Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)
blogs.harvard.edu
blogs.harvard.edu
I actually left my job two months ago to work on this full-time... Google Finance used to be a "home page tab" for me and it was just killing me that I couldn't find a good alternative. Bravos.co features a clean interface for tracking public companies, cryptocurrencies, and even private companies. The platform pulls in news, social conversations, and key financial data, and has modern features like a "Dark Mode" and mobile site. APIs, native apps, notifications, and more are coming soon.
We have a 2 minute video walkthrough here: https://youtu.be/gpQpCK9Ydl0
We would love to get your thoughts - we want to build this based on community feedback.
It looks like you're using Highcharts for the main graphs, and if they support transitions out-of-the-box, that'd be nice to have that turned on. For example, when zooming out from 1M to 1Y, it's a little tough to see the recent 1 month changes in the context of 1 year. The axis transitions just makes it a bit more distracting, without the line chart transitions between date ranges.
Also, making the selected range saved to the URL to make the links shareable would be a good feature to add too.
I see that it's built in React, but I'm curious why clicking on an individual stock appears to "leave" the app, not giving it quite as smooth of a single page app experience? Not a huge deal, just curious.
Otherwise, this looks really great!
We have much better charting coming soon. You'll be able to compare different securities, log scale, bar charts. URL params for things like the range are a good idea.
(And sorry, what do you mean by leave the app? Clicking on a company somewhere should take you to bravos.co/AAPL, no?
When I click between "Watchlists" and "Market News" on the left sidebar, the sidebar stays in place as I would expect from a single page app experience. However, when I click on a stock, it appears that the page reloads, as the left sidebar flickers a little bit.
It's still a fast experience switching between stocks, but I'm guessing it could be even faster if local state is updated with a new selected stock's information with the app shell already in place. Maybe that's exactly what's happening, but the left sidebar flickering just a little bit makes it "feel" like the site is refreshing.
A while ago I was looking for an API that would give me the calendar date that quarterly earnings were reported historically, ideally for all public companies (but a large subset like the S&P500 would do). Do you know if anyone tracks this data, and if so where I might find it?
If anyone found something easier, I'd certainly be curious as well.
https://intrinio.com/financial-data/zacks-eps-surprises?meth... https://intrinio.com/financial-data/wall-street-horizon?meth...
Feel free to PM me if I can help any further.
You're basically saying you should be able to enter that you bought 100 shares AAPL in 2004 at $15... what is your total return?
(We only have watchlists today, but we're designing more of the features that are "portfolio"-like and this is great feedback.)
Killer feature would be historical charts that include re-invested dividends.
For me, a killer feature would be charts with the option to include total return including reinvested dividends etc. I would happily pay for that if the data was accurate.
I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that the dividends listed in Google/Yahoo finance are often incomplete for common index funds. And it drives me nuts when I can't add them into the charts.
Good luck!
Company financials are self explanatory (quarterly breakdowns of cash, income, etc), the stock search allowed you to pare down stocks based on market cap, div &, P/E, etc, and was a wonderful tool for discovery.
Your site is nice, but it offers almost nothing over what every brokerage I've used offers: watchlists, news. Crypto is a nice addition, but Robinhood has that, and Robinhood has my actual transaction history.
Fundamental data is coming soon, for sure. We'll show you 10 years of historical data (annual and quarterly) for income statement, cash flows, and balance sheet.
Screening will come too, although it's not requested as often so we haven't prioritized it. The API, mobile apps, and improved charting are next for us.
My reasoning is that I do almost all real searching and analysis on the desktop, whereas mobile is just nice and handy for tracking an updates on the go. Also, screening is more immediately usable by a broader user set than the API functions (tho your spreadsheet integration is way cool!).
Just one small vote while cheering you on!
It's like bloomberg-light.
It doesn't have great stock filtering, but is pretty good for financial data.
You may enjoy the Finviz screener:
https://finviz.com/screener.ashx
(Make sure you check the tabs of the search menu, you can filter by a crazy number of attributes, including stuff like sales growth, technical breakouts, etc)
I immediately went to put in eg MSFT in the search box in the upper left. When I hit enter it just blanks the input box. The search icon is non-reactive to clicking. The only way the search box fires properly is if I click on the auto-suggest that drops below the input box. You should definitely wire up the icon to trigger the search, and enter needs to work as well.
I've just tried to see if your site addresses those pain points and it doesn't - but I think you're halfway there.
What OP's "hypothetical portfolio" means is basically the tracking of a whole set of selected equities (so in your site's case: the performance of everything within a watchlist, including a graph visualizing it plus all the common features like comparing that portfolio-graph to that of the Nasdaq, Dollar Index, BTC ...). [2]
GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")
When GF still had its portfolio feature, I hoped their "re-design" would allow for more mobile-friendliness (which you address) but more importantly comparing portfolio graphs with each other.
Also, as non-American I repeatedly ran into trouble finding an equivalent ticker sign for non-US equities [3]. Supporting WKN or ISIN would be an improvement over GF!
Anyways, quitting your job for this is a bold step and I wish you the best!
[1] Putting that label in quotes maybe highlights the fringeness of that niche and why Google shut it down :-(
[2] To be clear: not a graph where i have all the graphs of the items of a watchlist - but one line for all items combined
[3] My trouble was usually resolved, finding some European stock's ADR and converting the EUR amount invested to the amount of ADRs i'd have gotten in USD
I appreciate the points about ISIN and tickers. We'll need to be thoughtful about how we handle that, and definitely should support more than just the U.S. exchange tickers.
> GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")
I just want to second this point made in the parent comment. What I've always wanted to do that I can't really do in an app out there, is compare my "what-if" scenarios (e.g. what if I had held onto 20% of my AAPL in 2015, instead of selling and buying NFLX and UA/UAA?). I always imagined that there'd be an easy visualization comparison between two scenarios, to allow me to "evaluate" certain buy/sell decisions I've made, retrospectively.
Since GF's portfolio feature is gone I've never found a way to visualize to me, that my thinking in the past was stupid/correct.
In reality, you're tracking a lot of opportunities, and every decision you've made represents several different scenarios. It should be as easy to look back on a scenario (AAPL versus NFLX+UA performance over the last 3 years) as it is to see the performance of any of those specific securities.
You should also be able to easily see that your "biotech" list outperformed your actual portfolio, or that your "tech" list is outperforming your "European companies" list (or whatever else).
We probably won't go too deep into backtesting various strategies, as there is powerful software for that today, but we definitely can support the analyses in this thread.
I'd pay some amount of $ per month (or year or whatever) to just have a reasonable portfolio tracker. Yes, the brokerages all have this - and they're all pretty terrible.
Disclaimer: I am the author.
(If I sound like a shill, I work for https://trade.it which provides broker API functionality to Yahoo Finance, but I have also been trading and using Yahoo Finance for over a decade, way before I ever became technologically involved with them)
Has Bravos implemented imports for GF transactions, so I can spin up my exported-from-GF portfolios? GF had a nice export feature, but I never found anywhere that would import them for tracking.
Thank you!
Hopefully we can include that down the road.
(And thank you! Appreciate you taking a look.)
1) If I click a different period in a chart, it should show me the different in price over that period as a %. I want to be able to see the chart for the last 6 months and be told what % the price changed.
2) It needs options chains.
Some small tweaks would also be nice:
1) The news line length is basically unreadable. 2) Font size is too small. Really hard to read the site.
But overall I like it.
Thanks for the feedback on the font and news line. For the news line, do you mean that you'd prefer more text to show up in the news section?
Looks really nice, by the way.
Project earnings date, and past earnings performance (price effect) are 2 things sorely lacking. I do like the historical financials but man, I wish they showed the past five quarters, not 4. Sometimes you want to see how last year’s quarter changed quarter-over-quarter.
Sometimes I think the people who create these products don’t invest/trade stocks at all.
- "'No hablo Ingles!' Video shows Taco Bell employee in Hialeah denying service - Local10.com"
- "Guac fans, rejoice! Chipotle is now selling large sides of guacamole"
Any way you could make a easy to access URL that does the same thing but for market caps >= $1B?
Maybe:
If you are using any Unix derivative there are still Free Software applications from the 1980s (or 1970s if you run BSD) that you are running every day without any problems, whether you realize it or not.
Consider doing your financial modeling with a Free Software program like Gnumeric: http://gnumeric.org/
(most of it is provided by a third party, or was when I worked for said provider)
Seems like an opportunity for someone else, if it was really being relied on that much.
I suspect it wasn't. The author of the article said he hadn't checked in six years. Six years! And he's complaining that Google threw his work away.
People want to have their cake and eat it, too.
Both. They expanded into an area and killed the competition then killed their product and left a void. See Google Reader for the life cycle.
It's different people complaining in each case.
(Not that it is automatically relevant if it is the same people. But I get frustrated with this general game of moral equivalence somehow being a valid talking point.)
I work in an org with a lot of regulations and a rent seeking IT group different than development. I’ve heard a lot of people rationalizing decisions using emotion (eg, “they complain if we do, they complain if we don’t [;therefore their experience isn’t important to addres]”
It’s tough to solve and is based, I think, on having your measurement of success be a good story, because objective metrics are not really applicable.
In google’s case they make so much revenue and profit from search the rest of the company just kind of bounces around and doesn’t matter. So projects are run, it seems, off who has a great story. Sure, there’s massive data analysis showing things but those don’t matter. Why did a jillion people using finance used to matter, but not now.
I think Google, Facebook, and especially Yahoo did significant damage to their reputations and brands through how they have disposed of products both for consumers and developers. It is really hard to take anything they put out seriously until that product has been around a long time and is clearly being supported, used, and polished.
Google and Facebook are still large, strong, and growing, but what Yahoo did to all of the companies it acquired really fucked both their investors and customers. One wonders if Google and Facebook will wander down that path when their growth stalls out.
Even before Google Finance was shut down, I've wanted to work on this. Given that Google Finance has largely faded, I think we have an opening for https://bravos.co to enter the market.
and then that exact thing happens?
you're confused?
Couldn’t Google have charged a monthly subscription for the service? Oh you wouldn’t pay for it? Then Google made 100% the right choice in killing it.
(Full disclosure: I work for https://trade.it which provides the aforementioned broker API functionality to Yahoo Finance)
Keeping every feature around, even the unused ones that look like failures, is a bad idea.
Especially when there were options before. If I liked an old version of a native application, used to be I could just keep that old version for a long time. Especially if it was isolated in functionality, even the security implications weren't that dangerous.
Now, everything needs everything. And with the web, you can't pin a version to where you like it. :(
I understand "not used by me = not used by anyone" fallacy, but it can be applied to any product closed by google, including reader, inbox, talk, etc.
Huh?
I remember that before Mayer, Yahoo Mail was lightweight, fast and it displayed emails chronologically and in a well categorized way.
After Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo, the Yahoo email client became slow and clunky and it grouped emails together in a strange way which made it hard to find stuff; thankfully I was able to figure out a way to disable this 'feature'. That's not even mentioning all the Yahoo Mail hacking scandals that happened on Mayer's watch.
Also, the new Yahoo logo is bad.
https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.mercurynews.com/2012/12/11/m...
What does Mayer's floundering in her post-Googler-career as Yahoo's CEO have to do with the product failures of Picasa and Finance? Referencing her in this context makes as little sense as referencing Andy Rubin -- another prominent Googler who went on to flounder as CEO.
Her gender bias discrimination / sexism is what drove many to leave the company, draining the company of its best employees
Other things in her tenure.
-----------------------------------
Ex-Yahoo employee sues Marisa Mayer claiming she led an illegal purge of male employees.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3827244/Ex-Yahoo-emp...
Yahoo fine 35 million dollars for failing to disclose data breach.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/24/17275994/yahoo-sec-fine-2...
3 billion users affect by yahoo data breach.
https://www.avclub.com/yahoo-now-says-all-3-billion-user-acc...
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Basically, nothing go has come out of her working at yahoo, AFAIK. Everything went downhill when she became in chargeod
What I'm confused about in particular is why the author feels the need to snarkily slam Meyer here. Obviously she's not involved with Google's current decisions on Finance. And I'm pretty sure she wasn't involved with shutting Picasa down, which happened in early 2016. I've read articles about Mayer not being a popular manager at Google, or getting along with the chain of command, but I don't recall her being a prime mover in shutting products down while at GOogle
So why does she deserve snark when clearly there are Google executives who actually made and oversaw the decisions to shut down Picasa and Finance? Instead of doing the simple Googling needed to find who are currently the product leads, the author appears to throw in a lazy non-sequitur of Fuck Marissa Mayer, amirite?.
As for it being rooted in sexism -- who knows? It is kind of bizarre that the one Googler the author chooses to call out by name is not only a woman, but a woman who hasn't been at Google for the past 6 years.
> When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
from this page:
Edit: I have noticed adverts depend on how your access Google e.g. I found the iOS YouTube app way worse than the website in the browser.
The key is always having a plan to replace a third party that is no longer providing the service you need.
Many would agree, for many different reasons; some because of privacy concerns, lack of long-term guarantees that a service will work in the future, some because they don't like being a product instead of a customer (hence "customer support" being as it is), and so on. Many valid reasons, even if I don't necessarily share them.
> Short their stock!
This, however, feels like a completely different matter. Yes, there are reasons for not using Google, but they are very unlikely to influence the price of their stock. MSFT would be bankrupt at least twice in the 90s was that the case (and that's just one example).
So, I think that if you want to argue that their stock will tank, you should point out reasons other than that they treat their "customers" like crap. That, in itself, hardly ever resulted in financial problems for tech sector companies - as sad as it is :(
We built our portfolio functionality with this in mind to empower investors to understand their true returns, respective of time. It often amazes users here at Australia's #1 stockmarket app, disclosure: I founded and bootstrapped the business and it's iOS/Android only at the moment.
Refer: https://stocklight.com/faq
This dude's employer has access to data and tools that were never available on Google or Yahoo. All he needs to do is walk over to the business school and ask someone in the computer lab for help creating a mock portfolio of stocks and tracking performance over time.
In the past few people design Multics/Plan9 with a concept: a network OS, but with our desktop at the center of the universe, simply because we work there, our data are there etc. The network simply work as a helper, cache, horsepower etc, no more.
It was impossible for them to restore my previous subscription cost. As a paying consumer I expected a certain level of service, but I had not control over what was happening when something went wrong.
When paying Google, you're not better off.
I wonder if Google sent emails to uses notifying them that the service was going to be discontinued.
There was a notification on the site a while back (months ago, can't remember exactly when), but I don't think they sent an email announcement.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if any of the services I used today were still around 12 years from now, let alone waiting with my previously saved settings. If it was that important to you, you should have either used a paid service (hey, bloomberg exists for a reason) or stored the data locally at your own cost.