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Google to Offer Real-Time Stock Quotes
Apro+im writes "Today, Google announced that Google Finance will report real-time prices on NASDAQ-listed securities. While real-time stock quotes are not new, they have long encumbered with subscriptions, legal agreements, or pay software. This may be the first free source for real-time quotes."
Yahoo! does this already.
Are these stock quotes actually real time, or are they delayed 3 hours? There's lots of places to get stock quotes but unless you're getting them directly from a broker or the stock exchange they're delayed.
I got free real-time quotes with my E*Trade account readily enough. You do need to open an account and log in each time, and you do need to accept a legal agreement, but I don't think you need to actually pay for them.
The legal agreement was mostly "you can't sue us, or NASDAQ, or the NYSE or anybody, for giving you these quotes... and you can't, like, republish these to other people". It didn't seem excessive.
I guess Google will be more convenient than these, but it's not a huge deal. Besides, if you actually care about a 15-minute delay, you'll have your brokerage account open anyway.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
tons of subscription services will lose most of their user base overnight - not just the ones charging for real time quotes, but also all the free sites that only offer delayed quotes. It could even have implications for market as a whole, because a whole lot more amateur investors will be getting involved in watching real-time activity. Evil though they may be, it's hard to deny that google gets their product offerings dead-on nearly all the time.
What part of "We're very excited to tell you that real-time quotes on NASDAQ securities are now available on Google Finance" was ambiguous?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
First it was "15 minutes delayed" stock quotes being all the rage.
Now people are getting excited over "real time"? bah!
Give me "In 10 Minutes" stock quotes and I'll pay for that!
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Alright, time to use an idea from Ghost In the Shell 1. Create software that analyzes, buys and sells stocks. 2. Let it run. 3. Profit! I've always thought something like this would be a good idea, and the fact that I haven't heard of anyone doing it makes me wonder if there are some legal issues with it. Then again, I'm completely new to the stock market.
While I know Google makes for good news, this story is in fact more about the exchanges loosening their grip on quote restrictions than it is a feel-good Google story.
Historically the exchanges have required anyone offering free quotes to delay them 15-20 minutes since a big part of their revenue stream derived from charging brokerages for real-time quotes. (Brokerages in turn only offered this service to their customers.) NASDAQ announced a deal to allow Google, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC to show real-time quotes for free. Yahoo Finance announced a similar deal with a different group (BATS Trading) to phase free real-time quotes throughout its site also.
Looks like the internet continues to bring down barriers to information.
Anyone can access real time quotes. Call me when Google offers accurate intraday historical data. Now *that* would be huge.
\u262D = \u5350
I feel a great disturbance on the Internet. As if millions of tenuous business models suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
This may be the first free source for real-time quotes.
No. There you are.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I saw this early this morning, and of course it was before it showed up on the google blog. Just viewing the site, the numbers tick constantly and it makes me wonder how soon Companies are going to block the site thanks to high traffic from all these streaming numbers. Just leave it open with your huge portfolio and watch as the admins see these constant streams appearing.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
As some of you may or may not know, Bloomberg provides huge amounts of financial data to investment banks/firms via "Bloomberg Terminals" that Bloomberg offers. These terminals are very expensive to the firms. Yet all they offer is information. Information is something that Google excels at. I've used these Bloomberg terminals and they aren't exactly technology that you'd think of as cutting edge for 2008. Data is often inaccurate and researching things on them is an art.
I've wondered if Google might just enter the financial data market strongly. Google knows how to deal with large amount of data better than many places that are somewhat stuck in the past.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
It's good, but I'd rather have a system to stream the data to my HD in CSV format, or even historical tick data for all stocks. That would be tasty.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I'd like to know how Google will make its money on this particular service. How? Are the data feeds on prices free and a middleman has always ripped us off all this time?
It's not just Google that's doing this. CNBC and the Wall Street Journal also started providing free real-time quotes today. MSN Money has been doing this for a while.
Granted, some of these require a subscription (MSN, WSJ)--a point noted by the submitter--but all of these services appear to be free-as-in-beer. I don't think a subscription is that big a deal; YMMV.
From what I can tell, CNBC doesn't mention either a subscription or a daily/monthly limit; I admit I haven't looked at their service in detail though.
Free real time quotes are not new. What is new is a major player doing it, and publicizing it well. I remember there was a good free real-time quotes (even live listings of trades) in the early 2000s. I believe it may have been stockquotes.com? (Now a parked domain). If I remember correctly, they simply ran out of funding.
Anyway, glad to see a free real-time quotes provider that may stick around a while!
While the formula may be hugely complex, if such a formula exists, it's kinda self destroying, because the stock market exists in a way because there is no formula.
That's the only part of the above posting that's true. There have been successful technical analysis systems over the years. The trouble is that once someone finds a working strategy for beating the market and uses it on a large scale, others notice and replicate it, and it becomes the market. There's also a failure mode where structured investment vehicles are constructed in such a way that they have a high probability of a continual small gain coupled with a small probability of a big loss, for a negative expectation overall. (See "Long Term Capital Management".)
So much programmed trading activity is going on that it's most of the market now. That's why the number of transactions has become so high.
The vast majority of investors should ignore the minute by minute blows of the market. At this time scale the market is literally a big roulette wheel. Virtually all day traders and every amateur who thinks they can reliably extract disproportionate gains out of the market long-term (i.e. more than they would by say, holding an appropriate mix of diversified indexes) are fooling themselves into making predictions on what essentially amounts to sheer randomness. Think I'm crazy? Do yourself a favor and read A Random Walk Down Wall Street and save yourself the decade it took me to figure out how the market works. You're welcome.
Coincidentally, Barrons.com announced free real-time quotes today too http://online.barrons.com/article/SB121237840349237093.html
eTrade has had free real time quotes with a free account for over a decade. For those that really want/need this information, it was not hard to get.
/.
It is good if you can avoid an account, even a free one, to get this information now, but this seems a little over hyped to be on
I'll use this opportunity to ask if anybody has a good source for daily exchange rates. I'm building an open source app (geek cred?) that needs to pull daily exchange rates. I have only found a tab delimited file from the International Monetary Fund so far. That works okay, but does anybody know of other/better APIs/feeds for exchange rates?
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
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On occasion, I have seen quotes for FDRXX (money market fund) report 123,000%+ on finance.yahoo.com, so you still have to think once in a while, as wonderful as the Internet is, it is not perfect.
And to be a bit off-topic and rambling, it will not be technical hurdles that "kill" the Internet, it will be lawyers and legislators, mark my words.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I used to produce infosystems for traders and equities researchers/promoters on Wall Street (and in Toronto) during the 1990s Bubble. When those brokers say "realtime", they are talking about delays that are under 1 second. They're talking about WANs, LANs and apps at both client and server that have next to no latency. Because for their hottest traders, the software that makes them $billions a day, any edge in faster info means beating the competition.
The time to hit a Google page of "realtime" quotes is going to be at least a couple seconds, to say nothing of how long Google takes to get them from the market infosystems (which could be under 1s, because Google is rich and smart). That's not the realtime that real brokers pay for. It's better than 15-minute delayed quotes, which is what you usually get for free. But let's not call something realtime that isn't, even if it's free. That's the kind of BS that made the 1990s Bubble such a catastrophe, despite the best infosystems to deliver it that money could buy.
--
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What good is a real time quote without the ability to click on the quote and make a trade? Anyone that cares about real time stock quotes already has a brokerage account that gives this to them free anyway. Most brokerages do charge for level II quotes though.
Now when Google gives me free stock trades and free real time quotes they will have my business! Not sure how they will make money off of it though.
... a real time price data feed.
No offense Google, but I've had free real time quotes for years. Give me a stream of prices and I might sit up and notice. Having to continuously request the latest price is dumb, let me subscribe to the latest price and then provide me a continuously updating stream. Hell, I'd pay a reasonable fee ($1.00/day/symbol for DJIA constituents) for that service - as long as I don't have to pay the prices Reuters, Bloomberg, or the others charge (not to mention having to code to their idiotic API's.!
I thought the whole point of the delay was so that we don't reproduce the crash that happened in what? '87? Which was exacerbated by real time software being triggered to sell in a downward spiral after the stock market had dropped a certain amount.
I need to confirm that, but is that only the rule for NYSE, or US exchanges as a whole?
Aren't the windows sealed after a certain level? I mean how would they even open a window to jump in the first place? And the glass is pretty tough as well so breaking it wouldn't be too easy.
Just because they stop streaming after 25 minutes doesn't mean they aren't providing free real-time quotes. Because if you look at the top of a quote page during trading hours you get the realtime quote. Its been that way for at least a month. So the bit about google being the first free real-time quote is standard google fan boi on slashdot. As there have been FREE real-time quotes available for years (not just talking about yahoo, although they provided them years ago but were forced to discontinue them a few years ago
)
what turdface mod labeled this 'Offtopic' ?
Read radical news here
um...
1. Become a TradeStation customer
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3. Do what you said
Or, look up "Quant." A lot of people use automated trading.
For the curious, we just released the 9.0.1 version of our windows based portfolio manager/charting/trading platform app called Personal Stock Streamer, which now provides free streaming realtime quotes to non-professionals for up to 600 tickers when used with supported brokerage accounts.
The Nasdaq arrangements will begin as a six-month pilot project, while Nasdaq waits for definitive approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the right to sell market data to the sites for a fee. It hopes to get the approval within a year. The move comes at a time when the major exchanges are trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible from market data, which now makes up a larger share of revenue than equities trading. At Nasdaq, market data generates 20 percent of revenue, while at the NYSE, the figure is 14 percent. Nasdaq says the exchange's high trading volumes make its data more accurate, allowing it to charge a fee for a service that BATS is providing free to Yahoo. Nasdaq handles about four times the equity trading volumes that BATS does. A NYSE spokesman declined to say whether the exchange had similar projects in the pipeline. The project will generate only modest revenues, said Adena Friedman, an executive vice president at Nasdaq OMX. http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN0227850020080603
Except that it is done on a regular basis by a lot of people. Technical analysis is basically the field of automated stock trading techniques. Granted, many technical traders don't have a program do the buying and selling, but many do.
... in which case you are still wrong. Arbitrage trades exist in many markets, but you'd better make sure you have the lowest latency connection to the exchange.
Unless you meant that it can't be done in a way that guarantees a profit
For the most part, market makers have to be daft to not make money. And there are computerized market makers.
Tell me what the prices will be in 10-20 years.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
hate to reply to my own post - after digging through 570,000 ads for ticker software (what the hell?) I find that I was misinformed.
The NYSE has "breakers" in place that close the markets after certain percentage drops so that auto-trading won't continue the downward spiral.
external link to definition of "Rule 80b"
Thanks.
Opentick.com is a free quote datafeed that provides unlimited realtime streaming quotes for a variety of 3rd party software interfaces (some free as well) and only charges exchange fees, i.e. nyse is $1 (which gets paid to the exchange.)
One of the problems of course is the fact that there isn't a single body like the SEC (well, the IMF is I suppose) like there is for the NASDAQ and the like, so Google might have a harder time of it.
Who is John Galt?
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
... what sort of mathematical tools do researchers use to create the models that help people thrive? What sort of undergraduate math courses should I take in order to better understand the algorithms involved? To give a technical analogy... in high school, I was on a robotics team. I programmed the robot to respond to joysticks that told it how to accelerate. Of course, mechanical aberrations, among other things, caused the system not to function properly. So I learned about a process called PID feedback control. Basically, without it, acceleration would be jerky and the robot would be difficult to maneuver. However, with it, smoother, finer-grain control was granted to the operator. In a sense, it threw out outliers over time. Is this the essence of the stock market models? or is there something deeper? Either way, please let me know your thoughts.
During trading hours the part that of their quote page that currently says "after hours" says "real-time" which is "indicating otherwise" when it comes to the disclaimer on the bottom.
But continue to be uninformed all you want.
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Buy low.
Sell high.
That's all you have to do!
... invest based on clickthrough streams? ie, if there's a marked increase in the number of people checking out a particular stock - it's not unreasonable to assume that they're thinking of buying.
or selling i guess - but you should be able to guess what they're going to do based on the trend for the stock.
Disappointing. This is after all Google (Motto: Our Office Plants Are Smarter Than You Not That We Have Office Plants Because Well You Wouldn't Understand Why Not) so I would have expected at the very least 15-minutes undelay into the future.
You just know they have that tech but they won't share it because, well for reasons that take tensor calculus to explain.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Real time bid/ask would be so much more tantalizing. I could cut my brokerage fees in half if Yahoo or Google would offer real time bid/ask.
I notice that while you can download the complete (daily or weekly) history of companies' stocks to a CSV file, that option is not available for indices such as NASDAQ and Dow Jones Industrials. That kind of shodiness reminds me of, well, Yahoo.
Yay! More gambling opportunities right here, next to your child's bedroom.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I have worked at several exchanges. Prices go out in what is usually known as the broadcast feed.
The normal method is that when bid and offers come in, they are added to the order book. If this changes the best bid or offer on a product then this is added to the feed. When a deal matches, you get an execution price and that is also added to a feed. In addition, depending on the product and the time interval, you will get something called market depth, i.e., best 5 (or whatever) bid and asks.
This is a lot of data but it is buffered. Usually the system will wait until the buffer is full before dispatching the data, or until the holdback timer expires (usually around a second or so). If you look at something qith high liquidity, you can be more or less guaranteed that the best bid or offer (top of the book) has already gone and you must look deeper.
The thing is that often the price you see is not the most recent price. Even if you are paying $$$$$ for proximity services (you pay to be on the same LAN as the exchange, which is what the Algorithmic traders do).
When you are outside you need to use depth information as well as current best bid and offer and price history to predict where the price is going to be by the time that your order reaches the market.
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A people, a culture (yes, I will use the word) must want freedom. If people are too lazy to want freedom, if they will not defend their rights when their rights are threatened (or removed in PLAIN SIGHT) by dictators, "corporate citizens" and other interested parties, then they don't deserve their constitution... and they deserve the consequences.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Stop; them from breeding, and make them the "new nerds" that wont get any dates or action.
Nerds are honest, lawyers are not and become politicos
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Well, of course, otherwise people wouldn't need to be on the trading floor!
Eventually, of course, the trading floor will migrate into virtual reality, simply to get around the limitations of time and distance on teh floor itself.
Moe: Oh, boy! The deep fryer's here. Heh heh, I got it used from the navy. You can flash-fry a buffalo in forty seconds.
Homer: Forty seconds? But I want it now!
Real-time quotes are nice, but if they really want to leap over finance.yahoo.com they need to add an option to their charts to graph "growth of $10,000 investment" or "adjusted price (reinvested dividends)." Both Yahoo and Google only graph price, which means that the graph gaps down when a dividend or capital gain is paid out, but the drop has no economic significance -- the price drop represents money that was paid to the shareholder, not money that was lost. This is especially significant for mutual funds, which can have very large capital gains payouts (e.g. 20%), typically around the end of the year.
For example, look at the 1-year or 5-year chart for MVALX. The huge drops every December are misleading -- they represent money that was returned to the shareholder (or reinvested), not money that was lost. Quicken.com got this right a decade ago when they offered stock charts, so why can't Google or Yahoo get it right?
The exchanges do not allow redistribution of realtime quote data to professional traders. They will need to put something in place to at least give the impression of compliance.
Can't wait for them to release an API so everyone can build his/her own trader bot. Talk about Wintermute...
I took a second to look at both Yahoo! and Google's quote system compared to my Thomson machine (actual real time, tick by tick quotes, market depth, etc.) and neither gave true real time reporting of the consolidated tape. Google seems to go off of the primary market center only, which for a heavily traded stock isn't so bad. For something a little thinner you could be getting quotes that can be very misleading. Yahoo, well, I couldn't figure out where they were getting their quotes, as they were some times dramatically different to actual quotes. Long story short, be careful.
No smoking sigs indoors.
Real investors get their quotes from the NY Times!
Let's be clear on something here: There is no advantage to having 'realtime' quotes vs. 20-minute delayed quotes unless you're trading, and trading on tight schedules.
I'm not aware of any online brokerage which does NOT provide comparable realtime quotes.
Ergo, Google is looking to open up an online stock trading service. Free trades? Hard to say if they'll go that far. (Don't know if they'd be allowed, in fact.) But expect to see gtrade.com become a google property and service in the next year or so.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If you go to Yahoo's stock page and view a stock, yes you'll see it stream updates to the page every 1-7 secs (depends on how fast the stock changes) but this is not realtime, it's a stream of the data that's 15mins old.
http://opentick.com/
Are we talking about some webpage ticket that ticks ever second? That's nice but not all that great. What I want is access to a real-time data feed, and I mean real time, every single share done and every tick on the exchange, not snapshots. I looked into several options, satellite feeds, even 1-2 internet based solutions. The biggest problem with those? They required proprietary software, windows only, can't or not easily able to save data for later mining, and extremely expensive. So, this might be one step closer but I doubt it's the same thing brokerage firms get.
How does the Google feed actually work? Is it client-side javascript polling on a fixed-period basis, or do they actually push to the browser client asynchronously, really per-tick - using nasty tricks to keep the GET open indefinitely, or some special plug-in, etc?
There's nothing worse than finding out your 'golden' years are going to involve a diet of cat food... 15 minutes after the fact.