Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 10:12 AM
First things first: thanks to all of you who posted so many great comments. We've enjoyed reading them and are excited to try this Q&A thing out. So now to the good stuff:
Internationalization. There are a lot of suggestions to add quotes from various international markets including Australia and India. We can assure you that we are committed to providing a comprehensive online finance product and we do believe internationalization is important. Currently, Google Finance offers quotes from many international stock exchanges including Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Paris, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Toronto. It's great to have your input as to which markets should be our top priority. Stay tuned!
Tools. Many of you have asked for more tools like stock screeners. There are a bunch of online finance sites with stock screeners, but they could probably use some updating. We have a Noogler (a.k.a. "new Googler") on the team who is also keen to check out this space. In the comments section, please tell us more about the inadequacies you have with current stock screeners (i.e., What features are missing? What problems do you encounter?). Other tool requests include technical charts. We also agree that this is important. Which technicals would you most like to see?
Content. We've had a number of suggestions from people like Avinash (our most enthusiastic commenter!), to add earnings estimates, institutional ownership and options data. These are all very important pieces of content for investors and we agree that it's content we should spend time on. Thank you for pushing us in the right direction! Also, we often get requests to add more functionality for data such as downloading. If it were up to us, we would let you download everything, but we have certain content contracts in place which dictate otherwise. We'll be delighted to share your feedback with our content partners and let them know there is demand for more downloading rights. :)
Real-time quotes. Getting real-time quotes to you for free is one of the top requests we're seeing. We couldn't agree more. In January, we announced a deal with the New York Stock Exchange which would allow our dissemination of last sale quote data to all of our users for free. We reached a similar agreement with Nasdaq shortly thereafter. However, because market data pricing is regulated by the SEC, we have to wait for the SEC to approve these deals. We're as anxious as you are to get this out to you as soon as possible.
As for the Q&A itself: is this helpful? Should we do this more regularly? Please let us know. Thanks again for all your comments and ideas.
