Google Finance Charts

Stock portal sites always have charts. Google Finance offers a stock chart with a standard extended history. The default period starts at three days, but can be expanded as far back as the life of the stock. The Google Finance stock chart has a few things not common to other stock charts. Let’s take a look at some of the unique features.

The stock chart has a slide ruler underneath the peaks and valleys of each particular stock. When you drag this ruler backwards across time, the chart automatically updates with information from that period. The news items along the right hand side also update to the time period. This can be particularly helpful when trying to determine what caused a major spike in a stock’s price. You can read the articles from the time period to determine what drove the price up or down.

The time period you select to zoom to also effects the slide ruler. This means if you want to see a year, then the slide ruler becomes a year’s time, as shown in the graphic below.

As you can see in the graphic above, you can compare the stock’s movement to any other stock by entering it into the "Enter ticker here" field. You can also simply select a checkbox next to an index to compare the stock against an entire collection of stocks.

The default graph shows the stock with each news item labeled according to its time. As shown in the example below, you can readily see when a stock climbed and the related news item. When you click on the alphabetical reference, the news items on the right scroll to the entry.

Now you can read the news items that affected the surge or downturn for each stock. You can also compare the stock to the index or other stocks as shown in the following picture. We’ll compare Google’s stock to Microsoft. You can compare as many other stocks at the same time as you like.