Company Financials

Posted by Philip Brittan, Director of Product Management Buy! Sell! Hold! That’s stock trading 101. But sometimes investing isn’t as simple as just buying or selling shares of a stock or mutual funds. More sophisticated stock watchers also want to have the choice, but not the obligation, to purchase or sell a security before a certain time and for a specific amount of money. Yes, it’s nice to have options ... In fact, according to the feedback we’ve collected in our Help Center, options data is among the most requested features users ask for each month. So we’re making options information available to all Google Finance users globally. To find options data on a specific company, search for the company’s name on http://www.google.com/finance. You’ll see a new link to the Option chain in the left navigation bar, which will display the complete option chain for the closest expiration month from today. You can change the expiration date by choosing from the ‘ View options by expiration ...

Posted by Tianpeng Jin, Software Engineer Now there is a faster and easier to use company comparison page on Google Finance! Many of you query multiple companies at the same time, so we have worked to make the results better. Let us take a look at this comparison of HP & DELL . First, the comparison chart displays price changes for all the companies you include. Next to the chart, you will see news related to all of those companies. You can navigate the chart, zoom in and out, and click on news stories just as you can on the chart on a regular stock page. You will find a table of key metrics such as price or market cap right below the chart, and can customize the metrics by adding or removing columns from the table. Your configuration will be saved and applied to future comparisons as your personal setting. You can also add more companies to the page. Enter the ticker in the input box above the price chart and click! You will find the new company's price, news and table metrics...

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager and Eric Schrock, Software Engineer We are really excited to launch Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance. This launch was inspired by Hal Varian, our chief economist's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic indicators. Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment. Each index value is baselined at 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts. For example, the Google Unemployment Index tracks queries like [unemployment], [social security], [unemployment benefits] and so forth. We see that as the recession took hold in ...

Posted by Patrick Coskren, Software Engineer One of our most frequent user requests is that portfolios automatically account for splits and dividends. Starting today, they do. Transaction view lists all splits and dividends during the time period when you hold a stock. When a stock splits, your quantity is automatically adjusted in Performance view. Dividends are automatically deposited into your cash holdings. An example will help here: suppose you purchased 100 shares of GE on Dec 31, 1999, at a price of $51.53. When it split 3:1 on May 8, 2000, you'd have found yourself holding 300 shares. Google Finance portfolios will now accurately reflect the split, showing your purchase of 100 shares in Transactions view, but accurately reporting your current holdings as 300 shares in Performance view. At the same time, your cash value will now be $2,459.69, thanks to all the dividends GE has since your purchase. For those of you who have been monitoring your stock performance, we know that...

Posted by Dion Loy, Software Engineer A number of small features and fixes have been rolled out to everyone: Streaming charts. We have had streaming real-time prices for quite some time, and now the charts have caught up to the rest of the page. The price plotted will updated as new prices are streamed into your browser. This should be useful for keeping an eye on earnings reports this month, especially in extended hours trading! A toggle has been added to the top of the recent quotes module to select the absolute change or percentage change. You could actually toggle the selection before the header was introduced, by clicking on the change price/percentage itself, but this makes it more discoverable. Bug fixes for Opera users on portfolios, and some IE users on index pages. Watch this space for more updates as we roll out new features on Google Finance.

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager Over the last few months, we experimented with some changes on the site. We tried a couple of new layouts and received lots of feedback and suggestions from users and Googlers alike. Now, we're excited to launch a newly redesigned Google Finance! Our goal, first and foremost, was to make our current market data, news, and portfolios easily accessible from anywhere on the site. To that end, the most obvious change is the addition of a left-hand navigation bar that lets you move between the major sections of the site in one click. Links to sub-sections, like Portfolio-related news or individual portfolios, let you dive even deeper. We're also launching a number of new features to Google Finance that we hope give you more access to data and provide added flexibility. You can now plot your favorite technical indicators (Simple Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, etc.) on the Google Finance charts by clicking the Technicals link under the chart. ...

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager Over the course of the next few weeks, you might notice a few changes to Google Finance. We will be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback. They will only be visible to a small number of random Google Finance users. (In case you're wondering, experiments are selected randomly, so we can't give you any advice for how to get in!) It's pretty normal for us to run this kind of test, as we're always working to improve the experience of using Google Finance . In fact, experiments like these are a cornerstone of Google's development process - here's a post on the Official Google Blog explaining this practice for our search results .