Google Finance

A large number of finance sites compete for investor’s eyes online and Google Finance is one of them.

The site managed by Google (Alphabet) competes with sites such as Barchart, Fool, TheStreet, Investors, TradingView, Barrons, Investing.com, and many more investing information portals. Users can check stock prices and news and keep tabs on their own portfolio, however it offers no live stock trading platform.

Still, it is a pivotal finance website for retail self-directed investors with its real time quotes and price charts. It is a simple and easy to read finance and investing portal without the clutter and distraction experienced on Yahoo Finance and other more sophisticated portals. See more on the Yahoo Finance vs Google Finance comparison post.

What Is Google Finance?

Google Finance is a web-based platform developed by Google. It offers a selection of financial information and tools to help users track and analyze market data, stocks, currencies, bonds, commodities and more. Users enjoy real-time stock quotes, interactive charts, business news, financial statements, and other significant information investors need to make decisions to buy stocks.

Google Finance Overview. Screenshot courtesy of Google.

Quick Info for Reference/Monitoring

You can look up stocks, find prices, P/E ratios, S&P sectors as well as see how the Dow Jones, S&P 500, NASDAQ and Russell are performing. You’ll also find currency exchange rates, gold futures, oil prices and oil futures.

The stock information portal also provides aggregated finance and stock market news stories, market trends and an earnings calendars.

Screenshot courtesy of SimilarWeb. Yahoo Finance visit stats.

It may surprise web users about how weak Google Finance is compared to Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Finance’s traffic is estimated at 220+ million per month and visitors stay for almost 5 minutes on average. Google Finance’s traffic according to Similarweb is only about 1 million per month. The company spends about $2 million per month on PPC ads to attract traffic.

Google Finance aggregates data from various sources, including stock exchanges, financial news outlets, and other providers, to offer comprehensive market coverage. It provides detailed information on individual stocks, allowing users to track their performance over time, view historical price and trade volume data, and compare them with industry benchmarks.

Additionally, users can create and manage customized portfolios to monitor the performance of their investments.

Missing Depth and Services Hurts the User Experience

One of the issues for Google Finance is perhaps the lack of depth and breadth of coverage and expert analysis. And Google has no history or competence in the finance space to offer credible investment advice or buy recommendations to retail investors.

It offers one page details of specific stocks such as Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. For a fast reference it’s fine, and keeps investors alerted to news stories relevant to each company and industry.

Compared to Investing.com, TradingView, Barchart, and Yahoo Finance however, it lacks the details that provide a broader context.

Certainly Google is capable of beefing this service up if they wished, but like the housing market, it’s one they feel might be too tough and expensive to compete in. Given the Google Finance site already has a brand reputation to the investing marketplace, it would be difficult to elevate it to premium status anytime soon for serious investors, especially institutional investors.

However, the site is frequented by many self-directed stock market aficionados as a quick reference to keep an eye on stocks they might be interested in. It’s simplicity and stock quote facility is very useful and fast.

See more on Yahoo Finance , stock price prediction, stock forecast software, and other stock trading platforms.