What live feed do you use?

GiveMeABreak

I'm trying to find a website with a fast live feed of the stock market but I can't seem to find one. Nobody likes refreshing the page every second to get the new updated price.

I mean take this for example

http://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/prices-and-markets/ETFs/company-summary-chart.html?fourWayKey=IE00B42TW061IEGBXETFS

It doesn't update in real time and I have to refresh my page to get the latest price. So what website / program do people use?

bowlhead99

You can sometimes pay for a feed as a premium service from your broker.

Free feeds of live data are in great demand and so don't generally get given away for free -it costs to publish and serve data and they would be swamped by people sucking down the data either out of idle curiosity or as part of running a business. Some like advfn.com offer live streaming for a while but will timeout quicker at busier times of day, sometimes in seconds, if you don't pay for a subscription.

With some services they have a rolling 15 minute delay AND still need manual refresh. Google Finance is a rare example of a service where hosting is so cheap to them that they offer a live feed on some markets. However it is based on last trade rather than mid-price or bid price.

Personally I don't use any live feed. Why would you need to know the actual live price every second of every day without wanting to press a button? If I actually want to buy or sell, I will click to get my broker to give me a market quote valid for 15 secs or so. That is what most investors do.

I guess you may imagine yourself as some trader on a wall street movie with loads of live feeds and screens and charts. Those wall street firms pay thousands for their data services. For people day-trading from home, their trading platform usually has something suitable built in - e.g. when spreadbetting , IG.com's prices will refresh one or more times a second and you can see the live ticks of price up and down.

GiveMeABreak

bowlhead99 wrote: »

I guess you may imagine yourself as some trader on a wall street movie with loads of live feeds and screens and charts.

Not really... I just watched a documentary about home traders in the UK and the guy had live feeds with the charts and he could add certain stocks to a watchlist so you're just seeing the prices of stock you're interested in and cut out all the other junk.

This is the best that I could find http://www.hl.co.uk/shares/stock-market-summary/ftse-100 which updates pretty quickly as an index but when you click on an individual stock it don't update unless you refresh the page and obviously this would not be practical if you were trying to keep track of several different stocks at once.

bowlhead99

GiveMeABreak wrote: »

Not really... I just watched a documentary about home traders in the UK and the guy had live feeds with the charts and he could add certain stocks to a watchlist so you're just seeing the prices of stock you're interested in and cut out all the other junk.

If you set yourself up on one of the trading platforms the people were using in the documentary, you would have live data as part of the service. If you are instead using a savings and investments platform like hl you won't get that, because their clients typically don't value that.

If you go to http://www.ig.com/uk you will see some live data tick past on the home page but you would need an account to actually set up your own lists and view charts etc etc. Not a recommendation just an example.

jimjames

I don't.

I buy funds that are priced daily so I have no need to see prices every second.

Do you really need live prices or are you back looking at trading again?

GiveMeABreak

jimjames wrote: »

I don't.

I buy funds that are priced daily so I have no need to see prices every second.

Do you really need live prices or are you back looking at trading again?

I'm interested in the trading aspect rather than dumping money into stock and coming back 5 years later to see if you made a profit.

IronWolf

My saxobank trading account has live prices but not in the charts. I think you need a proper trading platform like Tradestation for that

Stompa

http://www.moneyam.com/register/

offer a limited free live share price service.

Our Free and Premier services operate a limited format (contended system) for Stockwatch and Trades, and are on a 'first in first off' basis. We will set a limit to the number of users who can log on at any one time. Once the limit has been reached, the first person logged on will be logged off by our servers.

puk999

From what I can tell most people here invest for the longer term rather than trading. Asking these types of questions on a trading forum will get you more responses to your actual question.

I can understand the attraction to trading but I've never done it myself. Would be great to get rich quick, but I'm not foolishconfident enough to think I have an edge over all the other traders. I would consider it when I've got enough in funds. Probably around £200k already invested in funds (and possibly individual shares held for long term) before giving trading a go.

If you do it, good luck, but remember that the potential for big losses is far greater than a diversified portfolio of funds where your money is spread over hundreds of companies. Slow, steady and boring can win the race

GiveMeABreak

puk999 wrote: »

Slow, steady and boring can win the race

Except the markets are falling for 4 days in a row now. Seeing as they're the highest in history it's probably likely they'll fall somewhat so even if I did invest it wouldn't be now... maybe 6 months or 1 year down the line once the markets have balanced out a bit.

InvestInPoker

Tell me more about how you can time the markets