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Posts Tagged ‘docs’

How to Display Country Stock Index on Google Docs?

February 18th, 2010

Our previous posting discusses on how to display stock prices on Google Docs. How can we display stock indexes, such as S&P 500? We might need them if we want to compare our portfolio with those indexes, don’t we?

Here is the trick: you can just type the same function as you normally use for stocks, i.e. “=GoogleFinance(index)”. Type without quotes. For example, to display the current price of S&P 500 index, type “=GoogleFinance(“.INX”)”.

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How do we find the ticker symbol of popular indexes? There are a couple of places on the Internet that has this information. Yahoo! Finance provides them on their home page; but they use a different convention with Google Finance. Instead of prefixing the ticker with dot, they use ^ symbol.

Here is the list of popular stock indexes around the world.

S&P 500 Index: .INX
Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index: .DJI
Nasdaq Composite Index: .IXIC
S&P/TSX Composite Index: .GSPTSE
FTSE 100 Index: .FTSE
Hang Seng Index: .HSI
Nikkei 225 Index: .N225

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Tags: djia docs finance google hang seng index indexes nasdaq Portfolio s&p 500 tsx yahoo

Monitoring Portfolio with Google Docs

February 15th, 2010

A couple of people have asked us, how we setup a live result of this stock picks contest. The answer is using Google Docs. It’s a very service from Google; where you can connect a spreadsheet to “real-time” stock quotes from Google Finance. We write “real-time” in quotes because some stock quotes are delayed up to 20 minutes, for example the ones from Canadian stock exchanges.

You can do a lot of things with this feature, for example:

Monitor your stock picks (just like we do).
Compare your stock picks to well-known index, such as Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 or Nasdaq.
Build your portfolio and monitor its performance.
…

How can we do all those things? The only thing you need is an account at Google Docs. Once you have an account, login to your account and create a new spreadsheet.

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Next, go to any cell and type “=GoogleFinance(symbol)”. Type it without quotes. For example, if you want to get the current stock prices of Google, you can type “=GoogleFinance(“GOOG”)”).

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