Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

A quick note for anyone thinking that this could help you build that finance app you've been putting off - getting actual real-time stock quotes legitimately is actually fairly expensive/involved.

Screen scraping Google / Yahoo finance and using that data in an app is (I believe) explicitly against their TOS. Whether or not they ever enforce that is another story...

The actual real-time data streams are highly controlled and regulated by a few big players.

(Just my $0.02 after having looked into it about a year ago for a social investing app I was building)

That data is also 15 minutes old (or older!) from what I recall. Probably not your best choice for anything remotely "realtime".

As parent said, you're better off getting a real market stream which will probably use FIX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange

It should be realtime (not delayed 20 minutes), we will find out in 8 minutes if this is true. :)

Confirmed real-time, just streamed in:

    {
	"ticker": "AAPL",
	"exchange": "NASDAQ",
	"price": "598.86",
	"change": "-9.48",
	"change_percent": "-1.56",
	"last_trade_time": "Apr 19, 9:30AM EDT"
    }

I was referring to scraping Google/Yahoo. They have disclaimers on their sites that the information is N minutes old at best.

EDIT: I guess a few of them are actually realtime now. Here's the list: http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlefinance/disclaimer/

Yeah, while this is cool I'm sure it's a violation of Googles TOS. I'm sure they'd enforce it if this gets traction.

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