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Google Finance happens to be a great tool for anyone doing things with the stock market. It shows a lot of data, up to date news, great graphs. But there is 1 severe flaw in it’s design. The Cash available calculation is completely wrong. Let me give you an example of my own account.

Currently the cash is listed as $43.75, but I really only have $15.96 in the account. Now, I’m not a heavy trader so this will be easy to reconcile. Here is a list of transactions:

Date Type Amount Balance
5/1/2012 Deposit – Cash 600.00 600.00
5/4/2012 Buy (366.85) 233.15
5/4/2012 Buy (194.55) 38.60
5/10/2012 Deposit – Cash 600.00 638.60
5/15/2012 Buy (619.15) 19.45
5/25/2012 Deposit – Cash 600.00 619.45
5/29/2012 Buy (9.18) 610.27
5/29/2012 Buy (594.31) 15.96

So you can see, I should only have 15.96 left available in the account. Which I do! I’m not exactly sure how this is happening because this is a fairly simple calculation. But this just leaves me disappointed in Google Finance and it is hard to trust the data it provides. About all I use it for now is checking news articles related to specific Stock Symbols.

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