The search-engine giant Google launched an important website called Google Finance in March 2006. It’s been a bonanza for many click-from-home investors!
As the name suggests, Google Finance is all about business and financial news. It contains a wealth of information about news and trends in U.S and foreign markets. With a glance at its homepage, you can glean the day’s headlines about business news and important financial events. Information about stocks and their latest prices are there too. The website also carries archived news about each corporation listed in all the major stock exchanges.
If you are an investor, you need to be organized to keep track of all that is happening in the stock market, as things happen fast—and you can miss the bus if the right information doesn’t reach you in time. Google Finance has become an important tool for the investor to get up-to-the-minute information about events in the business world and the broader financial community. This branch of the Internet behemoth keeps its focus exclusively on the financial markets and brings you lightning-fast information and news.
It is easy to go to Google Finance. Just go to the hyperlink at the top of this story, or click the option “more” on Google homepage and then click “finance.” There are features on the main page that help to keep you updated and organized. Click “markets” and you get all the news and the current position of the market. It carries market analysis, which is updated often. Also there are sector-wise trends that let you know the swings in a particular market sector.
There is also a section where the most popular stocks are analyzed. The day’s Top Five stocks in terms of gain or loss percentage are listed. Also, you can see the Top 10 by volume. In the News section, important happenings of the markets are posted. There is a section called “Portfolios” that can be used by members only. If you have an account, you can keep track of all your investments. If you purchase this feature, you will see a basic summary of each stock, including its fundamentals and performance. A tool called “stock screener” allows you to get all the relevant information such as P/E ratio, dividends and 52-week high and low of each stock you hold. Interactive charts let you know if news stories about a company have affected its stocks in any way. There are discussion groups where investors can chat with each other about the latest trends.
A redesigned version of Google Finance came out in December 2006. It now contains charts with 40 years of data from the U.S. markets. It gives real-time updates to the investor, with both NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange having entered into strategic partnerships with Google Finance.
