My first port of call for financial news has traditionally been The Financial Times, but the online pink pages have recently been usurped by Google’s quite exceptional Finance site. (There’s a UK version of the site, too.)

Not only does this collate all the latest business news (including the FT’s) into one digestable lump, but it presents the latest market data in such an effortlessly customisable fashion that it should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. 

Go to the home page, for example, and at the foot of the screen you’ll find a colour-coded, sector-by-sector breakdown of how the stock market is performing. Natrually, this is currently bathed in more red than the Chinese flag, but from here you can click on Technology to find a more detailed breakdown of the industry that (just about) keeps a roof above all our heads.

From here you get an instant snapshot of the biggest gainers and losers, as well as a full run down of the top 20 tech companies – revealing instantly this morning that Apple saw almost a fifth of its value disappear in a single day, whilst Google, Intel and Nokia all saw their shares fall by 10% or more.  Scary.

However, Google Finance really shows its muscle when you click on Apple, say, and open the company’s dedicated page. Here you’ll find a wonderfully malleable stock graph, which at first glance would probably give Steve Jobs another health scare. But hold your cursor over the graph and scroll the mouse wheel and the graph gradually expands back over the years to reveal that, even after the latest crash, Apple’s stock is still far healthier than it was only two or three years ago.

What’s more, the latest Apple news, blogs and RSS feeds are running down the right-hand side of the page, keeping investors (and curious journalists) updated with the latest reasons to ring the stockbroker. Beneath the graph is a table revealing the performance of Apple’s closest rivals, including Microsoft, Dell and HP (and they’ve not got much to chuckle about either).

Meanwhile, the rest of the page is bathed with countless statistics on the company’s financials, board members and upcoming events.

I don’t own stock in any company (thank the Lord), but if I did, I’m 136% certain that the company’s page on Google Finance would be me firmly embedded in my bookmarks.