A couple of people have asked us, how we setup a live result of this stock picks contest. The answer is using Google Docs. It’s a very service from Google; where you can connect a spreadsheet to “real-time” stock quotes from Google Finance. We write “real-time” in quotes because some stock quotes are delayed up to 20 minutes, for example the ones from Canadian stock exchanges.

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.