Lessons from Google Finance

If you are a stock market investor or just curious here is something you have goto see to believe. Google Finance offers an easy way to compare stock charts of a number of stocks at one time. You can go to value line and see nice long term charts but there you cannot super impose charts instantly the way you can on Google Finance and also on Yahoo Finance. What is amazing is that we live in a brand new era of stock charts and i am not just talking about the construction of the charts but the behavior of the greatest performing stocks. I make no recommendations about any stocks in this article except that some have amazingly spectacular charts that dwarf all the rest. Google Finance automatically flips the charts into percentage increases from price trending which makes doing this all the more fun. To get started you go to Google Search and think of your favorite stock then you type in the call letters for the stock and the words Google finance into the search box. That should give you a page with search results where you choose the top entry on the page which says the stocks call letter and Google Finance. Go there and you should see the name of the company the call letters and a chart that shows the trading prices of the day or for a week. Go to the chart and click on "All" . Go to http://www.Google.com/finance?q=NYSE:BRK.A to see Warren Buffet's $100,000 plus famous Berkshire Hathaway shares. Click on All to see all data for all the years google covers with the chart on Google Finance. It is unusual to find shares that trade over $100,000 per share . Just ignore this factor and note that this has been a non dividend paying stock over time. If you had started with MO for Atria that tracks part of Philip Morris over the years which has been possibly the most lucrative stock you should have owned since it was first issued once you factor in the spin offs and dividends that are not necessarily shown in the stock chart at hand. This fact of being non dividend paying makes http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:BRK.A the better place to start because more of total return of the share's appreciation is shown long term in this chart.

The next thing you want to do is to start comparing other stellar performing stocks you know about and seeing how they compare in the Google super imposition chart with BrkA. Start with MO by typing it into the compare box and then clicking enter. Then continue adding more comparison shares. Try adding XOM these shares paid out dividends too so it does not show total return nor the whole history of the company going back to JD Rockefeller.

Now go to the modern era to see what has changed to see what has really changed. Keep adding stellar stocks especially these and in this order: INTC for Intel, MSFT for Microsoft, AMGN for Amgen, then continue to add these: PCP for Precision Cast Parts, CRDN for Ceradyne and CSC0 for Cisco Corporation. The Cisco company shares on the chart should blow you away the way it blows the rest of the shares away down at the bottom of the page! Cisco not only shows the dot.com bubble with out the AOL finesse but it shows how the value of the Internet has sustained itself after the dot.com crash. There are actually stocks you can find that blow Cisco off the chart. By the time you add all of these comparison stocks beware you may have to re-enter CSCO or just cancel some of the earlier comparisons to bring CSCO back. You see CSCO actually achieved 200,000 % appreciation! It is mind boggling. Compare more stocks to see if you can find one that has done better than Cisco. Try Amazon, Apple, Google , Teva pharmaceuticals and other. It is hard to find anything that charts like Cisco over the number of years it has been around or going back longer in time. You can try starting out with IBM and T for or go to look at the big flops in the stock market you know best that are still around but first start out with less successful companies to make a comparison against.

Cisco might not have been your best investment ever had you sold or bought the shares at the wrong times so factor that into your thinking. If you go back to Berkshire Hathaway and compare stocks like JNJ and realize that JNJ has paid out dividends not shown on this chart since it is not a total return chart it stacks up fairly well. You can type in X to see the US Steel bubble before the 2008 crash.

The lesson to be learned maybe that geometric progressions are possible in a global world market where computers and computer driven utilities can lead to near geometric progressions in manufacturing and sales. It is something like Intel's Moore's Law but it is not just nor necessarily computer related companies. Google and Yahoo and other Internet charting utilities could make comparisons of total return for dividend paying companies which also account for value of spin offs so that companies would compare less like apples and oranges. Value Line is a charting service that correlates the chart with more than just volume but with other data in tables that correspond to the chart in a matrix. The Google charts have advantages you might never have seen before and is worth trying. As per stocks like Cisco and other high fliers listed in this article they are a lot different than bubbles of more ancient times like the infamous south seas bubble chart. The south sea bubble shares never had any real underlying value where as these shares have some or a great deal even if sometimes difficult to be sure.. The further back in time the chart goes the more honest the correlation to actual value of shares should be. I tried to show some of the more impressive charts you can probably find more. If you find one better than Cisco that goes out more than a few years share it with me so i can use it to continue studying bubbles and busts. One company to look at is Google . It's share price came out at about $50 and it is up to something like $600 now but it is just a blip on these longer term charts so far.