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Google makes it easy to track stocks with Google Finance, a free set of tools to keep up with your portfolio. Although you might use the Google Finance dashboard to follow your portfolio performance or create a watchlist, you can also build your own portfolio tracker using Google Sheets. Google makes it easy to import data about stocks, mutual funds, and currencies with the versatile GOOGLEFINANCE formula. You can make custom tables, dashboards, and charts to follow your portfolio however you wish.
Read on to learn how to track stocks with Google Finance and build your own portfolio tracker in Google Sheets.
Google Finance is a free tool provided by Google to help you track your portfolio performance and keep up with news and events for the stocks you own or have on your watch list.
Anyone with a Google account can access Google Finance at finance.google.com. Once you're logged in, setting up a portfolio or watch list of stocks is fairly straightforward.
To create a portfolio:
Once you have a new portfolio, you'll need to add your holdings to it.
If you simply want to add a stock to your watch list to receive news and events:
Once you have everything set up, you'll see a customized dashboard with your portfolio performance, top stories about companies you own or have on your watch list and upcoming earnings reports.
If you'd like to build your own custom portfolio tracker and dashboard, Google makes it easy by integrating Google Finance with Google Sheets. Users can access financial data about stocks, ETFs, market indexes, and currencies (including cryptocurrency). They can then use Sheets to organize and manipulate those data however they want.
The key to making your own stock tracker in Google Sheets is the GOOGLEFINANCE formula. The GOOGLEFINANCE formula is a versatile tool that allows you to specify which piece of data you'd like to import into a cell on your spreadsheet.
The most basic use of GOOGLEFINANCE is to import the current price of a stock. To do so, you'll use the following instructions.
Note that grabbing the stock price is the default function of GOOGLEFINANCE. However, you can specify many more attributes using the function to populate a full dashboard for your portfolio.
You might build a whole spreadsheet containing the ticker, the name of the company, how many shares you own, the price of the stock, price changes over the last trading day, the current value of your shares, the change in the value of your holding over the last trading day, and more. You'll see how to do that in the next section.
To build out your portfolio tracking sheet, you'll need to know a little more about how the GOOGLEFINANCE formula works.
After you type in "=GOOGLEFINANCE" and specify the ticker you want, you can also specify any one of a number of attributes you'd like to collect. You simply put a comma after specifying the ticker and type in the attribute. You'll find a full table of useful attributes below.
You may also specify a start date, end date, and interval after the attribute, which can be useful in some cases.
Then, you can manipulate the data in your sheet to provide important information, like the total value of your stock holdings or how much your entire portfolio gained or lost over the past day.
Here's an example of a basic portfolio dashboard.
Unfortunately, you might not be able to get every piece of data through the Google Finance formula. One of the biggest omissions for stocks is dividends. But you should be able to get most of what you need to build a good dashboard to track your stocks.
Here's a table of useful Google Finance formula attributes.
