I am looking for a data service which is in between realtime stream quote and intraday 20-minute delayed quote. To be more specific, I am looking a data service which allows me to download the snap quote of all trading stocks with no delay or little delay. For example, a stream broadcast service which continuously sends me the snapshot of all stock quotes every one or a few minute. Such kind of design provides most flexibility to potencial powerful third-party market screeners without incurring bandwidth overload problem. For example, with even 10000 symbols in the watchlist, less than 100 bytes is required every update. If the update period is adjusted according to the user's service agreement or bandwidth constraint, the bandwidth (thus the cost) of the vendor can be controlled. I am wonder whether such near realtime snapquote service is available on the market or not? If not, who is rich and willing to provide some fund to put it into a business adventure?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're talking about, but it sounds like a very small niche at best. BTW - how are planning on packing the quote snapshots for 10,000 symbols into only 100 bytes? Good luck.
Not quite what you want, but you can get unlimited snaps ( I go thru Quote Tracker) at Money.net. I can get an update on more than 1000 symbols in a minute or so. You have to sign up for the Screamer service to get the unlimited snaps. http://money.net/index.php
I checked traderbot website and it is an interesting service but not exactly what I want. However it takes all computation burden on the server side which greatly limits how flexible and powerful a screener can be. With the increasing computational power of our Pcs and the shift to broadband service, it might be a better architecture to let the client side to do the screening while the server side only provides some continuous screaming of AGGREGATED data (and/or with some value add-in indicators like the buy/sell presure on traderbot), but definitely not necessarily to be tick by tick data, because such kind of data service would be provided specificly for screening over broad market in quasi-realtime, instead of for realtime charting, level II quoting, or automatic trading purpose. In the later category, esignal, qcharts etc are the example. However to download tick by tick data of all stocks in realtime is impossible for personal users (esignal normally limit the symbols to 500). Moreover for screening purpose, I am really not willing to pay for all other bells and whistles coming with those data service like esignal or qcharts. (although I have been an esignal users for two years). Back to traderbot, the possible screeners are greatly limited because it lacks the feature of screening based on user's scripting. One website which supports user screipts is stockfetcher, although there is still a lot of limitation on stockfetcher. Therefore the more flexible and powerful way to do quasi-realtime screening is to do it on the client side with software written from scratch, which not only supports simutaneous screening and realtime alert based on multiple strategies, but also can evaluate the market condiftion in realtime to decide which screening script to use. However to achieve this in my mind, I need the data service first. In my previous post, the 100 bytes is refer to the estimated number of bytes needed to transmit for EACH SYMBOL EACH UPDATE PERIOD. Suppose we need to track 10000 symbols and each symbol needs 100 bytes and the update period is 2 minute, it is roughly about 70Kbps ( 8 bits/byte * 100 bytes * 10000 / 120 second ~ 70Kbps ), which is really not very bandwidth consuming.
pisspotpete, could you be more specific about how you do it? Do you mean you may automatically retrieve snapshot of many symbols (say 2000 symbols) without congesting your dsl or cable modem link? Why do you need to go through QT? Is the snapquote can be automatically refreshed every one minute or so? Thanks in advance.