Finally, Real-Time Stock Quotes at Yahoo-- For Free | Hacker News Reader

Finally, Real-Time Stock Quotes at Yahoo-- For Free

alleyinsider.com

28 pointsraju12 comments

Not for free, from my research. I clicked a link at the bottom of a stock quote, and got this.

http://billing.finance.yahoo.com/realtime_quotes/signup?.src...

Still $11 per month is not bad, eh?

Just an update; I was wrong, though I did a lot of research ahead of time. It turns out that link (that I found under a stock price on Yahoo! Finance, and the landing page still offers the $11 plan) is Yahoo's existing service. They are indeed making it free.

Here is what Google returned today that it had not before: http://ycorpblog.com/2008/05/28/real-time-stock-quotes-on-th...

Thanks.

20-mins delayed stock quotes are a comodity right now, and pretty cheap. it is the real-time quotes, (the one that every investor needs), that have been expensive.

There is also Level II quotes, with wich you can see trades going on in real time, but these are even more expensive, and brokers will only give them to active trader.

The whole system, is rigged in such a way, that if you are a casual investor, you have a lot less information on what's going on, then people that have these tools available. What Yahoo is doing, is actually pretty game changing, and makes a comodity something that was only available at a premium.

casual investor

Have to be pretty darn casual. Sign up for ameritrade and you have real time quotes automatically. (I forget the minimum account, but it's probably a thousand or two.) I had a good month of 30+ trades a few years ago and they gave me level II quotes for ever after.

I'm a small investor and i get free real time streaming data for Euronext Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris from my broker. It also shows the outstanding orders in the order book. It's fun to watch but if you observe closely it is very obvious that trading (instead of investing) is a game for the big boys who use intricate financial models and a massive amount of computing power. It's like competing directly with Google.

Do you know if historical level II quotes are available? That data seems like it could be interesting (and profitable) to explore.

If the data isn't available, do you think it is possible to collect market-wide level II quotes from a commercial source?

I never understand why they charge insane amount for stock quotes. A while back, I had an idea around stock trading. After some digging around, I found out it costs thousands per month for 20-minute delayed quotes, that pretty much killed my idea.

I agree that it sucks, but it makes sense from their perspective. Frankly, they could charge that much, and people and financial institutions would pay for that data.

Find me a business where you have a natural monopoly that isn't regulated, and you don't milk it for all it's worth. They're just too lucrative not to profit from it, and frankly I'm surprised that even now Yahoo has made it free.

The press release mentions quotes would be available to Yahoo Finance users but didn't mention an API. Can we get some REST love out of this?

Time to screen-scrape like it's 1999!

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