Review of Google Finance

Google has made a foray into the world of financial information. Google Finance (beta), launched a year ago, is the latest next big thing from the Internet giant, whose shares closed in on the $675 mark last week. At first glance, the site appears fairly simplistic, much similar to the Google home page. However, as you begin to try it out, you'll find the service is rich in features, deploying Google's repertoire of technologies to track Wall Street bustle.

It is fresh, fluid, and fairly easy to use. It is the perfect tool for the at-home investor, with several key features that make keeping up-to-date with your investments a cinch.

Key Features

• Home Page - The main page has an updated summary of the North American markets, with recent quotes and related news, charts of the major indexes, information on bonds, big movers and shakers, and key financial news of the day. There is also a sector summary which shows how key industries are performing, along with currency conversion and a video section. All of this is easy to read, free of the clutter found on other finance websites, and automatically updated.
• Search - Coming from Google, you know it had to be something special - and it is. With the help of AJAX technology, the search feature on Google Finance allows you to quickly find what your looking for, with search results displayed as you type. No need to fuddle around with symbols - a search of a company name brings up a list of results with similar spellings and symbols, for quick and easy access. Can't find what your looking for? Entering a search brings back results similar to a Google search, with suggestions for typos, and similar company links.
  
• Up-to-date info - Upon landing on a stock's page, you'll find all the information you need, in an easy to read format. The share price of the specific stock is in large and bold, with key stats clearly displayed. All of this is automatically updated. The share price and change is also displayed in the taskbar, which allows you to see the price even if the window is minimized.
  
• Advanced Charts - With the help of Adobe Flash, Google has provided the best chart on the web. Users can fluidly zoom in and out of the chart being viewed by using the scroll of their mouse, adjusting the timeline along the bottom to show a customized range, or by clicking on key intervals. Added to this are news flags, which provide insight into why the stock moved the way it did, a comparison tool, for quick comparing between stocks and indexes, dividend markers, and access to historical prices.
  
• Wealth of information - To the left hand side you'll find information on related companies, key financials and stats, along with access to other resources. Along the right hand side are links blog posts, moderated discussions, a company overview, upcoming company events (that can be added to your Google Calendar) and a management summary with pop-up bios.
• Portfolio - Easily track your investments by signing up to access the free portfolio feature. You can add and remove your stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, set quantities, initial cost, and track performance overall, with daily and cumulative losses/gains tabulated. Logging in displays your portfolio on the front page.
• Integrated with Google Accounts - You can access your portfolio as easily as you can change between Gmail and Calendar. Charts can also be displayed on your customized home page.
  

Overall, Finance (beta) is a simple, yet powerful tool. It combines Google's plethora of resources to deliver an easy-to-follow interactive application, with updated detailed information on your investments.

Learn more. Give it a spin.

Valuating Wikipedia

With the latest .com deal making social networking staple Facebook worth a cool $15B, its about time we take a look at the last unsold Kingpin of the Internet.

Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is huge and still growing. The user-powered encyclopedia had at last count 2,065,000 articles in its English edition on just about everything. The site reaches millions of visitors daily, often through search engine queries - call it the Yahoogle-Wikipedia tandem if you want - with a behemoth of topics ranging from the aardvark to Zoloft.

Just imagine the lucrativeness of advertising served to people actually looking for information on a specific subject - people interested enough to read an encyclopedia article about it. It is not far fetched to assume that big spenders, the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, would be willing to spend a reasonable amount of coinage to at least secure rights to advertise on the 8th most visited website in the world, and at most make it a sizable subsidiary. Plus on the bright side, Wikipedia doesn't know who you really are, as opposed to Facebook, with a collection of personal information that would get advertisers drooling for more. The only problem is Wikipedia is not for sale. In addition, advertising on the project out of St. Petersburg, Florida, is regarded as taboo within the Wikipedian community. But why is that? After all, professional sports leagues around the world thrive off of advertising. Does the Wikipedian community actually believe that at some level, they are better than NASCAR, the Premier League, or Major League Baseball? Besides, marketers have already penetrated the site, jazzing up articles on their own companies and products, with external links (spam) to boot. That being said, in the foreseeable future Wikipedia will continue to meet its operating costs and Utopian vision of spreading free information around the world from generous donations, with the latest fundraising drive launching in the last week.

Despite all of this, there still lies the question - what is the white elephant in the room worth? What is the wholesale value of such a project? To put it lightly, the Wikimedia Foundation, governing body of the free encyclopedia, has a portfolio which consists of a few hundred depreciating servers, an office in downtown St. Petersburg with a dozen underpaid staffers, and 187 shares in Google. Assets total a mere $1,000,000, which is definitely not much in terms of liquidity - if anything probably Google's candy budget for the year. But that's not what a potential buyer would be looking at. It is the web presence that they'd be looking at, which totals hundreds of millions of visitors each month and vast amounts of potential ad revenue.

The only way to really assess Wikipedia would be to gauge the sale of other Internet properties. Take HowStuffWorks.com - recently aquired by Discovery Communications for a neat $250M. As mentioned earlier, Facebook's deal with Microsoft - $240M for 1.6% - gives it a value of $15B. Not bad for 7th overall. Google acquired YouTube in 2005 for $1.7B, which at that point boasted a shoddy collection of viral videos, and was (until recently) losing money due to the massive technical costs associated with running such an operation. So where does Wikipedia lie in the mix? The site which has been around since 2001 meets its operating budget with donations alone, and is the de facto top result in most search engine queries, garnering millions of visits a day. The content, although filled with some recycled garbage and factoids, is improving thanks in part to bots which scan the pages for rubbish, and policies devised by the organization which are enforced by "administrators" (colloquially referred to as janitors) on the site. Unbeknownst to the critics of Wikipedia - mostly losers who couldn't fathom the deletion of their own article - the site has a vast array of policies and guidelines devised to maintain law and order, and ensure quality, factual content, contrary to popular belief that vandalism and 'crowd sourcing' prevail. For some, the project is something neat to do in their spare time, and for others, it is free content available at their finger tips. Such a project is prone to mistakes, but each mistake brings a wave of improvements.

Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia - a significant destination for information on the web, which takes the form of a user-generated online community. It attracts as many visitors - interested visitors - as Facebook. The demographic is wide, the potential for advertising is huge, and the reach is massive. So what is she worth? The Buck Nerd says a cool $8B. Not bad, not unreasonable. With that kind of money, Wikipedia (and Wikimedia for that matter) can surely move on to bigger and better things. Access to several resources and financing for years to come is just a start. As for the potential buyer, they would be making cash hand over fist.

Well that's just some crazy thinking, right? After all, it is just an idea, much like the altruistic vision of spreading free information around the world, which some might suggest becomes a little easier with a steady cash flow in hand.

The Big Apple

You've probably heard stories about people losing and gaining tons of money in this thing called the stock market. But what does it really all mean?

In order for a company to expand and grow, they need to raise money. This can be achieved by becoming a public corporation, where the ownership of the company is split amongst individuals both inside and outside of the company. Investors pay billions of dollars to the company who then in turn gives them a certain percentage of ownership in the company. Each unit of ownership is referred to as a share.

Public companies are owned by a consortium of banks, private individuals, and regular people just like you. Through a broker, and more often your bank, you can purchase a share of the ownership of a number of companies listed on stock exchanges around the world. Shareholders are allowed to attend annual meetings, appoint directors, and decide on major issues which affect the company. As an owner, you also receive a slice of the profit - if the company makes $1 billion in profit, and there are 100 million shares, each share receives $10 - called a dividend. If you own 20 of said shares, for example - your dividend check would be worth 20 x $10 = $200. It comes in the mail - pretty easy money for not doing anything. Shareholders are also allowed to sell their shares - that is where the stock market comes in. If a company is doing very well, ownership would be in high demand, thus the value of the share goes up. If you purchased 1000 shares of a company, and the price of the stock goes up $3, you can ideally sell your 1000 shares and make a $3000 profit. The only problem is, you've given up ownership in the company and can miss out on larger dividends and even higher stock values. The key is to think long term.

Take for example Apple - maker of the iPod , iPhone, and the Macintosh computer. If you had invested $50,000 in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) five years ago, that investment would be worth a cool $1.2 million today. In the last 5 years, shares in the Silicon Valley company have gone up $160, or 2273% (charts). This works out because 5 years ago, Apple shares were hovering around the $7 mark. $50,000 five years ago could afford you 6887 shares. Today, those 6887 shares are now worth over a million dollars, because Apple's share price has gone up to $167 ($167 * 6887 = $1,150,129). To put that in perspective, if you had decided 5 years ago to purchase Apple shares instead of a 2nd generation 20GB iPod for $499, you'd have $11,000. That is a lot of apples.

Apple may be an extreme example, but overall a diversified portfolio - lingo for having money in different companies - will yield a reasonable return in the long run. This is much better than the pennies on the dollar you'd receive from your bank.

Buck parity has no effect on prices

This weekend while you're out shopping, consider this: that new high-def television or dual-core laptop is ten to fifteen percent cheaper in the United States. After we tack on taxes, that figure approaches twenty percent. So what gives? The answer lies not with lawmakers who levy the high sale taxes, but rather retailers who have yet to adjust their prices to reflect the current valuation of the loonie. The Canadian dollar has risen steadily from an all-time low of $0.61 US in January 2002 to parity this past week. For the faint of math, that is a 64% appreciation in value over the greenback in half a decade. All the while, Canadians have seen virtually no savings for items such as music, movies, books, electronics, and more notably automobiles, over the same time period. Industry analysts will proclaim price fluctuation will create instability in the market. However, when talks of a hurricane approaching the Gulf of Mexico occur, you'll be sure to see those gas prices change like night and day.

Understandably, repricing merchandise every week will create havoc for Canadian retailers. However over the course of several months, one would expect to see a drop in prices, especially from online vendors such as Apple and Dell. Take Apple's online store for example. Their baseline Macbook model retails for $1099 US. Given that we're at parity this week, that equals the same in Canadian dollars. The only problem is, Apple doesn't permit shipping to Canadian addresses from their US store. So hop on over to apple.ca, and you'll find the same model retailing for $1249. After crunching some numbers, it appears that Apple's basis for their Canadian pricing is the 88 cent dollar, which hasn't been seen since April of this year. That's nearly 6 months. Considering how Apple was able to make a huge cut in their iPhone pricing, not to mention the $100 vouchers, I don't think a price re-adjustment on their Canadian store site would be too arduous of a task to accomplish. The same can be said about Dell. Their baseline model Inspiron 1501 retails for $499 US. Since we're at parity, that should be $499 CAD. Once again, you cannot order from the US store to a Canadian address. At the dell.ca, the same model retails for $549. A few calculations reveal that this is accurate as of May, when the dollar was hovering around 90 cents.

Apple's online store

Although the Canadian dollar is on par with the US dollar, Canadian consumers are still paying upwards of 10% in price markup compared to their US counterparts.

If retailers know what is good for business, they will adjust their prices, and do so fast. With the holiday shopping season six weeks away, sooner will be better than later, especially when it comes to big ticket items such as computers, game systems, and televisions. Even after taking into consideration shipping and taxes, mighty fine savings can be found south of the border.

So while the weather is still good, head down to the bank and get some greenbacks while they're cheap, because parity won't last forever. Then make the journey across the border for a weekend of savings. Be sure to purchase some clothes, shoes, jewelery, electronics, and a full tank of gas while your at it. Because apart from that, there won't be any savings on this side of the border any time soon.