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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."
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.
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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make install -not war
Guess you missed the end part where Yahoo said:
Quote data delayed 15 minutes for Nasdaq, 20 minutes for NYSE and Amex. Real-Time continuous streaming quotes are available through our premium service....that doesn't strike me as free and real-time.
not just talking about yahoo, although they provided them years ago but were forced to discontinue them a few years ago."Forced" by whom, and how?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I'm more interested in being able to search the 20+ year history of a stock, mutual fund, index (with dividend reinvestment), or futures contract. They only seem to let you go back 10 years, or not see the result of dividend reinvestment. Even google finance only lets you go back a few years in many cases.
Interestingly enough, people on investing forums casually reference these values as if they're easy to get, but I've never seen a free source for that information.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.