If you want information on a publicly traded stock or mutual fund, you can enter one or more NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, or mutual fund ticker symbols in Google's search box and Google will return a link to stock and mutual fund information.

[ peg ]

[ ek ]

[ goog ebay csco ]

Click on the "Show stock quotes" link to see financial information, which may include the price of the last trade, the range of prices for the day and for the year, a one-year target price estimate, the previous days closing price, the opening price for the day, the volume of shares traded during the day, the PE radio, dividends per share, the dividend date, a chart and much, much more..

Note: Entering a ticker symbol in the search box and then clicking on I'm Feeling Lucky will not take you to that symbol's financial information page. Instead, Google displays the first search results, whose link appears just below the box enclosing the stock information link.

You can also retrieve stock information via the stock: search operator. For example, [ stock:ca nu ] will return a link to stock information about Computer Associates and Northeast Utilities.

When you look up a publicly traded company, at the end of the first result (the company's corporate web page) is the company's ticker symbol, which links to the company's stock information.

Exercises

These problems give you practice in obtaining financial information for US publicly traded companies. For hints and answers to selected problems, see the Solutions page in the Appendix.

1. Obtain a chart of Ebay's stock price for the past 5 years by entering Ebay's stock symbol, ebay, clicking on the link "Show stock quotes" and then selecting a 5-year chart.

2. Find current financial information for Yahoo and Amazon

3. Using the similar pages feature, find competitors to google.com that are run by public companies. Check whether their stock prices have been climbing or dropping in the past three months.