Google Finance

For years, I used Yahoo! Finance as my primary investment research tool. It's great and useful. It might be Yahoo's most visited product page. The webpage provides quick, fast, relevant stock data to institutional and retail investors. I've seen everyone use it. But the functionality has plateaued.

Since the Marissa Myer era of Yahoo, the company has stopped developing new assets. They focused more on media and less on new technologies. So I eventually moved on to new stock research tools like SeekingAlpha, Finviz, GuruFocus and MarketBeat. Each tool brings a unique feature when it comes to investment research.

However none of them have a great watchlist app. Until I came across Google Finance. This has become my favorite research tool. It has replaced many of Yahoo Finance's capabilities. Google almost shut down this finance product but I'm glad they decided to invest in it.

For starters, the dashboard is clean. It displays all of my watchlist stocks and sample portfolio. The earnings calendar is very helpful. Especially since it can sync with my Google calendars. Before it was tough to stay on top with these critical dates without alerts. SeekingAlpha does a great at this if you have an account too.

But all-time favorite feature are the stock pages. Below is an example for Ubiquiti.

If you click one stock page, the most relevant stock data pops up right away. Very few ads show up in the Market news feed and I can see the company description with relevant links. My favorite feature are the bar charts for the three-statement financials. This is very helpful if you want a quick financial.

Financial statements were hard to analyze in Yahoo Finance. Everything was common sized and hard to read. The only feature that Yahoo Finance still does best are Key Statistics. Which shows relevant financial ratios, making it easier to digest specific stats. Otherwise I prefer Google Finance over every research app at the moment. I recommend checking it out.