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”)”.

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