For years, Yahoo! Finance has been my favorite site for basic financial data. I've used most of the other big sites, but I've found that Yahoo is consistently the best for my needs. Specifically, they got the major things correct:
- provide a ton of data
- in a concise format
- as a quick download so I can pull it up quickly
- and without making me use it in tandem with another site to find out a particular piece of standard data (i.e. shares outstanding)
Enter Google Finance, Google's entry into the financial information space. Google takes a slightly different tact than Yahoo! and uses a rich Flash control for the stock chart. This allows the chart to be customizable on-the-fly. Subjectively, it also feels like changing the chart's time period is quicker than with Yahoo! (I should also note that the time periods can be customized in ways that Yahoo!'s can't.) Also, Google scrolls the news in an attempt to be contemporaneous with the displayed chart, so that you can overlay historical news against historical stock trends. It looks like the news data doesn't go back beyond about 18 months, but I'm willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt that they will be able to index and add more historical news stories.
So generally I'd give the nod to Google. But they fail miserably in one key area: there is no dividend information. So for now I use Google Finance as my launchpad and switch to Yahoo! to get yield data. I'm hoping Google fixes this, or it's back to Yahoo! I go.
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