Roi Paul

some more impressions on the new version :

the entire ajax feature-set appears to be working better and lighter, prices and graphs updates in the background over long periods of idle time. 

one thing i do not like is the removal of basic financial and fundamental data from the stock details page, this means you can get the Mkt cap / book value ratio of a company only by checking its financial tab.

there’s nice play in the ticker which highlight in red/or green the current change in price.

the related companies table is buggie, but you only notice it if your browser is set to debug script errors, its a nice feature though could have been kept at its own tab instead of appearing twice.

Extending the blogs and discussion parts in the stock details page is useless, these parts have long been taken by spammers of all sorts, i minimized them.

the portfolio : i don’t get the checkbox on the left column (its a common trick of UI created by dev tools to know the first column is a checkbox but i find it hard to believe this is the case), i mean, how many times do i actually compare or delete a stock from a portfolio? it should have been placed at the right column.

the on page history is an interesting feature, not sure it is very useful but time tell

the stock details key figures part is all cluttered at the left part of the screen (why is that?)

there are no major changes to the stock screener, it would have been nice to be able to save screeners and to create screener based portfolios.some more search criteria’s would have been nice (long term value metrics come to mind)

on the home page the world markets is a nice addition, bonds and currencies shows improvement as well.

the news section (as the news service) requires further improvement, the new portfolio related news display is useless if you have 10 portfolios.

that’s it for this update.

update : this is odd, the version discussed below was pulled back the night i had posted it, it has not came back up since, it was good, i guess they want to make it better.

update 2 : researching a bit, i had found that Google are running some experiments. here (filling like a guinea pig, i don’t mind)

Google had come up with a new version for Google finance today.

I should have guessed when I got a server error (500) yesterday.

While (IMO) the home page only turns worse from version to version, it had been added a degree of control and you can now move the different web parts up and down in the page or close it all together.

Another major improvement is the “ubbercool chart” as Google liked to call its flashy quote chart. it had been added a much missing technical analysis graphs, different graph display (candlesticks and more) and much smaller intervals for the more sophisticated displays.

A feature that was already in the last version just got its proper place and now much more fun to play with is linking a feed to the chart.(why cant you link to it-with the plotted feed, or embed the chart altogether?)

On the left added some sort of a menu with links to summary,news, a much improved historical prices page, and recent quotes.

The stock screener had been improved as well, now allowing to screen stocks in the US, China and HK (peculiar choices..).

Some long term investing criteria had been added to the screeners.(as I have suggested in the past)

The quote page had been changed, while the company information seems now a bit scattered on the page, the overall look is nice, I liked the related companies table with the new trend line feature and additional columns, that’s really good.

Management mug shots are gone, shame, its was an important feature (the face of the company tells a lot)

There are too many changes in the portfolio to count them now, will carry on later.

Nice work Google team