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Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

blogs.harvard.edu

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Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#71

Hi - I'm the creator of https://bravos.co , a replacement for Google Finance. (I didn't have anything to do with this article being posted.) 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 eve…

Apologies in advance if this sounds overly negative: this is not a replacement for Google Finance. This is a portfolio tracker. The first two things I checked for that made GF different and important (to me, at least) were company financials and an advanced stock search. Company financials are self explanatory (quarterly breakdowns of cash, income, etc), the stock search allowed you to pare down stocks based on marke…

> the stock search allowed you to pare down stocks based on market cap, div &, P/E, etc, and was a wonderful tool for discovery.

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)

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#72
To be honest, this article just seems like a thinly veiled attempt to poke google because he doesn't like their political leanings.

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.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Daniel, neat site and I'm really happy someone is taking this on! As the OP noted, the killer feature for me to choose GoogleFinance (GF) above all other "free equities tracking websites" [1] was its portfolio. 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 select…

> 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, whi…

Thanks and: Yes, absolutely this.

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.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#74
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies in advance if this sounds overly negative: this is not a replacement for Google Finance. This is a portfolio tracker. The first two things I checked for that made GF different and important (to me, at least) were company financials and an advanced stock search. Company financials are self explanatory (quarterly breakdowns of cash, income, etc), the stock search allowed you to pare down stocks based on marke…

> the stock search allowed you to pare down stocks based on market cap, div &, P/E, etc, and was a wonderful tool for discovery. 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 would second this. Finviz felt educational when trying to find growth stocks for me. The terminology used and capabilities provided are pretty deep.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#75
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny to me is that so many people complain about large tech companies eating up every product category and preventing competition. But when they later kill these products, people complain all the same. Which is it? 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 compl…

> Which is it? It's different people complaining in each case.

There has to be a name for this. Folks love saying "people complained when I did X, now people complain when I do Y." As if that proves something. Unless it is the same people, irrelevant.

(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.)

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#76

Was anyone really using this feature? Even the author sounds like he wasn't actively using the feature. He entered some data 6 years ago, and went back today to find it was missing.... He didn't even notice until almost a year after it was removed. Keeping every feature around, even the unused ones that look like failures, is a bad idea.

Repeatedly destroying trust by dropping things and breaking things for people, is a bad idea.

At this point Google projects are basically less reliable than hobby projects.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#77

Was anyone really using this feature? Even the author sounds like he wasn't actively using the feature. He entered some data 6 years ago, and went back today to find it was missing.... He didn't even notice until almost a year after it was removed. Keeping every feature around, even the unused ones that look like failures, is a bad idea.

Agreed, though, as a sibling said, making a habit of dropping a ton of features constantly is annoying.

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. :(

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Daniel, neat site and I'm really happy someone is taking this on! As the OP noted, the killer feature for me to choose GoogleFinance (GF) above all other "free equities tracking websites" [1] was its portfolio. 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 select…

> 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, whi…

This is a super helpful set of points. I've always had similar questions to your AAPL/NFLX/UA examples. I think the insight here, is that brokerage accounts and most sites treat your "list" as binary - you either "own"/"track" something or you don't.

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.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#79

Hi - I'm the creator of https://bravos.co , a replacement for Google Finance. (I didn't have anything to do with this article being posted.) 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 eve…

Just want to say Thank You!

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!

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#80
post #79

Hi - I'm the creator of https://bravos.co , a replacement for Google Finance. (I didn't have anything to do with this article being posted.) 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 eve…

Just want to say Thank You! 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!

We don't have that now, since we're prioritizing other things.

Hopefully we can include that down the road.

(And thank you! Appreciate you taking a look.)

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