
- Sector comparisons: It’s nice that Google allows you to do this. It aids stock discovery, but it’s pretty bare-bones. I’d like to see some more output here.
Stock pages
- Cleaned up quote box: Google has cleaned up its quote box (see below) and has placed alongside it how well the stock is performing against the overall market and its sector. Google has also added some relative data into the quote box, including today’s volume and how it relates to average volume. Also helpful.
- Expanded comparative companies module: This module gives you a quick view for sizing up a particular stock against its sector or competitors, including some customization that allows users to display which information is most useful to them. Not sure how useful this is, though, in relation to how much real estate it gets.
- Key stats and ratios: There appears to be more meat here on the individual page as it relates to financial metrics which a link to more info at Thomson Reuters. I’d like to see some more Google smarts put to use here and add real ratios according to industry metrics (like Wikinvest is doing). If Google doesn’t want to, port in some of Wikinvest’s data because it’s really useful for stock-specific research.
- Technical charting: Google has introduced technical chart overlays on top of their basic chart, which I thought was one of the easiest to use and most useful in the industry. Now, investors who use the MACD or RSI technical can do so. Some smarts in the system here: I played around and empowered the SMA technical and wanted to add not only the 20-day but the 50 and 100-day and Google allows you to add more technicals like this and even pre-populates the check boxes accordingly. Makes things easier to use. I founds some of the charting a little buggy.
Anyone else have any feedback? Let me know in the comments below.
Google Finance has been gunning for Yahoo Finance for years. This new interface takes them part of the way. I’m looking to Google to mix it up a bit if the company is really serious about competing in this space.
Additional Resources:
- Google Finance vs. Yahoo Finance
- Top 5 Investment Sites
- Google Finance’s post on learning about the new interface
