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."

Comments

Prediction systems

[Animats]

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.

Maybe to some, not to me.

[Gordo_1]

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.

Re:Simpsons already did it.

[DriedClexler]

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.