If you're a stock junkie then this is big news for you. Yahoo Finance is the first major financial site to add real time stock quotes.
Up until now most financial sites displayed stock prices with a 20 minutes delay. Bats Trading is providing the real time information for Yahoo Finance.
Yahoo! Inc., vying with Google Inc. for the top rank as the most popular U.S. Internet site, plans to offer real-time stock quotes to 19.5 million users of its finance web pages.
Yahoo is making the change in order to stay competitive with Google and Microsoft.
"Our users will enjoy a better experience when they see a big piece of news and within just a few seconds prices react," said Mark Interrante, general manager of Yahoo! Finance, in an interview.
"The time compression in market trading has just been extraordinary. At this point, 15 minutes is so far off the time scale of people working in the markets that it almost feels like yesterday."
Bats Trading is the 3rd largest trading company in the US behind the NYSE and NASDAQ.
Bats Trading was founded in June 2005 and handles about 605 million shares a day, representing about 8.9 percent of the shares traded in the U.S., according to its Web site. The NYSE handles about 1.21 billion shares daily, while Nasdaq matches 1.96 billion shares. Bats Trading gives its users all market data for free.
Currently the NYSE and Nasdaq are waiting for regulatory approval to see their information to web sites in real time. That's why Yahoo Finance chose Bats.
"We look forward to doing all we can to ensure that users receive market data at no cost," Bats spokesman Randy Williams said. "We believe market data should be free to all participants and that all participants should have access to it."
Here's a screen print of the stock price for Apple. Notice the "Real-time" indicator. Real time prices are only available during regular trading hours of course. After the market closes the indicator will say "after hours."
As I've stated before, I'm not a big fan of stock ownership. However, I know several people who love to watch stock prices. I'm sure this update will make them happy.
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Comments
1 Comment so far
This is nothing new. MSN and Goog have been doing that for over a year.