Google launches a finance thing. Is it a portal? Is it a portfolio tool? Is it headlines and tickers?
Well, it won’t track OTC pink sheets, so that sucks. Yahoo Finance does that. Actually, in a five minute kick of the tires I see absolutely nothing of interest. Yuck. This is like a sub component of Google News, only worse. The portfolio tool is entire unsophisticated, and sure, there’s a little AJAXy rollover thing going on with the market charts. Headlines click to news.
What was I looking for?
A very sophisticated portfolio management system — those are so 90s and have been beaten to death by the finance pubs, but ultimately owned by the brokerages. People want their stocks and bonds where they can trade em, not where they can look at them. To own portfolio page views you need desktop widgets, realtime quotes, etc. etc. Goog Fin ain’t even in the parking lot of the ballpark.
News is news. I don’t see any customization capabilities of headlines related to my stocks.
No technical analysis.
No original content — no Bankrate, no Money, no personal finance.
Here’s what the FAQ says is notable about the product:
- Company Search — With Google Finance you can search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies, using both company names and (where available) ticker symbols. [really? Imagine that. DC]
- Interactive Charts — Google Finance charts correlate market data with corresponding dated news stories to help you determine if there is a relationship between them (for instance, by seeing news stories that came out about a certain company in the context of what that company’s stock did that day). You can also click and drag the charts to see different time periods and zoom in to see more detailed information. [we’ll see. DC]
- News and More News — Google Finance incorporates our Google News service, which gathers stories from more than 4,500 English news sources worldwide. Stories are clustered by topic so you can see different opinions on a single subject; you can also review news stories by monthly date range and by importance (which is determined by algorithms). [snore. DC]
- Blogs — If you want the opinions of citizen journalists, you got ’em; Google Finance includes company-related postings from Google Blog Search. [I haven’t checked out the finance blogosphere … seems ripe for the pump-and-dump gang. DC]
- Company Management Team — Google Finance helps you put a face to a name. Mousing over an executive name shows you their picture as well as links, where available, to their biography, compensation details and trading activity. [Semi-cool. Forbes.com does a much better job with the tearsheet model. DC]
- Discussion Groups — Talk amongst yourselves. Google Finance offers high-quality Discussion Groups whose dedicated team of moderators work to keep conversations on and spam-free. [Moderation is semi-cool. DC]
- Portfolios — Google Finance offers a fast, easy and powerful way to keep create and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.” [Not in this first rev it don’t.DC]
Blech. This one should have stewed in beta longer. I’m sure it will get cooler, but for now, Yahoo wins in finance.
[update: the power of the product is what we called at Forbes.com a “tearsheet” model. to see it in action, run a stock symbol through the search box and the results are a fairly good consolidated tearsheet of what one needs to know about that instrument at that point in time. Google gets a B+ for tearsheet design and is actually superlative to Yahoo in that regard. The charting is pretty cool with the designators of major news events against the trendline — Google didn’t invent that — Valueline did]
