Google Finance

Google Finance is out and I must say I like it. The chart is dynamic flash and news items are overlayed on it with letters corresponding to the news items listed to the right of the chart. You can click and drag the chart just like a Google Map.You can move the mouse along the chart and a guide is shown on the chart that also displays the date, price, and volume of that day.

You can hover over the Management and see a picture along with a blurb about th employee, with links to a Bio, Compensation, and Trading Activity (provided by third-parties). When reading financial statements in Google Finance, you can easily switch from Overview to Income Statement to Balance Sheet to Cash Flow using javascript. You can also switch from Quarterly Data to Annual Data.

It’s nice how they integrate all the information on one page, including blog posts. What is best of all is teh Discussions section which is integrated with Google Groups and allows you to discuss any stock you lookup, as well as see any discussions others are having.

And did I mention the Google Portfolio? You can add any stock you lookup to your portfolio, which is then listed next to ‘My Account’ when you are in Google Finance. It’s a very simple portfolio that is easy to manage and edit. If you had stocks listed in the Google Personalized Home, they get imported into your portfolio and you can add your buy price and how many shares you own.

The only problem I have found so far with Google Finance is that the stock charts only go back 5 years. This is not enough for people wanting to see how a stock has done historically. It doesn’t even show some of the high points of stocks since it misses the dot-com boom and bust completely.