Overcoming the inertia that keeps people going to other financial sites confronts Chris Jolley, group manager at Microsoft’s Financial Products Group, every day. He believe MSN Money deserves a look.

Compared to most of the past month, today was a pretty uneventful day for Google’s stock (it gained $7.57).  As such, now seems as good a time as any to take a deep breath, sit back, and consider where it might go in the future.

Google’s stock chart shows a drastic plunge taking place between November 7th and November 12th, but things have since leveled off, and Credit Suisse isn’t worried.  An analyst at the firm has actually suggested that Google might hit $900 per share in the next year.

When writing a story that revolves around stock prices, I prefer to wait until the market’s closed – don’t want the story reversing itself as I type, after all.  I’ve found that market updates from Google (and Yahoo and MSN) are a little slow, though, and for this, we can blame the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ten days ago, Joe Magyer described Google as “the world’s scariest stock.”  He may have been laughed at as a result, since the search giant proceeded to gain about $60 per share.  It’s now lost around $40, though, and investors have to be feeling decidedly uneasy.

At 9:32 AM, Google’s stock arrived at $700.43.  Regardless of what happened next, that was an important mark.  But what happened next is interesting, too: the search engine giant generally stayed above $700.

Up and down, down and up – it just sort of meandered along for a while.  But on Friday afternoon, Yahoo’s stock took more of an “up, up, and away” approach due to Alibaba.com’s impending IPO.

It wasn’t long ago a couple of analysts pulled a few blogs to the air hose and blew up their valuations. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch was among them with an MSRP of $100 million and CNet the prime candidate to buy. Then, this morning Arrington said something very curious.

A little more than two weeks ago, Google’s stock hit $600 per share.  We all “ooh”ed and “aah”ed.  Now the search giant has hit $675, and it may be only a matter of time before it passes $700.

This is not something to be alarmed about; it was both prearranged and preapproved.  It’s still an interesting bit of news, though: Ram Shriram, one of Google’s founding board members, recently sold 100,000 shares of stock.

The GOOG spent a brief time over the $600 mark, putting it in some pretty good company for a few minutes.

Yahoo’s stock lay down like an overheated hound at the end of the dog days of August. Don’t look now, but they are bouncing back.

A three-year low in the company’s stock price may have been too tempting for Yahoo president Susan Decker to let slip by without taking a chance on it.

There’s no telling what’ll happen with the DoubleClick deal, but Mountain View’s Postini arrangement is no longer up in the air – the Federal Trade Commission doesn’t mind if Google acquires the email security company.

Local.com is $13 million richer, but the money was not so much a gift as a payment – Local.com sold about 2.4 million shares of its stock to two investors.  And those investors bought the shares at $5.50 apiece, even though the stock’s current price has only ranged between $5.70 and $7.60 over the past few days.

So Harry Potter was the cause of Amazon’s tripling profit? What will they do when there are no more books coming out? They’ll be just fine, because that’s not what happened, the New York Times just sort of made it sound that way.

The after hours price for shares of GOOG as seen on both Yahoo Finance and Google Finance plummeted to $12 for a few brief minutes at around 6:14 pm EDT.

We usually write about companies buying each other, but in this case, Hearst Corporation is going against the trend: it has sold its stake in Local.com.

The world was relatively quiet last week when Local.com announced it had been awarded a patent on local search. Not so today, as another patent is revealed for an ad-supported 411 local search model. As of right now, 2:30 EDT, shares of Local.com are up 62 percent.