Google Data » Katie Jacobs Stanton

Our doors are open to OpenSocial developers

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:35:00 +0000

Arne Roomann-Kurrik, Developer Programs

OpenSocial apps will go live to Orkut users in the last week of February. To launch your app on Orkut you need to have it pass a review by the Orkut Team, so be sure to use these best practices to build a successful app.

To help get your apps up to snuff, we'll be opening our doors here in Mountain View so you can get real time technical support and face-to-face feedback on the user experience of your app. Orkut Product Managers and Engineers will be on hand to review your application and add it to the initial Orkut application directory.

Swing by the Googleplex and you'll have access to:

Workspace, power, and internet access.
Introductory materials and training.
Googlers working on OpenSocial and Orkut who can answer your questions.
Advice on how to polish your applications to get into the Orkut directory for launch.
A free lunch (they do exist!).

These all-day "hackathons" will be on February 7-8 and February 14-15 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. If you're on the east coast, you can attend via video conference from our New York City office. There are limited seats available - reserve your spot by sending your name and preferred date and location to hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com. If you've already got an OpenSocial application, include the URL of your gadget spec and we'll check it out before the hackathons.

We're pushing OpenSocial v0.7 to sandbox.orkut.com tonight. This is the same environment that will go live to 50M+ users worldwide. Check out the release notes for v0.7 and the updated OpenSocial Spec.

Hope to see you here!

Borsa Italiana pricing data

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:23:00 +0000

Posted by Matthew Simmons, Market Data Gnome

We're happy to let you know we're now able to offer pricing data for Borsa Italiana listings. In addition to news and descriptive data (which we already offer for these listings), you'll now see intra-day market data and charts. You can search for companies by name using the search box, or you can search by ticker. For example, if you'd like to find the current price for stock in Alitalia, you can search for it by name, by RIC as AZPIa.MI, or as BIT:AZA.

As always, if you notice any problems, please let us know. It may take us longer than we'd like to resolve issues, but we do read every report.

API, Gadgets, and Tabs, oh my!

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:05:00 +0000

Posted by Gundy, Google Finance engineer

Today, we're excited to release a Google Finance tab on iGoogle. This tab is a dashboard of financial gadgets which enables you to add, customize and share your Google Finance experience. But here's what's extra cool about these gadgets -- they now have communication skills and can "talk" or "sync" with each other.

As part of this release, we're introducing a bunch of new gadgets, including:

- Top Movers
- SnapQuote
- Related companies
- Company overview
- MiniChart
- Company Sector

Ready to see this tab in action?

But wait, there's more! If you're a developer, we just made it easier for you to make a stock market gadget with our new API. The gadget API for market data provides a framework so developers can display stock market information from the American, Nasdaq and New York stock exchanges within a gadget on Google properties. Unfortunately, due to data licensing restrictions, we couldn't open this API for display on any platform. However, we believe this is a great start in providing easier access to stock market information and hope you have fun with it.

For more specific information, please refer to the following:

- gadget API for market data specs
- Inter gadget-communication documentation
- Discuss with other gadget developers

As always, please let us know what you think in the comments below!

Australian and New Zealand pricing data

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:42:00 +0000

Posted Matthew Simmons, Market Data Gnome

We're pleased to announce the availability of pricing data for Australian (ASX) and New Zealand (NZX) listings on Google Finance. We've always had descriptive data and news for these listings -- now we have all that plus intra-day market data and pretty charts. You can search for companies by name using the search box. Alternatively, you can search by ticker. For example, if you'd like to find the current price for stock in the Auckland International Airport, you can search for it by name, as AIA.NZ, or as NZE:AIA. Similarly, if you'd like to find the current price for stock in Billabong, you can search for it by name, as BBG.AX,or as ASX:BBG.

As always, if you notice any problems, please let us know. It may take us longer than we'd like to resolve reported problems, but we do read every report.

Green with envy

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:30:00 +0000

Posted by Russell Leidich, Google Finance 20% Engineer

You may have heard the idiom "green with envy". It refers to a strong feeling of desire to experience the same good fortune experienced by someone else.
I must admit: that's exactly how I feel with respect to what I call the "Green Stock Boom". And what better time to examine green energy investments, than today, Blog Action Day?

It's starting to feel a lot like 1999 in this industry, and it would pay to have some insight into who might be the next Amazon.com (AMZN), rather than a glitzy second-tier competitor who ultimately fails to grow its profits. At its very roots, I think, the Green Stock Boom is about human survival: we must avoid the fate of the Easter Island civilization, and many others like it, whose population collapsed amid resource wars spurred in the wake of exponentially expanding consumption in the presence of limited resources. But a growing segment of the population has been "thinking green" for decades. So why has the Green Stock Boom materialized, in earnest, in only the last few years?

I think the key is oil prices, and to a lesser extent, the backlash against CO2 emissions. Oil prices started to escalate in earnest early in 2003, as the invasion of Iraq migrated from rhetoric to reality. At the time, oil was around $32 a barrel. Now it floats around $85 a barrel -- a 166% increase in just under 5 years, which amounts to a compound annual return of roughly 22%! Almost in lockstep, Exxon (XOM) has followed with approximately the same return (or a bit more, if you account for dividends):

But what's the red line? That's Winslow Green Growth Fund (WGGFX). Winslow invests in green companies generally, not limited to the energy sector; it's the best proxy I can find for a green index with several years of history. As with XOM, Winslow's returns are artificially low due to the exclusion of dividends from the chart. But the implication is unchanged: the Green Stock Boom has tracked oil prices. And more recently, investors have made it clear that they see much more upside in its few profitable heroes, such as SunPower (SPWR), than Big Oil:

No doubt this relates to the concept of "Peak Oil": while it's true that "oil will never run out", oil production (that is, the rate at which it is extracted from the ground, in barrels per year) will inevitably reach a maximum. When this occurs, the world's economies will need to have some other way to sustain the usual few-percent-per-year growth in gross domestic product (GDP). At the same time, computer models of oil production in the years after Peak Oil suggest an annual decline rate on the order of 2% -- that is, only 98% as much oil will be produced in the year following the Peak Oil year, and so on in subsequent years. Without a viable alternative energy source, this could quickly become a catastrophic economic problem: how can we expect to sustain even modest GDP growth, while consuming a few percent less oil per year?

In this scenario, the gap between normal GDP growth and shrinking oil supply is around 5%: we want to continue to grow GDP at a comfortable 3%, while using 2% less oil. For the first few years following Peak Oil, this may not amount to much of a challenge. But the catch is that the problem compounds exponentially: the second year, we need to grow GDP by another 3%, while reducing oil consumption by another 2%, and so on. It doesn't take a math genius to understand that, at some point, without a sufficient alternative energy source, we'll be saving our pennies for the next grocery trip (in an electric car, by the way). Granted, oil supply and demand vary greatly over the course of a year, so these are only rough projections which pertain to multiyear time periods; the important part is that our traditional energy supply will grow with a negative exponent, relative to demand in the absence of an alternative, following Peak Oil.

Most Peak Oil proponents assume that it will occur in the 2008-2018 timeframe. Based on the numbers I've seen, I would have to agree. It is, in any event, inevitable. The question is, will we have sufficient affordable alternative energy in time?

But the financial urgency to find alternatives may explode much sooner than Peak Oil arrives: oil traders are well aware of the phenomenon, and have bid up the price of a barrel year over year at a superinflationary rate, occasional price drops notwithstanding. Oil wars, plant shutdowns, and rig-crippling ocean storms emboldened by a warming atmosphere don't provide price relief, either. The traders may become increasingly willing to hold their positions through downturns, realizing that until a viable alternative is found (or we all become backyard farmers who telecommute to work), the price will inevitably surpass its previous high.

If all this sounds like crazy talk, it's worth noting that it already happened. And I'm not talking about the American gas station lines of the 1970s, which were a modest inconvenience by comparison: when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba lost its main oil supplier. Fossil fuel input to the country was cut to about half of previous levels. A GDP collapse followed, dropping by about a third from 1989 through 1993. Even for a socialist state, the economic repercussions were staggering -- comparable to the travails of America's Great Depression. Today, it's little wonder that the country is a leader in local organic farming.

Today, ethanol is probably a key component of our escape from Peak Oil. At the moment, it's produced largely from corn, which is problematic because corn feeds humans and livestock. Other proposals for production include switchgrass, sugar beets, yard waste, and even sewage. But before you buy stock in an ethanol producer, consider that most of them appear to be stuck in the research phase, not unlike most Internet startups of the late 1990s. Established producers are generally dependent on commodities such as corn and sugar; as traders accumulate positions in those crops in anticipation of Peak Oil, they actually undermine the viability of ethanol producers by increasing the cost of their raw materials. Normally, the reduced demand would force traders to sell their positions and give way to lower prices. But unlike lumber, oil is not a renewable commodity subject to normal business cycles. Traders know this, and are therefore more willing to hold onto their positions (whether in oil, or obvious alternatives) until the energy crisis is firmly under control, perhaps decades from now.

So if the business case for corn-based ethanol is unclear, the case for solar is more compelling. With tremendous innovation occurring in the field, it seems inevitable that costs will soon become competitive with electricity generated from other sources, especially after accounting for the tax incentives. The problem is, among public solar companies, you find stratospheric P/Es, if earnings exist at all. And this early in the game, it's entirely possible that a no-name startup will invent a dirt cheap alternative to photovoltaic cells and capture the marketplace. Without a triple PhD in chemistry, electrical engineering, and economics, it's a very hard field to navigate.

So what to do? Buy oil? At around $85 a barrel, it seems to have moved too far from OPEC's apparent $60-something comfort zone to sustain this level. But ultimately, oil prices are not under OPEC's control; it's the consumer vs. geology. Guess who wins.

The real winner is set to be alternative energy. If I'm wrong, we'll go extinct, and you won't need to worry about your investments. But I must confess: I'm stumped. How can I possibly find a winner among the thousands of unprofitable startups, plus a few established companies selling for enormous earnings multiples? For the meantime, I think there are better green investments closer to home.

If you're looking for a new house (which, in America, it's clearly a great time to do anyway), take time to learn about the energy efficiency and solar power options available, including any tax breaks that you might receive. Likewise, next time you purchase a car, think hard about how much it will cost you to operate it if gas prices continue to spiral out of control. If you have a job, see if you can arrange to telecommute a few times a month, like I am right now. (It helps to check out Google Docs, where you can edit the same document with several other people at the same time over the Web, for free. That's how we produce these blog entries.) Eat healthy and smart: buy locally grown organic veggies, which are free of the oil inputs required for pesticides, excessive packaging, and global distribution. Start a ride sharing program at your company, for which there are tax benefits in many states. Run a Google search for Peak Oil, and learn about ways to save serious money and reduce your dependence on external energy inputs. Even if Peak Oil doesn't arrive for another century, remember that the sooner you save money, the longer it can compound through investment.

As always, to keep things unbiased, I have no positions in any of the securities discussed. Like many investors, I do have oil positions which have enjoyed a good run. But I'd be much richer, had I invested in the heroes of the Green Stock Boom instead. So at this point, I would do well to heed my own advice.

Real-time quotes for China!

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 03:13:00 +0000

Posted by Matthew Simmons, Market Data Gnome

What's hot in the world of finance? At least one correct answer must be "China". Over the past several years, the world has seen the economy of this enormous nation grow at a breakneck clip. The local stock markets have followed, showing unparalleled growth in value within the global market. In some Chinese circles, individual investing has become a near obsession; the topic is rumored to dominate discussions at coffee houses and at the dinner table. These investors are demanding more data, and they are demanding it in real time. Google Finance has heard the clamor, and we're pleased to be able to improve our service for the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges by providing pricing data in real time.

Are you interested in intraday movements in the Bank of China? Or perhaps Yunaan Copper, a large Copper mining group listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange? Now you can get the answer, in real time. We hope you enjoy your new real-time Chinese listings.

By the way, we hope our friends at the SEC are watching. We've been waiting since January for the Commission to approve the last sale proposal, enabling us to offer our users real-time data on NYSE and Nasdaq stocks for free on Google. Transparency in the financial markets, led by access to real-time information, is critical for all investors. We hope to be able to deliver this information to you as soon as the SEC gives a thumbs up.

Updates on charts!

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:51:00 +0000

Posted by Andrey Khorlin, Google Finance 20% Engineer

We've gotten a lot of great feedback and suggestions on how to improve our charts. In response, today we're unveiling an updated UI as well as some new tools. The new chart UI makes it easier to compare stocks, indices and even mutual funds. In the "compare" tab, we provide some suggestions on what you might like to compare a stock with, such as industry competitors or general market indices. Or feel free to add your own stock, index or mutual fund.

In addition, we have a bunch of new features to help analyze public companies. First, you can now "link to chart" with all of your settings preserved. For example, take a look at this 2-year comparison between Vanguard Emerging Markets ETF (VWO) and S&P 500. Copy and paste the link from the "Link To Chart" tab, then send a link to your friend or include it in your blog.

Another feature we've recently added is support for logarithmic scale, which is extremely useful when viewing charts that have large changes in price. Just compare the 10-year chart for i2 Technologies Inc (ITWO). Without logarithmic scale, the current behavior of the stock is hard to see.

Linear chart:

Logarithmic chart:

In the comments section, please let us know what you think of these additions as well as what other chart features you would like to see.

The fine lines …

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 04:47:00 +0000

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Group Product Manager

One of our favorite testers for Google Finance features is also a member of a fantastic local singing group, The Richter Scales, in San Francisco. They put the following video and song together to help us all take the edge out of the subprime meltdown. Enjoy!

User experience research

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 00:12:00 +0000

Posted by Marianne Berkovich, User Experience Researcher, Google Finance

I've recently joined the Google Finance team as a user experience researcher. My role is to observe, talk with, and otherwise hang out with people using Google Finance. Simply put, we want to learn how you use the site and how we can improve it. Your comments on this blog and through the Help Center are great sources of feedback; our research activities are another way you can share your thoughts with us. All of these activities help us to get more focused insight on a particular topic -- for example, how you use portfolios, or what type of community features you'd like to see. Our research activities might include:

- surveys
- remote or in-person usability studies
- field studies (at your home or office)

Please sign up if you're interested in participating in upcoming research projects.

Historical LSE data

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:07:00 +0000

Posted by Matthew Simmons, Market Data Gnome

We now have historical daily prices for LSE stocks (like Vodafone or British Airways) back to 1996. You'll note that splits have been imported, but dividends have not. Dividends will follow along shortly.

If you notice any problems, please let us know.

A new help center

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:55:00 +0000

Posted by Ben Softness, Google Finance Support Lead

As part of our continuing effort to provide quick and easily accessible answers to your concerns and questions about Google Finance, we recently launched our brand new online help center. You can find the help center by clicking "About Google Finance" at the bottom of any Google Finance page or by pointing your browser to http://www.google.com/support/finance.

Whether you want to learn how to use a particular feature or seek information about how Google Finance works, the help center is your best resource. Plus, we've listed the five most common questions and made the entire site searchable from any help center page, so accessing the information that's most relevant to you is easier than ever.

If you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you. While we can't promise an answer to every message we receive, know that we read everything you send us and that we use your feedback to improve Google Finance.

And now in Canada

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:08:00 +0000

Posted by Dion Loy, Google Finance engineer

Today we're pulling the wraps off Google Finance Canada, a localized version of Google Finance tailored for Canadian investors. One of our top requests has been for localized market information, presented of course in a useful and accessible format. We think Google Finance Canada addresses this by presenting top news and company news from Canadian sources, economic data from the Bank of Canada, multi-currency portfolios, and Canadian equity and mutual fund data. The main Google.com search experience has also been improved with Canadian stock onebox results. But speaking as a Canadian, my favourite feature is the company search that prioritizes Canadian companies (no more typing in Canadian exchange prefixes!).

What makes this release extra-special for us is the fact that it was put together by a distributed team of full-time and 20-percent-time engineers. (All the Google engineers may devote 20 percent of his or her work time towards a project of their own choosing.) We're grateful to have had the contributions of 20-percent engineers from our Hyderabad, Kirkland, Montreal, Mountain View, and New York offices to make this launch possible.

Have a date with your favorite stock

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 22:49:00 +0000

Posted by Dave Marmaros, Technical Lead, Google Calendar

Want to know how your favorite stock is doing each day? Now you can! Google Calendar and Google Finance have teamed up to provide daily stock quotes.

Try searching for your favorite stock symbol in Calendar:

You will then be able to able to see the close price as an event each day.

Survey says …

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:12:00 +0000

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Group Product Manager, Google Finance

First things first: thanks to all of you who posted so many great comments. We've enjoyed reading them and are excited to try this Q&A thing out. So now to the good stuff:

Internationalization. There are a lot of suggestions to add quotes from various international markets including Australia and India. We can assure you that we are committed to providing a comprehensive online finance product and we do believe internationalization is important. Currently, Google Finance offers quotes from many international stock exchanges including Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Paris, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Toronto. It's great to have your input as to which markets should be our top priority. Stay tuned!

Tools. Many of you have asked for more tools like stock screeners. There are a bunch of online finance sites with stock screeners, but they could probably use some updating. We have a Noogler (a.k.a. "new Googler") on the team who is also keen to check out this space. In the comments section, please tell us more about the inadequacies you have with current stock screeners (i.e., What features are missing? What problems do you encounter?). Other tool requests include technical charts. We also agree that this is important. Which technicals would you most like to see?

Content. We've had a number of suggestions from people like Avinash (our most enthusiastic commenter!), to add earnings estimates, institutional ownership and options data. These are all very important pieces of content for investors and we agree that it's content we should spend time on. Thank you for pushing us in the right direction! Also, we often get requests to add more functionality for data such as downloading. If it were up to us, we would let you download everything, but we have certain content contracts in place which dictate otherwise. We'll be delighted to share your feedback with our content partners and let them know there is demand for more downloading rights. :)

Real-time quotes. Getting real-time quotes to you for free is one of the top requests we're seeing. We couldn't agree more. In January, we announced a deal with the New York Stock Exchange which would allow our dissemination of last sale quote data to all of our users for free. We reached a similar agreement with Nasdaq shortly thereafter. However, because market data pricing is regulated by the SEC, we have to wait for the SEC to approve these deals. We're as anxious as you are to get this out to you as soon as possible.

As for the Q&A itself: is this helpful? Should we do this more regularly? Please let us know. Thanks again for all your comments and ideas.

Interactive Q&A comin’ up!

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:49:00 +0000

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Group Product Manager, Google Finance

A core tenet of Google is to "focus on the user and all else will follow." The Google Finance team shares this view and as such, we spend a lot of time conducting user research, meeting with power and novice users of online finance, and reading your emails and comments to this blog. This week, we wanted to try a new idea, which is to set aside a period of time to have an interactive Q&A session on this blog.

Here's how it will work: please write your suggestions and questions about Google Finance in the comments section below this post. We will start reviewing and responding to all comments (except comments that are off-topic!) immediately and will respond in a meta-post on Thursday, July 19th around 9am PST. If there are more submissions than we can comfortably answer in a single post, we'll carry over the selected questions to Friday and answer them then.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Making the most of Google Spreadsheets

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:12:00 +0000

Posted by Nick Fey, Google Finance Designer

Almost every stock investor that we talk to during our user visits makes use of a spreadsheet to compile the data they have researched and many use their own formula to help decide when it is optimal to trade a stock. Whether they use Excel or a napkin, vast numbers of investors spend time every day keying in or writing down data. Wouldn't it be great if there was a spreadsheet that you could access from anywhere with an Internet connection -- a spreadsheet you could share with certain friends and automatically get the data updated to save you doing that work each day? For a while now, Google Spreadsheets has included Finance formulas so you can do all this and more.

Within Google Spreadsheets you can select the Formula tab and follow the more >> link on the top right.

Look at the Google section within the dialogue box and from here you can see the syntax for entering a Finance formula (see above). The details of all the stock and mutual fund data that you can pull into the spreadsheet can be found on this help page. To quote a section:

"Here are a couple examples using the formula:

* To insert the current volume of Google stock:
=GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "volume")
* To insert the current price of Google stock:
=GoogleFinance("GOOG") and =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price")
* Alternatively, the stock symbol and/or the attribute values can come from spreadsheet cells. For example, the function can be:
=GoogleFinance(A2, B1)
In this case, the attribute specified as a string in cell B1 would be returned for the stock symbol in cell A2."

Using this approach you can set up your portfolios and watchlists and have the data be updated continually. This is a screenshot of a portfolio I pulled together in a few minutes:

If you have your own formula that you would normally use to screen stocks then go ahead, it is easy to add them in. If you want to collaborate with anyone else, maybe a co-worker or investment club, it is easy to add them through the Share tab and you can show off your winning formulas with the world by publishing the spreadsheet and linking to it on your blog.

You can see how powerful this tool is, and so we are busy talking to folks who use it, and exploring ways in which we can improve it. If you have any ideas, please feel free to comment below.

Let’s discuss!

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 20:56:00 +0000

Posted by Ayla Tiago De Melo, Moderator, Google Finance Team

When Google Finance launched last year, we created discussion groups, a forum where posters could have quality, on-topic, spam-free discussions about their favorite stocks and companies, and where the exchanges remain cordial and informative. If you're interested in participating, please review our community guidelines. In addition to these rules, we have a small team of moderators, including me, who help facilitate the discussion process.

Over the past few months, we've seen some great discussions on Google (GOOG), New York Stock Exchange (NYX), and the recent IPO of Blackstone (BX). In fact, our Apple discussions group has been hotter than ever as the community has been going ga-ga over the iPhone (in fact, so have I -- who hasn't been?).

To find a discussion on a particular company, do a search on Google Finance, and click on the "Discuss" link, above the chart. Or, you can start your search for a company from Google Groups. We look forward to welcoming you to our community.

Tracking the real estate meltdown with comparison charts

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:44:00 +0000

Posted by Russell Leidich, Google Finance 20% Engineer

Everyone knows that business cycles oscillate from boom to bust every so many years, and real estate is not unique in this regard. Stock prices reflect these trends. Anyone who has looked at a home builder stock in the past couple years is intimately aware of this connection. But what does it mean to say that an industry, as opposed to a stock, is experiencing a downturn? It's not just a matter of saying "real estate stocks are down" -- it's more that they're down, in a roughly correlated manner, over a meaningful common time period.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. Here are 3 major homebuilders -- Centex, Lennar, and Ryland -- in the same graph:

Let me take a moment to explain how I generated this chart, so that you can do your own analysis of stock trends in real estate (or any other industry). Go to Google Finance. Type in the first symbol, CTX (Centex). Hit Enter. You should see a chart for Centex. Use the time window below the chart to change the view to January 2005 through June 2007. (You might have to zoom out more than once.) Now, hit the"Compare" button to the upper left of the chart. Check the boxes for LEN (Lennar)and RYL (Ryland). A short moment later, you should see essentially the same chart that I gave you above. You might have slight differences due to different start and end dates.

Notice that you never asked for LEN or RYL. Google Finance just knew that they were related companies. This works very well in most cases. Type in C (Citigroup), for example, and you'll get other large financial companies from "Compare". How do we know which companies are related to which other ones? Ah, but that's the secret sauce!

So back to the vague term "industry downturn". As you can see in the chart above, all of these stocks are down roughly 35% since the start of 2005. And it should be visually clear to you that they rose, then declined, in roughly the same manner, with RYL being the most volatile of the group.

Has this ever happened before? Sure it has. In the last major real estate stock decline, you can see an eerily similar pattern:

Here, January 2005 has been replaced by January 1989, and June 2007 has been replaced by June 1991. Again, CTX was the most volatile of the group, and again the ups and downs of all 3 major players roughly traced one another. The group as a whole appears to have peaked in August 1989 (although to know for sure we need to adjust for market cap). It then seems to have bottomed in October 1990.

In the first chart, you can see that the group appears to have peaked again in July 2005. So, if we learn from history, it should have bottomed in around September 2006. Indeed, this isn't far off from the real bottom, up to that point, which occurred in July 2006. Unfortunately, as we all now know, that wasn't the bottom...

Of course, comparisons such as this do not make a complete investment analysis, but they can often provide suggestions for further research involving other financial metrics.

I don't own any of the stocks I discussed, and while it's not my business to advise you what to buy or sell, I do hope I've shown you a new and cool way of analyzing related businesses.

Gadgets on the loose!

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 06:44:00 +0000

Posted by Casey Ho, Engineering Intern, Google Finance

If you like to customize your iGoogle page, you'll love these two new gadgets. The interactive chart and sector summary gadgets reflect two of our most popular features on Google Finance. We're pleased to now offer them on iGoogle.

Click on the screenshots below to read more about the gadgets and to add them to your page:

There'll be more finance gadgets to come. Meanwhile, if there's something you really want made into a gadget, please let us know in the comments section!

Finance on the go

Katie Jacobs Stanton — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:01:00 +0000

Posted by Nick Fey, Designer, Google Finance

It's easy to access Google Finance even when you are away from your computer. Even using the most basic mobile phone, you can receive stock quotes simply by sending a text message containing a ticker to GOOGLE (466453). (Note that quotes are delayed at least 15 minutes.)

If you have web browsing enabled on your phone, go to http://www.google.com/m. And if you want easy access to stock quotes, look at Build your page and click on the Add Stocks link. Enter one or more stock tickers, and build up a watchlist for your phone.

When you're done, click the Add button. Now your Google search page will display your watchlist with 20-minute-delayed quotes below the search box. Better still, click on any of the tickers to see all the detailed quote data you would find on Google Finance on your PC, along with today's chart for that stock.

We're currently looking at alerts for your phone, too, so that you can be notified when your stocks hit specific pre-set values or when there are unusual movements in your portfolio stocks. We can even link these alerts to any relevant news articles that may offer an explanation on, say, movement in the price. Your feedback will be useful in helping shape this application, so feel free to comment.