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."

This is a big deal...

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:This is a big deal...

[Anonymous Coward]

"tons" of subscription services will not lose most of their user base overnight as "tons" of subscription services offer more services than just "real-time quotes." Including research/reports, customer service, stock trading, etc... This is a non-issue.

Google vs Bloomberg

[TibbonZero]

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.

Re:I'm curious about the bandwidth

[espiesp]

A few numbers vs. high resolution video...

We're talking about two entirely different beasts.

Re:How will Google make money?

[chromatic]

I'd like to know how Google will make its money on this particular service. How?

How does Google make money at anything? They'll sell your eyeballs to advertisers.

Re:ja1217

[Anonymous Coward]

Any such process is inherently self-limiting. If you find an algorithm to make effective profit, people will take notice, and start emulating your trades. This eventually leads to a decrease in liquidity. There are always short-term models available with profit-generating potential. The problem is not finding these models, but exploiting them before market forces change the balance to obviate your model. If you are smart, and willing to make a concerted effort, you can profit this way. But far greater profits have been gained through random chance, than through any sort of trading model.

There are true patterns in the stock market. These can be exploited, and it's exciting to do so. The problem is that the patterns shift like sand in the wind. You can keep up, but it is exhausting from mental and capital standpoints. The best strategy to profit from the stock market, IMHO, is to possess a keen understanding of world affairs and economics, and to recognize global or national trends before most others. You can always get lucky and get a cookie. But perseverence and a stock of cash to weather the rough times are the true components of success.

Re:This is a big deal...

[joocemann]

It is a big deal, and it is a good one. Long story short, people charging to repeat information to you will be shafted by a company like Google that can do that simple task for free. Very cool. Hell, why should we be paying subscriptions for someone to tell me public info?

I beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Unless you meant that it can't be done in a way that guarantees a profit ... 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.

For the most part, market makers have to be daft to not make money. And there are computerized market makers.

Re:Who needs real time stock quotes?

[Prof.Phreak]

Ironically, nobody. At least not at the personal level. Hedge funds need'em in order to buy/sell ETFs in relation to the underlying---and hopefully do it quicker than anyone else (ie: making the market `efficient'---by making a profit!)

At consumer level... if you care for ``real time quotes'', you're not investing, you're gambling.

Re:Simpsons already did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

People on investing forums probably don't care that the sources aren't free. I bet most of them are dealing with large enough sums of money that any fees for access to information are worth it. Information is money, if it will earn you more money you will pay for it.

Re:Maybe to some, not to me.

[Eivind]

This is very VERY true. Speculation is, afterall, a zero-sum-game. You can only beat the average of the market to precisely the same degree that someone else underperforms the market. The only sure winners are the brokers collecting transaction-fees.

Now -investment- is *not* a zero-sum game, over time most companies turn a profit (those who don't go bankrupt), and so buying random stock at random times and keeping it until you need the money will, on the average, give you precisely the same return as the market-average.

The Random Walk book gives good advice, except I personally prefer just naked stocks instead of index-funds. For the fairly simple reason that index-funds have -low- costs (typically 0.2%/year or thereabouts) whereas holding random stock has -zero- overhead-cost pro year.

4% pro year over 30 years give 324% (4% above inflation is a fair longterm guess for the stockmarket) 4.2% over the same period gives 344%. It's not a big deal though, either is sound advice.

index funds make sense if you ain't got enough money to invest to get an acceptable diversity yourself. Personally I change from index-funds to raw stocks when I can afford to hold 10+ different stock in a market. (which means for example for OSE, you'd need on the order of $20K)

Also in most funds, the fund-managers are technically the owners of the stock, and you own only a part of the fund. Which means, for example, that you don't get a vote on the general assembly. Instead the fund-managers get to vote -- even though it's YOUR money that bougth the stock.

Re:Simpsons already did it.

[Zen]

If the GP is really trying to do something as extensive as you are, I would hope they don't expect to be able to find that data for free. 25Gig a day for a few hundred or thousand stocks is a lot of traffic. I would never expect someone to extrapolate the data, collate, host, and allow me to download that for free every day. That should definitely be a pay service.

Re:Simpsons already did it.

[corbettw]

My job involves persisting tick data from a Reuters feed for large investment company and the amount of data we collect every day for 16 exchanges in Europe is huge. Something like 25Gb (growing exponentially) and that's being selective about which stocks to capture.

I think you just answered your own question. Anything that requires that kind of storage on a daily basis isn't going to be cheap to provide access to. And since Joe Daytrader isn't going to care, but companies creating new investment products will, I can't see the viability of providing access to that data for free. That doesn't mean someone won't (or hasn't) done it, just that it seems like the kind of thing that someone would charge for access to.