
Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance) - tjr
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2018/09/14/google-throws-away-12-years-of-work-by-investors-portfolios-in-google-finance/
======
danielaxelsen
Hi - I'm the creator of [https://bravos.co](https://bravos.co), a replacement
for Google Finance. (I didn't have anything to do with this article being
posted.)

I actually left my job two months ago to work on this full-time... Google
Finance used to be a "home page tab" for me and it was just killing me that I
couldn't find a good alternative. Bravos.co features a clean interface for
tracking public companies, cryptocurrencies, and even private companies. The
platform pulls in news, social conversations, and key financial data, and has
modern features like a "Dark Mode" and mobile site. APIs, native apps,
notifications, and more are coming soon.

We have a 2 minute video walkthrough here:
[https://youtu.be/gpQpCK9Ydl0](https://youtu.be/gpQpCK9Ydl0)

We would love to get your thoughts - we want to build this based on community
feedback.

~~~
woodpanel
Hi Daniel, neat site and I'm really happy someone is taking this on! As the OP
noted, the killer feature for me to choose GoogleFinance (GF) above all other
"free equities tracking websites" [1] was its portfolio.

I've just tried to see if your site addresses those pain points and it doesn't
- but I think you're halfway there.

What OP's "hypothetical portfolio" means is basically the tracking of a whole
set of selected equities (so in your site's case: the performance of
everything within a watchlist, including a graph visualizing it plus all the
common features like comparing that portfolio-graph to that of the Nasdaq,
Dollar Index, BTC ...). [2]

GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those
portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy
because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar
equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for
becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point
going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")

When GF still had its portfolio feature, I hoped their "re-design" would allow
for more mobile-friendliness (which you address) but more importantly
comparing portfolio graphs with each other.

Also, as non-American I repeatedly ran into trouble finding an equivalent
ticker sign for non-US equities [3]. Supporting WKN or ISIN would be an
improvement over GF!

Anyways, quitting your job for this is a bold step and I wish you the best!

[1] Putting that label in quotes maybe highlights the fringeness of that niche
and why Google shut it down :-(

[2] To be clear: not a graph where i have all the graphs of the items of a
watchlist - but one line for all items combined

[3] My trouble was usually resolved, finding some European stock's ADR and
converting the EUR amount invested to the amount of ADRs i'd have gotten in
USD

~~~
cloakedarbiter
> What OP's "hypothetical portfolio" means is basically the tracking of a
> whole set of selected equities (so in your site's case: the performance of
> everything within a watchlist, including a graph visualizing it plus all the
> common features like comparing that portfolio-graph to that of the Nasdaq,
> Dollar Index, BTC ...). [2]

> GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those
> portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy
> because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar
> equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for
> becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point
> going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")

I just want to second this point made in the parent comment. What I've always
wanted to do that I can't really do in an app out there, is compare my "what-
if" scenarios (e.g. what if I had held onto 20% of my AAPL in 2015, instead of
selling and buying NFLX and UA/UAA?). I always imagined that there'd be an
easy visualization comparison between two scenarios, to allow me to "evaluate"
certain buy/sell decisions I've made, retrospectively.

~~~
appleiigs
I think Excel would be the best tool for that type of analysis, not an app.

~~~
robryan
An app would be a lot nicer to get a graph of performance offer time for that
hypothetical decision. Excel would be okay if you just wanted to know today’s
position of various decisions.

------
cdcfa78156ae5
This is why Richard Stallman calls SaaS "Service as a Software Substitute" and
recommends running your own programs on your own computers:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-
serve.html)

If you are using any Unix derivative there are still Free Software
applications from the 1980s (or 1970s if you run BSD) that you are running
every day without any problems, whether you realize it or not.

Consider doing your financial modeling with a Free Software program like
Gnumeric: [http://gnumeric.org/](http://gnumeric.org/)

~~~
MarkMc
But any replacement for Google Finance will require a pricing feed, so in this
case you cannot get away from a 'service' model.

~~~
HIPisTheAnswer
For now, but soon our markets will be run completely p2p, and order books will
be shared with whoever wants to see them for really cheap. And no breakage.
Like I said before: this is good, the more saas are disrupted, the more we can
focus on a real distributed OS.

------
docker_up
It is mind boggling to me that both Google and Yahoo have thrown away their
finance sites. It's utter garbage. And on the phone, Google Finance is even
worse. They don't even use the same site or the same behavior, even though I'm
pointing to the same URL. It's insane. Why would they completely disregard
finance? Are they really not able to make a profitable site using ads?

~~~
beaner
What's funny to me is that so many people complain about large tech companies
eating up every product category and preventing competition. But when they
later kill these products, people complain all the same. Which is it?

Seems like an opportunity for someone else, if it was really being relied on
that much.

I suspect it wasn't. The author of the article said he hadn't checked in six
years. Six years! And he's complaining that Google threw his work away.

People want to have their cake and eat it, too.

~~~
protomyth
_What 's funny to me is that so many people complain about large tech
companies eating up every product category and preventing competition. But
when they later kill these products, people complain all the same. Which is
it?_

Both. They expanded into an area and killed the competition then killed their
product and left a void. See Google Reader for the life cycle.

~~~
zapita
Yes, exactly. Those are not contradictory. If anything, it makes it more
obvious why unchecked Big Tech expansion into every market, subsidized by
their core monopolies, is a bad thing for consumers in the long run.

------
rgbrenner
Was anyone really using this feature? Even the author sounds like he wasn't
actively using the feature. He entered some data 6 years ago, and went back
today to find it was missing.... He didn't even notice until almost a year
after it was removed.

Keeping every feature around, even the unused ones that look like failures, is
a bad idea.

~~~
tomohawk
Repeatedly destroying trust by dropping things and breaking things for people,
is a bad idea.

~~~
gboudrias
At this point Google projects are basically less reliable than hobby projects.

~~~
psergeant
But hey, come build your company on top of GCP!

~~~
stefano
Funny thing is, people are lining up to do just that. I think that's a symptom
of an industry where following the hype is more important than long term
stability.

~~~
runeks
Or maybe they’ve carefully weighed their options, and concluded that e.g.
Kubernetes on GCP works a lot better than on either AWS or Azure?

------
veronikakolejak
We built [https://wallmine.com/portfolios](https://wallmine.com/portfolios)
that can import a Google Finance CSV. The stock search/screener can filter
stocks listed on US, Canadian, and international exchanges. Happy to hear your
thoughts.

------
danso
> _When we combine this with Google’s destruction of millions of person-years
> of (part-time) work in Picasa, is the only reasonable conclusion that Google
> has re-hired Marissa Mayer?_

Huh?

~~~
nanoanderson
Seriously, what a nasty comment. Trying to think of what possible context they
could put around this comment that would justify it.

~~~
jondubois
Obviously you're not familiar with Marissa Mayer's work.

I remember that before Mayer, Yahoo Mail was lightweight, fast and it
displayed emails chronologically and in a well categorized way.

After Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo, the Yahoo email client became slow and
clunky and it grouped emails together in a strange way which made it hard to
find stuff; thankfully I was able to figure out a way to disable this
'feature'. That's not even mentioning all the Yahoo Mail hacking scandals that
happened on Mayer's watch.

Also, the new Yahoo logo is bad.

~~~
leoh
I'm not sure how you can hold Meyer directly responsible for the clunky Yahoo
email client. This reads as incredibly sexist.

~~~
pantheon
Why is it sexist? She did terrible at Yahoo. That's fact. Or you say, just
because she is woman, people should say she did a good job?

~~~
pm90
No but they shouldn't single her out either. I don't see him slamming any
number of male tech executives who made mistakes.

~~~
pantheon
You can single out whoever you want. It is not sexist. What is wrong with the
world?!

~~~
pm90
Consistently singling out a certain group of people betrays bias and likely
animus towards that group. For this author, that group seems to be women.

------
lalos
As long as Google reports 90% of the revenue from a single stream (Ads),
anything else is a pet project that can be canceled or left to rot since there
is no strong incentive to keep working on it. I try to back up whatever work I
do on any Google service. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on
me -> Google graveyard for more info: [https://www.lifewire.com/google-
graveyard-products-1616198](https://www.lifewire.com/google-graveyard-
products-1616198)

~~~
sbisker
There's a caveat there; Google is very incentivized to keep around any service
on which it can display those ads! Gmail isn't going away any time soon in
large part for that reason.

~~~
tonfa
Does Gmail show ads? I had the impression that was not the case now.

~~~
robocat
I just got one in the inbox list for Nokia (by a reseller) - not an email:
clicking it takes you to an advertisement.

Edit: I have noticed adverts depend on how your access Google e.g. I found the
iOS YouTube app way worse than the website in the browser.

~~~
acct1771
This is likely based on how captive of an audience they believe they have at
the moment.

------
api
Welcome to the new age of not owning or controlling anything. Your work
belongs to "the cloud," whatever that is, and can vanish at any time and
without warning. You can't make a backup... or not one you can use at least.

------
pkaye
That is the problem with depending on a third part service. Even if it was a
company that you paid for the service, at some point they might not find it
profitable and close down the service or company.

~~~
Y_Y
Finance is just a pile of third-parties trusting each other in exchange for
money.

~~~
njarboe
Or business in general.

~~~
dragonwriter
Or (generalizing money to utility) society in general.

------
rcar1046
I created a Google Finance replacement –
[https://stockdaddy.io](https://stockdaddy.io) – in my spare time. This can
track your investments and returns including dividends for stocks and ETFs
(real-time) and mutual funds (EOD). It’s basically a pure portfolio tracker
without much of the frills of a full finance site. It's meant to be a solid
performance tracker and good full screen layout to glance at throughout the
day.

~~~
BareNakedCoder
I get different looking 5-year charts for symbol HYG when I look on
stockdaddy.io and finance.yahoo.com. Where do you get your data?

~~~
rcar1046
IEX whom I would say for the most part is very reliable, although I would only
base actual trades off of your brokerage’s data and leave other sources like
Yahoo and Stockdaddy for real-time portfolio tracking.

------
arcticbull
I switched over to Yahoo Finance. Works pretty well, the UI especially on the
phone leaves some to be desired but it gets the job done.

------
nikolay
Stay away from Google products and services! With all their stringent to the
ridiculousness level hiring, they seem to hire calculators, not humans in the
negative sense. They don't get families either - I haven't seen their
diversity numbers, but maybe they are predominantly a bachelors' company, yet,
they try to design products for families. For example, I am the family manager
of our Google Play store account. Now, after the clowns come up with Google
One, which for whatever reason needs a massive migration, so, after six months
I'm still not in. Well, guess what, they invited my son and my wife to One,
but not me, you know, the family manager. Well, my son created his One
account, and my wife's old Storage account got converted to One, and suddenly,
she became the Google One manager. See, one family, two managers. And this
cannot be undone. So, if they had a single family man in this circus, he or
she would have influenced the product design, and deliver something that
doesn't lead into double charges, countless calls with customer support, and
most importantly - customer frustration. At the same time, Microsoft gets it.
Amazon gets families, too, and Facebook and Google don't. I had similar
experiences with the bachelor demographic of Facebook's in Product Design.
Anyway, back to the original point - Google doesn't get social dynamics, as
they don't get regular people in general. Most importantly, with all their
computer scientists, they don't seem to realize that by abusing us repeatedly,
they make sure we don't bother to use their future products and services. They
recently killed Inbox, but, honestly, that was a belated decision - they had
to kill it a second after it was launched as a completely idiotic product!
Sometimes I wonder what kind of people work on their products! They are way
too full of themselves and live in their twisted reality. That's why I would
never respond to their recruiter emails and calls! Google and Facebook are the
last place on Earth I'd go! And the ex-Googler title means nothing nowadays
anyway. I repeat, keep off Google! Short their stock!

~~~
andybak
(pro tip - line breaks aid readability...)

~~~
nikolay
Thanks! I didn't expect it to be that long!

------
cornflake
In terms of actually understanding how a hypothetical portfolio would have
performed, something that is much more meaningful then the overall ROI
provided by Google Finance is the concept of the annualised return.

We built our portfolio functionality with this in mind to empower investors to
understand their true returns, respective of time. It often amazes users here
at Australia's #1 stockmarket app, disclosure: I founded and bootstrapped the
business and it's iOS/Android only at the moment.

Refer: [https://stocklight.com/faq](https://stocklight.com/faq)

~~~
nradov
Why do you consider annualized return more meaningful than alpha or Sharpe
ratio?

------
OldHand2018
I understand that the purpose of this blog post is to discuss the collective
loss by the general public of access to this type of feature, but...

This dude's employer has access to data and tools that were never available on
Google or Yahoo. All _he_ needs to do is walk over to the business school and
ask someone in the computer lab for help creating a mock portfolio of stocks
and tracking performance over time.

------
MarkMc
The stocks that someone puts in a portfolio can be useful in targeting
advertising to that person. I'm surprised that Google decided this benefit was
less valuable than the ongoing cost of maintaining the Google Finance website.
Perhaps the problem is that that noone at Google wants to do the boring work
of maintaining what is essentially a CRUD application.

------
xte
Use cloud stuff? Witch means use someone else computers? That's an example
results.

In the past few people design Multics/Plan9 with a concept: a network OS, but
with our desktop at the center of the universe, simply because we work there,
our data are there etc. The network simply work as a helper, cache, horsepower
etc, no more.

------
HelloFellowDevs
I remember using Google Finance in one of my business classes in High School.
I haven't checked on it since, but I didn't know that Google would kill
something that was definitely promising.

~~~
iscrewyou
I still miss Google Reader. I just wish they would somehow let community take
over for the project. I don’t know how it would work but I just don’t see
another way. I’ve moved everything off Google other than email and calendar.

------
tinkerteller
I would love to know internal story behind the disaster that Google Finance
has become. I'm not against new designs and evolving but the new website
misses out on one simple thing: People using this site loves numbers, they
want numbers! "Minimal & dumbed down" doesn't work with investor types. My
guess is that they got new VP and the moron decided to wield his steve-jobs-
me-too minimal everything stick. The guy has to be wearing turtleneck every
day in the office and probably got big bonus for driving this trainwreck to
its conclusion.

------
vortico
Google Finance was a free site if I remember. If a consumer expects a level of
service without offering a payment, any pains the consumer has are entirely
their fault. If it was a paid service however, the consumer should control
(via a contract or terms of use) what will happen when something goes wrong.
If anything, people should thank Google for offering their service free of
charge.

~~~
ant6n
I am paying Google for storage. Last year my credit card went bust and Google
told me via e-mail I had 7 days to provide an alternate card, when payment
failed. Before that time was up, Google cancelled my subscription
unilaterally. They told me it's no problem, I just have to renew the
subscription, except by then the cost of the subscription had gone up 8%.

It was impossible for them to restore my previous subscription cost. As a
paying consumer I expected a certain level of service, but I had not control
over what was happening when something went wrong.

When paying Google, you're not better off.

~~~
vortico
Absolutely, don't use a company as large as Google for your data services. An
individual customer is not a significant income source, so they care less
about their customers. But there are several services out there offering paid
data services that _do_ care, because their main income source is the
customers, rather than advertisement and data collection companies.

------
yanneves
Any other disgruntled investors, I'd recommend ShareSight (not my company).
Generous free service.

------
anotheramala
This new website is doing a nice job:
[http://www.cmlviz.com/](http://www.cmlviz.com/)

------
RickJWagner
Quick shout-out to the commenter who mentioned Boggleheads.org. If you're into
finances, it's a great resource.

~~~
reptation
that's bogleheads.org I take it?

------
arrty88
Its a shame Google/Yahoo finance couldnt pivot to become Robinhood. It was so
close.

~~~
steakknife
You can now link your RH account (and many other brokers) directly to Yahoo
Finance and trade and track your portfolio in real-time, so really it's even
better than them becoming a broker.

------
wonder_bread
Stockrow.com

------
lozaning
This title seems clickbaity to me. Didn't the author lose about 5 minutes of
work they did 12 years ago, and not the effort resulting from continual work
over 12 years?

~~~
giarc
You're correct. Author added some stocks into their hypothetical portfolio and
went back to check to see how it was doing.

I wonder if Google sent emails to uses notifying them that the service was
going to be discontinued.

~~~
bacon_waffle
I had a portfolio there, just to see what the feature was about.

There was a notification on the site a while back (months ago, can't remember
exactly when), but I don't think they sent an email announcement.

~~~
slededit
At times I’m annoyed they don’t update it. But given the modern idea of
“updating” is to remove functionality and add white space I’m thankful.

------
Soundest
To be honest, this article just seems like a thinly veiled attempt to poke
google because he doesn't like their political leanings.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if any of the services I used today were still
around 12 years from now, let alone waiting with my previously saved settings.
If it was that important to you, you should have either used a paid service
(hey, bloomberg exists for a reason) or stored the data locally at your own
cost.

