The Wonders of Google

When Sian and I set out with this project I spent a long time looking around for a set of on-line tools that I could tailor to our needs. At the bare minimum I wanted an RSS feed that could be tailored to give information about our shares. As I use iGoogle as my personalised homepage in Firefox, it would be handy if it could be placed in a Google widget.

I found a number of tools, some paid for and some not, some Google widgets, but none really gave me what I needed. Then I found Google Finance haha!!

http://finance.google.com/

Not only does Google Finance give you massive amounts of news, you can also set up your profile so that you can track the value of shares that you own, taking into account the purchase and sale commission. Tracking the value of the shares can be done in so many ways... I now have a widget on my homepage that displays my current portfolio status and links back to more detailed pages about each company. I can track historical performance over a number of time periods and can see news releases about the company attached to the performance time line. Excited? you betcha!!

And then, if that wasn't enough, I was hunting around trying to discover how I could grab this sort of information for my own purposes (entering it into a database so I could carry our my own mathematical analysis) and I found this
http://docs.google.com/support/spreadsheets/bin/answer.py?answer=54198

Basically, you can enter functions into the GoogleDocs spreadsheet that will grab the data for you... see here for an example using Google's own share prices
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pkYWXZssQmM5mmkqQuKqVJQ

Now I can take that data in the form of an RSS feed and extract and manipulate any way I want.

I've got to say, if information is power, than the degree of power these Google guys are moving toward scares me a touch, but they know how to provide data provision services.