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."

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 [amazon.com] and save yourself the decade it took me to figure out how the market works. You're welcome.

Yahoo users - don't be fooled

[NotQuiteReal]

Yahoo users - don't be fooled by simple "Web 2.0", and "AJAX" magic. It's just a bunch of javascripts refreshing your browswer... on a time delay.

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.

Not Realtime

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:ja1217

[nelsonal]

You're just a little late to the party, brokers call theirs program trading, and hedge funds call theirs black box/anylitical trading. It's probably 60-80% of the shares traded on any given day.

I don't think real-time feed == real-time market

[stypica]

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?

Re:Ctrl-r

[UncleTogie]

Just because they stop streaming after 25 minutes doesn't mean they aren't providing free real-time quotes.

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?

Re:I don't think real-time feed == real-time marke

[stypica]

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" [thefreedictionary.com]

Re:ja1217

[lazlo]

It's been done. It's being done. I find it interesting that Renaissance Technologies' Nova fund, which is basically a computer program [wikipedia.org], from my understanding, some days makes over 10% of the total volume of trades on the NASDAQ.

Re:Maybe to some, not to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

do yourself a favor and read "a non random walk down wall street" and don't give up on a topic that has been the most misunderstood among timeseries predictions ever. Trading live for 3 years and making more than my day job(MSc comp science, top paying dev job). I am not alone. sorry for the formatting, on mobile.

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.

Re:Maybe to some, not to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically this makes sense, but practically speaking, its irrelevant. The reason is because buying begets buyers and selling begets sellers, destroying randomness and creating endless opportunities to buy undervalued and sell (or short) overvalued items. This is the case in movement over weeks, days, minutes, even seconds. You're welcome.

Bzzt wrong

[MushMouth]

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.

Re:ja1217

[aeschenkarnos]

I'm struck by the irony.

The reason I get a paycheck twice [a] month

and ...

you can create efficient algorithms to make money in financial markets

If these algorithms actually worked, why would you need to be working for somebody else?

Re:Simpsons already did it.

[dintech]

The problem is, this is only open and close prices. If you want to write algoritms that run on actual tick data (what realtime algos are actually useful for), you have no way to back-test it without collecting your own data first.

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.

Re:Maybe to some, not to me.

[LordKronos]

I was thinking he was just talking about things like how people react in real time to a presentation being given. A bad point is brought up and the stock starts dropping. Then the bad point is put into context with something like "but this downturn has provided us the opportunity to improve..." and suddenly the stock shoots up. And then repeat over and over. It's interesting to see how bi-polar investors behave.

From an investment point of view, this could be helpful, because it could help you better gauge what sort of things appear to be most important to the market and help you make future decisions.