If you’re into trading stocks and shares, or simply love following the ups and downs (and downs) of the stockmarket, then you’ll be interested in Google’s recently launched financial portal for the UK.
Google Finance gives you near-realtime data on UK share prices, unit trust fund prices as well as the performance of the FTSE 100, 250 indexes etc.
The US version has been around for a while, but now there is a dedicated UK version which features a portfolio tool for watching your own holdings, or setting up a watchlist of possible investments. There are also interactive charting tools, where you can map the graphs to news stories to see how the news affected a share price, plus links to related blog posts and stock-specific discussion forums.
All-in-all, it’s a useful tool for tracking the performance of your investments, also allowing you to keep on top of news related to your holdings – it also provides a level of detail that’s probably not available for free from many other sources.
One thing I’d like to see added would be the ability to get RSS feeds and / or emails alerts for share prices and portfolio valuations.