Google Finance and QlikTech (Qlik): A Look at Financial Data Visualization

Google Finance provides a comprehensive platform for tracking financial markets, news, and company data. While excellent for presenting raw data and basic charting, it lacks the advanced analytical and visualization capabilities necessary for deep dives and complex business intelligence.

This is where QlikTech (now simply known as Qlik) and its data visualization platform, Qlik Sense, come into play. Qlik offers a powerful alternative for finance professionals seeking to transform raw financial data into actionable insights.

Qlik’s Advantages over Basic Google Finance Charts

Google Finance’s charting capabilities are primarily designed for displaying historical price movements and trading volumes. They are sufficient for a quick overview but fall short when users need to:

• Analyze large and complex datasets: Qlik excels at handling vast volumes of financial data, including transactions, ledger entries, market feeds, and economic indicators. Google Finance is limited in its capacity to process and visualize such datasets effectively.
• Create interactive dashboards: Qlik allows users to build custom dashboards tailored to their specific analytical needs. These dashboards can combine various data sources and visualizations, providing a holistic view of financial performance. Google Finance primarily offers pre-defined views and charts.
• Perform advanced calculations and analytics: Qlik supports a wide range of statistical and analytical functions, enabling users to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs), perform trend analysis, and identify anomalies. Google Finance offers limited analytical capabilities.
• Explore data associatively: Qlik’s associative engine allows users to freely explore relationships within data, uncovering hidden patterns and insights that might be missed with traditional reporting tools. Google Finance lacks this capability.
• Collaborate and share insights: Qlik facilitates collaboration by allowing users to share dashboards and insights with colleagues. Google Finance offers limited collaboration features.

Use Cases for Qlik in Finance

Qlik can be applied across various areas within finance:

• Financial Reporting and Analysis: Generating dynamic financial reports, analyzing revenue, expenses, and profitability, and tracking key financial metrics.
• Budgeting and Forecasting: Creating interactive budget models, monitoring budget performance, and developing accurate financial forecasts.
• Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating financial risks, monitoring market volatility, and assessing portfolio risk.
• Investment Analysis: Evaluating investment opportunities, tracking portfolio performance, and conducting market research.
• Fraud Detection: Identifying suspicious transactions and patterns of fraudulent activity.

Integrating Google Finance Data with Qlik

While Qlik offers superior analytical capabilities, Google Finance can still be a valuable source of raw data. Users can extract data from Google Finance using APIs or web scraping techniques and then load it into Qlik for further analysis and visualization. This allows users to leverage the breadth of data available on Google Finance while benefiting from the analytical power of Qlik.

Conclusion

Google Finance is a useful tool for quick market overviews and basic data retrieval. However, for in-depth financial analysis, interactive dashboards, and uncovering hidden insights, Qlik provides a much more powerful and flexible solution. By integrating Google Finance data with Qlik, finance professionals can gain a comprehensive and actionable view of their financial performance and make better-informed decisions.