Disclaimer: The stocks in this post have been picked randomly. I currently own none of the stocks in this post (as of 2022-04-11), this post is not meant to be for or against buying any of the mentioned stocks, they are purely examples.
It is quite easy to get the current price of a stock in Google spreadsheets. You simply use the GOOGLEFINANCE() command with a ticker, like below:
=GOOGLEFINANCE("\<Your stock\>")
For example with Novo Nordisk:
=GOOGLEFINANCE("NOVO-B")
This will give you the price 308,65 as of 9th of Juli 2018 (when i originally wrote this post):
You can find the ticker for the company by searching for it on google finance (for example novo nordisk stock). If it is not there, it will not show up on your google spreadsheets. The ticker you need to use you can find below the name of the company:
In the above example you would have to remove the space between CPH: and NOVO-B. So that it becomes CPH:NOVO-B. Other examples could be NASDAQ:AMZN (Amazon), TSE:ABX (Barrick gold corp) or HKG:9618 (JD). It is good practice to prefix the ticker with the stock exchange! read on.
Are you not finding the correct price?
Perhaps you are selecting the wrong stock! There are many stock exchanges and big companies are often found on more than one. If you are looking for the Danish company Simcorp, you will not find it by typing "=GOOGLEFINANCE("SIM")". This will give you a price of 9,37 but Simcorp's price is 811,5! (as of now). This is due to the imprecision of typing "SIM", instead of "CPH:SIM". Which lets Google finance know that you wish to look for the ticker on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. Typing just "SIM" gives you "Grupo Simec SAB de CV" on the New York stock exchange (NYSE:SIM), which is a totally different company.
If you wish to see a list of all of the commands you can use with GoogleFinance you can find the list here. Another way is to hover over the "googlefinance" command in your Google spreadsheet and directly access it like below:
Finding the historic price of a stock
You can use the following function to get a price on a specific date like the 1st of January 2020:
=INDEX(GOOGLEFINANCE("NASDAQ:AMZN"; "price"; "2020-01-01"); 2; 2)
This will give you the price 1.898,01. The use of index in the above is because the above function returns a table. You can see this if you provide it with two dates as it will return you all the prices in the range:
=GOOGLEFINANCE("NASDAQ:AMZN"; "price"; "2020-01-01"; "2020-02-01")
This will give you the following table:
That is it!
I hope you found this helpful, let me know below if you did - or if you did not! :)