Here is the trick: you can just type the same function as you normally use for stocks, i.e. “=GoogleFinance(index)”. Type without quotes. For example, to display the current price of S&P 500 index, type “=GoogleFinance(“.INX”)”.

How do we find the ticker symbol of popular indexes? There are a couple of places on the Internet that has this information. Yahoo! Finance provides them on their home page; but they use a different convention with Google Finance. Instead of prefixing the ticker with dot, they use ^ symbol.

Here is the list of popular stock indexes around the world.

• S&P 500 Index: .INX
• Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index: .DJI
• Nasdaq Composite Index: .IXIC
• S&P/TSX Composite Index: .GSPTSE
• FTSE 100 Index: .FTSE
• Hang Seng Index: .HSI
• Nikkei 225 Index: .N225

You can do a lot of things with this feature, for example:

• Monitor your stock picks (just like we do).
• Compare your stock picks to well-known index, such as Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 or Nasdaq.
• Build your portfolio and monitor its performance.
• …

How can we do all those things? The only thing you need is an account at Google Docs. Once you have an account, login to your account and create a new spreadsheet.

Next, go to any cell and type “=GoogleFinance(symbol)”. Type it without quotes. For example, if you want to get the current stock prices of Google, you can type “=GoogleFinance(“GOOG”)”).

There are a couple of attributes you can add, such as opening price, market capitalization, and many more. We’ll discuss them in our future postings.