For people who are looking for a new way to handle investments online in the UK, Google has finally launched their Google Finance platform there. Google Finance is a simple way to gather the information you need for your investments. It works by pulling together information on companies, stocks, markets and more.
From their announcement, UK users will have access to the same features other location specific Google Finance users do.

Feature list:

* Search with a preference for UK companies and mutual funds.
* Google News integration – With a preference for news from British sources. The news is organized in groups by news topic, rather than listed by date, so you won’t have to scroll through multiple headlines for the same news story.
* Interactive Charts – Map market data with corresponding news stories in a single interactive chart, so you can track news to stock performance. You can also click and drag on the charts to see different time periods, and zoom in for more detailed information.
* Front page market summary with FTSE indices and British pound exchange rates.
* Blogs – Incorporates blog postings for related company information from Google Blog Search.
* Discussion Groups – High quality discussion forums are part of the service. We have a team of folks dedicated to keeping the conversation experience free of spam and irrelevant posts.
* Portfolios – A fast and easy way for you to create and track portfolios of stocks and mutual funds in the currency of your choice.

One thing Google Finance still lacks, in my opinion, is a way to use the site as an actual tool in tandem with an online investment site. I’d love to see Google partner with an established site like ShareBuilder or the international equivalent. It’s nice to see your stock and investment portfolio information in Google’s usual easy to read format they’ve become so famous for, but I’d love to be able to parlay the information into real time stock decisions.

Sure, sites like ShareBuilder offer a way to view stocks, but it isn’t as easy to use or user friendly as the Google Finance interface. You have to spend extra time hunting around on the site for the information you need, then going to entirely different screens to make stock buy and sell decisions, and the mutual fund and other portfolio information is in yet another area still. Google could easily create one stop shopping for this if they put their minds to it, offering a solution no one even knew they needed.

Screenshot:

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