Google Finance hits Web
...New services to compete with Yahoo, other sites: Google’s finance area, at finance.google.com, was to be up running sometime overnight. It will offer many of the same features as its established competitors, such as stock information, the ability to create a personal portfolio and access to a discussion board. But it also has some new twists, including stock charts that note when major news events take place and a sample of blog postings by amateurs about individual companies.
I clicked in at about 1:00 this morning and I have to say I was pretty impressed. The first thing you’ll notice is the uncluttered interface. Ads permeate all the other sites in this sector, to an almost blinding level.
Jumping through for a quick look at AAPL, I liked the ajaxed stock price charts—they make it feel about 10x faster than Yahoo for that one important function. In addition to the blog postings, it also has a strong set of external information links. The list of executives pops a small bio and photo of the indivdual, when you mouse over their name.
Where the site really shines is with mutual funds. Funds are second-class citizens on all the major personal finance sites—until this morning, you needed to hit Morningstar to find anything of substance on these most-popular of investments. Performance, Morningstar ratings and Risk data, plus the same excellent charting functions as the stocks, make this a comprehensive resource for the average investor.
On first glance, I’d like to see a more comprehensive portfolio view, with a place for factoring in fees, but I think this is a play to provide the basics that will appeal to a broad cross-section of 401K account holders and other “surface-level” investors. Even without some of the sophisticated portfolio functions seen on Yahoo or MSN, I’m sold on google finance.