Google Finance

Comments (Archived):

1. The other good thing about Yahoo! Finance is they are including a few cryptocurrencies now, unlike Google Finance. Here’s a sample watchlist: https://uploads.disquscdn.c…

   1. “!” – was that a copy and paste? 🙂 I’ve never before seen anyone take the trouble to type the exclamation mark.what criteria does Yahoo! Finance have for choosing which currencies to list?

      1. Yahoo! is the right way to write it.

         1. how is it pronounced?

            1. Ya-hoooooo [with excitement]

2. One other difference that I liked with Google Finance was the quality of the related news to stocks. When I use Yahoo, I find a lot of the related news articles to be very spammy so I end up getting my news on other sites.

3. is that you feeding on the beast, or is that the beast feeding on you?

4. Bloomberg is worth considering: https://www.bloomberg.com/q…

   1. Bloomberg is okay but like the WSJ you have to scroll and scroll to get the basic info. It’s more efficient in a table but you get much less advertising space! 😉

5. I miss the ability to see YTD performance across securities of google finance.. the change in service is so bad I thought they were no longer maintaining google finance as a service. Shocking that the “upgrade” got through.

6. I find this happens with several Google products.Now I know that anytime you make a U/X change people will be unhappy.But it seems strange to bury or remove features.I am not sure why. I surmise that part of it is not having great U/X people and letting programmers who need to show they are doing something make changes for the sake of change not better.There are two things I have found over the years:Programmers or anybody for that matter get tired of how things look and want to change things (no different than moving furniture). But they have to remember the users don’t work on the product every day.Also people believe in the fallacy that: That feature doesn’t get used much, rip it out.I tell people nobody uses more than 20% of our product, but 100% is used by somebody.The classic example is word count in Word. Who cares? Except if you are a student or writer.

   1. No matter what they have, or how good it is, some people want a MAKE-over!!! The reasons are any reason or no reason. The drive for the MAKE-over can be a user or a vendor.

   2. That feature doesn’t get used much, rip it out. I tell people nobody uses more than 20% of our product, but 100% is used by somebody.Here are examples of that:- People buy 4wd or AWD cars even in places that snow is rare. They like knowing it’s there if they need it.- The sum of a lot of small things often tips the balance to make you stay with a product or service. Your brain rationalizes the value in a way that doesn’t make sense when a propeller head or finance guy analyzes the numbers.- I drive out of my way to Whole Foods every other day because I like the bagels. I have other options closer and easier to get. When I am there I buy a host of other products honestly because I am in the store. Who doesn’t? As I’ve mentioned before this is why Wawa will have such a hard time getting rid of cigarettes and can lose money selling them. (Brings in their type of buyer which they can then sell that unhealthy food to).- People want balconies in condos, vacation properties, homes, hotel rooms even though they rarely use them.Bottom line is people place a high value on things even if they are rarely needed or used. (This is how the insurance industry works in part).

      1. >The sum of a lot of small things often tips the balance to make you stay with a product or service.Right. Geoffrey Moore has a term for this concept, in his book “Crossing the Chasm” [1] (which was mentioned here on AVC a few weeks ago. I had also commented, so had @JamesHRH). The term is “the whole product” [2], and it is made up of many parts: the main product itself, with its features and benefits, the ancillary products / plugins / addons, services and training and consulting around it, etc. Powerful concept, and works.[1] @JamesHRH said it is the bible of B2B marketing.https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…Excerpt:[ Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers or simply Crossing the Chasm (1991, revised 1999 and 2014), is a marketing book by Geoffrey A. Moore [1] that focuses on the specifics of marketing high tech products during the early start up period.Moore’s exploration and expansion of the diffusions of innovations model has had a significant and lasting impact on high tech entrepreneurship.In 2006, Tom Byers, director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, described it as “still the bible for entrepreneurial marketing 15 years later”.[2]The book’s success has led to a series of follow-up books and a consulting company, The Chasm Group.[3]][2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

      2. I paid 2.5x per square foot to live closer to a beach that I never go to. Could live miles further and Uber to the beach every day and would still save money compared to living so close to said beach

7. I’m noticing a lot more goofs from Google lately. Suffering from “big tech co. syndrome”. And how about the messaging experience on Android? Let’s not even talk about Google Developers. The only place I must say the user experience is superb is on the Google Cloud Platform.

   1. See my comment there are three things at play here.You hire and get lots of people and they feel they have to do something, I am stunned at the number of developers at some of these companies.You know what they say about too many cooks.The last is interesting: When you are small you just make changes whenever you feel like it, get it wrong three times and then get it right before a big company makes a decision, I always say.BUT: As an Amex executive told me. That’s great at your size, but screwing up something at Amex….the penalty of firing is just not nearly enough.I think Google has kept the ethos of lets do it on the fly. Again great when you are small.

      1. Creative vision needs to be driven by 1 person not many. This is like the classic ‘camel is a horse by committee’ situation. Not that you can’t get input from various people but in the end one person has to have both the skill to choose and be the decider. And importantly not to have any people waiting to stab them for that decision (sole owner of a company or a primadonnna employee gets that benefit is what I have found).I think this is the same for most business decisions. You do your best work when you can take input but in the end go with what your gut tells you to do. Take the chance and not have to worry about anything but win or lose.This morning I gave my wife the strategy for a letter that she had to write that involved negotiation. She told me she didn’t feel comfortable doing what I was telling her to do. “It’s not me I don’t threaten like that” (wasn’t a threat but she saw it that way). The letter was for a situation that didn’t just impact her however unfortunately I didn’t want to press the issue because, well, it’s not worth it (for the gain) to be wrong in my assessment. The funny thing is after I explained to her the different letter strategies and how there were actually 3 more riskier ways to write the letter she ended up on her own writing something even more risky than the one that I suggested. (A matter of positioning the product in the consumer’s mind (my wife) I guess).

8. I did exactly the same!

9. For the price quotes that no longer work, use https://www.alphavantage.co/ — they even have crypto!

10. Wow – GOOG finance is truly awful; I have no idea who their target user might conceivably be or how they could put this version to production!

11. I have been a Yahoo Finance guy for two decades and am very frustrated with it now. The newsfeed is off and doesn’t work properly. Don’t even understand how you can screw that up. Options tab is hard to read and understand.

12. Can get a quote from the search but site is not so hot.Bloomberg.com like @markgavagan:disqus mentions

    1. Perhaps some of the worst graphic design ever on that bloomberg homepage.

       1. No question, but good info. Terminal is best

13. Yup: Standard problem in software. Get something you like, and then someone changes it to something worse:(1) Sure, early on computing was highly centralized. So, the hardware (A) was really expensive and (B) needed expert care and feeding, and (A) and (B) were too expensive for most users, especially individual end users. That situation is still with us, e.g., Yahoo Finance versus Google Finance and, in general, what is in a cloud.(2) So, the centralized stuff split into smaller computers for smaller groups of people and maybe just one person. So, now people can computers they own with their own software and data.(3) Long the biggest problem has been managing the computing: If one person has all their own computing, then they have full control but have to do all the managing; if they share the computing, then they lose full control and encounter a political process and sometimes like the management decisions.(4) Hard/software vendors commonly don’t like individuals having full control and are moving to various means of retaining control and making management decisions that some users won’t like.An implicit rule used to be that if had a copy of some software, then could just install it and run it essentially forever. If get a new computer, then with the implicit “backwards compatibility” could just run the old software on the new computer. Now often this compatibility is broken.It’s a continuing struggle between the user and the vendor, for control, privacy, etc.I’m switching over from 10 year old computer that was running Windows XP 32 bit Professional SP3 to a new computer with Windows 7 64 bit Professional SP1. And at the same time I’m using an HP laptop with Windows 10 64 bit Home Edition.Net, a lot of the software that I had on my old XP system won’t work on my Windows 10 system or my new hardware. A LOT.Areas with lots of trouble are (A) copying CD/DVDs and (B) playing video.Apparently the security problems caused big needs for updates, and the updates have opened the door to vendors getting a lot more control over PCs. E.g., now Windows 10 isn’t just and operating system but a “service”.So, I’m sitting here wasting hours and hours just trying to have working again what I had working really well on my old XP system. This is mud wrestling and no fun. I can’t get all of the old software to work. The situation is so bad I decided to install on my new computer BOTH old Windows XP 32 bit Professional SP3 ANDWindows 7 64 bit Professional SP1. Then I will install applications on XP that won’t work on Windows 7 or 10. I appears that my old software for working with DVDs will have to run on Windows XP. Some of the software I was running on XP was also tied to certain Asus motherboards — my new computer also has an Asus motherboard but, still, that old software won’t install.E.g., I was using a centrally managed computer and had carefully developed some foils for presentations. So, the night before a presentation, I wanted to tweak the foils a little and make copies again. NOPE! In the meanwhile some of the software I had used had had an “update” or new version, and it made a mess out of my foils. So, the night before my presentation I was up most of the night redoing the foils with the new software. Later I was not kind to the people in the centrally managed computer that denied me access to the old software. Their response was the usual one that the new software was better. That the new software ruined all my old work with foils and more and cost me sleep was of no concern to them.Users can have full control or they can share, but the sharing gets to be a political, etc. struggle.Same thing happened with some car air conditioning: When finally I had money enough to order air conditioning in a car, soon some political forces denied me working fluid for the air conditioning. So, the car had no air conditioning.

14. I’ve used Google Finance too since the beginning. I’m so disappointed in the lack of attention and development it has received over *the last decade!* Even two full time developers there could have made this a great product and extended all kind of power to Google Sheets but they did basically nothing.The update has made it very difficult to just get what was simple before – a quote with a chart and some basic numbers. Now you have to click through to find that information.It feels like the product management team on Google Finance is not comprised of anyone who is an active investor, stock analyst or even a person with a financial background.There is a paid service – Money.net that is okay, a little too much probably. Seems like there is an opening for some enterprising people to build a simple free financial site – probably good demographics in the potential user base.

15. Yahoo & Google Finance have been ancillary resources and go to sites for years, along side some heavy pay $ub$criptions. Between the two, access to information, from profiles to key stats and filters has been a golden addition for professsional use. Charts and portfolios were more my faves with Google, the rest I deferred to Yahoo. Bloomberg terminals, Morningstar Advisor Workstation and WFA’s proprietary systems have been used significantly less and less for the same info that’s specifically available on yahoo and google finance. Given their value for so many perhaps tokenized pay systems are in their future…

16. CONTRIBUTORS:The boredom of Developers and their reasons to justify their employment.The term can be called the Google kill cycle.The Google applications people get attached to the benefits then killed off like a favorite movie character after four great films. (Logan-Wolverine)1. Google Reader 2. iGoogle3. Google Labs4. Google Notebook5. Google Helpouts6. Google Wave7. Google Answer8. Picasa9. Picnik10. Google Buzzsource: Lifehacker Never take credit for others hardwork.Captain Obvious!#UnequivocallyUnapologeticallyIndependent

    1. google health

    2. Man, did I love iGoogle…

       1. mikenolan99:The issue is that Google never listens to suggestions or those apps we enjoy wouldn’t disappear. The developers don’t even use what they develop. Most are on Apple products. That is the disconnect.Captain Obvious!#UnequivocallyUnapologeticallyIndependent

17. Try ycharts.com, better than both.

    1. They need to give an indication of the prices on the pricing page not just ‘call for information’ and try for free.

       1. Use what the pros use. it’s super cheap for what you get. Bloomberg will run you thousands a month. They have a bare bones freemium service, but by coughing up a small amount of money per month, you get incredible analytics. I have lined up options trades on it. Figure if you hit the jackpot on one trade it pays for the year, so the cost is cheap. Fred can figure out where Bitcoin and Twitter are headed. Allows you to download to a sheet too!

          1. Are we looking at the same site? I see no freemium level at all. Just a free trial for 7 days.If there is a comparison made to Bloomberg they should talk about it in terms of % of cost of Bloomberg. That should be part of their marketing.

18. I have been testing out https://wallmine.com to some success. I have found the change has drove me to StockTwits more regularly and to my broker. I was very disappointed by the change and think the UX on the new format is completely terrible. No positive changes.

19. .Market Watch desktop version is the best I have found particularly its 5-year compilation of detailed financial statements.I have never found a bit of data I wanted to be missing.It takes the tiniest bit of familiarity. I just shortcut to what I use all the timeJLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

    1. If looking around for trade ideas, especially on a shorter timeframe, FinViz is it.

    2. Agreed. I moved from Yahoo Finance to MarketWatch, though I still use Yahoo on occasion. But I never could stand Google Finance, and that was *before* all the changes that seem to have driven Fred off.

       1. .I am constantly looking at 5 year trends, so the comparative financials are very useful.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

20. It’s more than just financial data! Business news is super ripe for disruption. @cnbc I’m has driven off the cliff. People can differ on cryptography. But it certainely should not have been a front page business news story for 24 months, with Tom Lee 50k forecasts day after day. In addition, the quality of writing at the @wsj is has trended down for years now.

21. Book marking robinhood web might be a better option … http://blog.robinhood.com/n… it is a great UI with advanced tools and the tacit knowledge of your preferences…

22. I also find it hard to search for a price quote now, which is kind of the most basic feature one would want in a service like this.I haven’t used google finance for some time but took a look. It’s almost scary how they didn’t put shadow text into the box at the top so that someone would know to put the ticker symbol there.Also typing finance.google.com end up redirecting to something like https://www.google.com/sear… which also makes no sense from a user’s perspective and doesn’t drill in the URL they should be returning to in their mind. [1]In finance.yahoo.com of course there are two places to put a ticker symbol complete with shadow text (per the attached image). Very easy for google to fix and add (Woz could write the code in a weekend) but scary how such smart people are not doing that.[1] I call this the ‘alarm code manual type in’. Even if I have a fob for the alarm code I often type it in manually so I don’t forget it which is what will happen over time. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…

23. I used Google Finance for half a decade to manage my portfolio of stocks and mutual funds. Used it daily. A simple table is often the best UX. Was very disappointed when they killed the portfolio feature. Ultimately had to move to Yahoo Finance.Larger and more interesting thought is that it seems like I’m using Google less and less. Gmail is the only product that I use actively. Can’t remember when I last went to Google.com. 50% of the time browser suggestions directly take me to the website I want to go to. Remaining times I do land up in Google’s search results page. But as long as the result I’m looking for shows up, the results page might well be powered by DuckDuckGo. Out of sight, out of mind.Then there is the Hangouts feature that no one in my company uses (even though its free with Google Business account), but we switched to UberConference. Workplace chat is powered by Slack. The day Slack offers an email id for business, we will switch from Gmail in a heartbeat.Seems like Google is distracted exactly when they are being disrupted left and right.

24. I prefer http://www.koyfin.com to look at charts and financial statements, but I’m biased 🙂 We’ve seen a ton of former Google finance users switch to our site.

    1. Look like a nice service. good work. Love the graphing. giving it a try.

    2. Nice job Rob, love it.

    3. Does it support London Stock Exchange shares?

       1. We don’t support LSE currently but we will in the next several months. If you created a free account on Koyfin you’ll get an email announcing it or you can follow @koyfincharts on Twitter

    4. Nice work Roy! I just signed up.

25. I’ve been using koyfin.com for the past few months analytics have been really helpful for trading especially in this volatile market.

26. Yes for bringing back Google Finance! As a side note, what’s remarkable is that despite almost every stock exchange in the world having a website with published share prices (ok, delayed 15 mins), neither Google nor Yahoo Finance have plugged into them to be able to pull such prices. So if I need to look up the price of a stock in Kuwait, I need to go to the stock exchange’s website, or Bloomberg. Then again, Bloomberg is no Yahoo or Google finance (UI and functionality wise).It would be great to have a single interface that allows you to search all published share prices on the web.

27. Reduction of functionality without significant penalty is something UX designers live by. But many make the mistake of “removal” of function as they tend to not be power users.Good UX designers then “hide” power user functionality.Great UX designers, find a way to hide the features but then make the features a preference for the power user.

28. I was a Google Finance power user, and noticed the same thing. Now I am forced to use Yahoo Finance, primarily, and Morningstar to compensate.

29. I’ve really enjoyed using stockrow.com recently. Highly recommend!

30. What a timely post. I was on Google Finance earlier today and just noticed the UI, hated it, and immediately switched to Yahoo. The new layout is much less informative than the old one. I don’t really know what kind of process a company goes through to overhaul the UI of a product used by many millions, but I can’t imagine most people find the new dashboard preferable.

31. We think http://www.sharesight.com is a good google finance alternative, but we might be biased.

32. I used to use the chart overlay a lot, with the ability to add any (and multiple) tickers to a chart for comparisons. This was huge for me.

33. Same. Or maybe Google Finance is just not a priority for the GOOG. YF’s fancy interactive charts are much nicer but I miss GF’s cute little charts for financials.

34. Totally agree with your review…I find the new GF version painful and frustrating; they had a good thing going. I’ve switched back to YF now as well, it’s not the best but all-in-all, it’s works a little better for my purposes.Bummed out about google’s update.

35. Have a look at https://craft.co/, which is great on private companies too

36. Try http://www.finviz.com

37. Fully agree, they destroyed Google Finance. The primary benefit for me was to very quickly check my portfolio and see that day’s performance. Now, even doing such a simple task is extremely difficult. Definitely a design fail.

38. Google Finance redesign is so bad that I can’t help but believe they did it on purpose. They weren’t making any money with their Finance product, and deliberately chased users away to significantly reduce the cost of keeping it up and running. Yahoo, unfortunately, is not as good as it was in the past either. I find it quite amazing that after 20 years, free finance sites have not progressed, and in fact are worse than ever.

39. Change headline to “Fred Wilson hates Google Finance”. The CEO will get it fixed.

40. We’re biased too, but we see that people download WealthTrack app to monitor stocks in real-time http://apple.co/2E9XD71

41. Not only did Google Finance lose a lot of features, but their mutual quote information is wrong. Its now Monday April 23 at 8pm ET (5pm PT). They are still showing all mutual fund closing prices from last Friday. Everyone else has the new daily price around 3pm ET. Its been broken for more than a year and reported. Try a quote search for VTSAX and you will see what I mean. The =googlefinance() API also doesn’t have the correct info either.

42. Fully agree. I use Investing.com, particularly since I track stocks from different markets across the world. But I validate with Yahoo Finance. Pure suggestion – I have no vested interests.

43. I too agree the views expressed. Thinking to change to yahoo finance

44. Google the shark!The team at ‘Alpha’-‘Bet’ FKA Google thinks they are really smart.This is simply a wonderful example of losing sight of the core requirement in any product – solve the simple problem first.With respect to Google, there are many examples where they seem to be losing sight of this.

45. I developing a free web-app modelled on the old version of gf. The prototype will be ready in a few weeks..If anyone’s interested there’s more info here.. https://basic-capital.com/Also if you have any personal recommendations or suggestions for it, get me on twitter. Would be happy to hear them!https://twitter.com/BasicCa…

46. Hey Fred –I’m a data analyst/hacker. And I saw this ad on FB (https://www.tealsk12.org/sc….I’m interested in possibly bringing one kid in for an internship. I had one good teacher who basically inspired me to study math and I figured we could possibly do the same for some high school kid over the summer.Any advice? Suggestions? Preferably a minority kid who exhibits some talent in Math. I don’t know. I’d like that. To kind of pay it forward.Any advice would be appreciated.– Curtis Sumpter

47. Google has ruined Google Finance. Some shares now point to the wrong data! (BP on thE LSE is one such).

48. Hey Fred, I’ve always wondered, I’m sure you’re heavily invested in your own fund, and clearly some crypto. Where else do you invest? Do you like property, gold, stocks, passive investing? I always wondered