Live Stock Market Quotes and Current Stock Prices
A lot of free financial sites are now providing live stock quotes or real time stock prices. I myself am aware of Yahoo Finance and Google Finance, and use these tools when I am not in front of my pc or trading actively. Although the site's say they are real time, I found some discrepancy, and in many cases the prices in Yahoo Finance and Google Finance don't match up. I haven't been able to check my Scottrade account and see how Yahoo Finance and Google Finance match up with a dedicated brokerage website's services, but I do believe that Scottrade would have much superior up to date real time prices.
Live stock quotes provided by free financial sites are definitely beneficial to those who are trading over the space of a few days rather than day trading. If you are day trading you want up to date current stock prices and you also want to be able to buy and sell stocks immediately, and as such tracking live stock quotes over Google Finance or Yahoo Finance loses its purpose. These real time stock quotes are much more beneficial to those who are actively invested in stocks but are not day trading or do not require them to buy or sell stocks immediately.
Daily Stock Prices and Real Time Stock Prices
I am only aware of Google , AOL, and Yahoo finance that provide real time stock prices, and I think it's a fair guess to say that Reuters also provides real time stock prices, but haven't checked out their website so don't know about it. If memory serves me correct, it was Google that started providing free real time stock prices to their website viewers, and after that everyone starting jumping into it. Prior to real time stock prices, all financial websites (the free ones) provided stock prices with a 20 minute delay (which they still do).
We still have a lot of issues in regards to providing current stock prices at Ryzone Financial, and some of our stock prices are even days old and most of our stock offering data are closing stock prices instead of carrying intra-day stock prices as well. It is my intention that Ryzone Financial carve out a niche among financial websites, and I hope that the strategy I am going to be laying out for the site in the near future is executed successfully.