Real-time Equities Pricing

August 31, 2009 4:49 PM

Is there a real-time US market data feed better (or at least as good and less expensive) than Yahoo Finance's Market Tracker?

My online broker provides great execution and is pretty reasonably priced. My needs are simple enough - solid real-time equities pricing with at least rudimentary technical charting, market breadth, etc. $14/month seems like a good price, but I'd like to know whether any of you have found the same or better with either your online broker, or another third-party service.

posted by nj_subgenius to technology (15 comments total)

Not to threadjack, but I've favourited this question because I want this as well, and wondered if you or anyone else knows of a screener capable of reporting on stocks that are about to reach, or have just reached the "golden cross" of short term average crossing long term average.
posted by Kickstart70 at 5:09 PM on August 31

Never used Market Tracker, but Google Finance has real time feeds for the NYSE and NASDAQ (among others)
posted by doowod at 5:15 PM on August 31

The Google Finance quotes are free, BTW
posted by doowod at 5:18 PM on August 31

doowod, at the portfolio level or just on single securities? I couldn't tell.
posted by nj_subgenius at 5:21 PM on August 31

Kick, I know much about it it, but most of that stuff, while available in real time from Yahoo Finance with appropriate chart setups, doesn't do it on a set-and-forget basis without spending $$ on a technical charting service.
posted by nj_subgenius at 5:24 PM on August 31

...err...know much=don't know much.
posted by nj_subgenius at 5:25 PM on August 31

Both.
posted by doowod at 5:27 PM on August 31

you could always set up a thinkorswim account. I'm pretty sure you can just have a free account there but once you submit the appropriate paperwork can get all the realtime info you need.
posted by bigdave at 5:28 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Yay! free is good. Thank you.
posted by nj_subgenius at 5:31 PM on August 31

Your broker should really be providing you with this. Mine, TDAmeritrade, does a pretty good job. At some point in the past I told them I was leaving and they offered to lower my price $5 per trade, so I stayed.

Stockcharts.com is the only other service I pay for and is well worth the $35.00 a month or so it costs for the realtime version.

It's not any one thing in particular; it's just that their execution is far and away the best. They have by far the most amazing charts around, with auto-refresh, and you can configure them exactly in the way that's most clear to you, and every technical indicator imaginable is available. The best part is that you can annotate the charts. Draw a trendline or a support/resistance line and it will be there next time you look at that stock. They also have all kinds of ways of looking at market breadth. It's like putting on prescription glasses.
posted by dacoit at 6:29 PM on August 31

If you sign up for thinkorswim, and happen to be a programmer, a little known feature is that you can wire up Excel and the TOS client, so that you can use Excel to do analysis, with very real-time data automatically filled in. Presumably, the same functionality can be used with any other kind of Windows programming, but I never got much further than playing with it.

For doing technical analysis, TOS is the best client I've ever seen.
posted by cschneid at 7:08 PM on August 31

Try TradeStation. The data is free if you do a certain amount of volume and they have some great charting and scanning features. Execution is good and timely. Customer support is reasonable. I use them to trade full time right now.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:44 PM on August 31

ThinkOrSwim is great. The free account, left unfunded, will only give you delayed market data. And, the software currently lacks an API (beyond a poorly documented Excel interface). Interactive Brokers is a comparable Java platform that offers a nice real time data feed for $9.95/month, or free if you rack up commissions, and has a serviceable API.
posted by fatllama at 3:22 AM on September 1

Wow, way more than I expected. I was running out of things to do :-) so programming to a cheap/free feed sounds like a blast. Thanks all!
posted by nj_subgenius at 4:24 AM on September 1

...Unfortunately Google doesn't stream the way I need it to. On to thikorswim!
posted by nj_subgenius at 1:53 PM on September 1