Google Finance Canada
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
Initially when Google Finance Canada first launched, I was excited. In retrospect I’m not at all sure why, but I was. Anyways it seems to have been a little bit of a let down, basically just because of some poor integration/execution issues
One Box Results - When I type a ticker symbol into Google.ca’s Search box, if I happen to type in a Canadian Stock Symbol and there is an American stock symbol that matches it, the Finance Chart & Info displayed will always be for the American Company.
Getting to finance.google.ca is a pain - The dropdown for finance in the top frame of gmail always takes me to finance.google.com. There is no Finance link anywhere on the google.ca page not even in”more” page. There appears to be no way to set which is your “default” version of finance. And so I’m left to type in finance.google.ca in the address bar, and once there it seems to have forgotten if I have already logged into my google account.
Getting out of finance.google.ca is NOT a pain - Should you happen to click in any discussion items you will find yourself back in finance.google.com. I suppose this is to keep group discussions consistent between the two domains, there is a .ca version of google groups so I’m unsure why this is an issue, but it certainly can make things confusing.
Incomplete Historical Data - For some reason the data for one of my iShares ETF’s (XIN) seems to be stuck at reporting a 1 week rolling window. On top of that the volume chart is way out to lunch only rendering volumes of lower volume stocks, with the lowest measure being thousands per minute, resulting in some pretty hard to read and ultimately useless charts.