How to get Real Time Quotes

Most of the free stock quote services or providers available throughout the Internet are DELAYED stock quotes. For those cases, the stock prices are usually about 15 minutes delayed which is worthless data if you are keen on the up-to-date price movement and in this fast changing stock market.

So naturally any stock investor wants to have access to the real time quote services. People used to pay additional monthly fees to get the real time quote services. But there are ways that you can get the real time quotes free. – Google Finance and Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Finance was providing real time prices long time ago, but they stopped the service for a while , then back to providing real time data again after Google Finance debuted with the real time quotes.  I mean it’s just amazing that they can provide live real time stock price quotes for everybody. Thank you both!

What I like about Google Finance is that you can easily view the quotes of your stocks in the portfolio if you are logged into Google account. Of course, Yahoo also provides free real time quotes in the portfolio menu, but you will have to click few more times to access the screen.

Google Finance website also provides top financial news with the stock portfolio in a clean layout page, so you can clearly see what’s going on without any distraction.

Yahoo Finance is OK . But you will need to click on the ‘Real-Time’ button on the portfolio page. Yahoo provides portfolio
What’s amazing about these portfolio stock quotes listing is that the quotes are constantly updated with the latest prices by AJAX WEB technology.

However, there is a little problem with above real time quotes solution. It is quite inconvenient that you need to open a web browser to monitor the prices. Or you may want to be more discreet of what you are doing during the work hours that you may not want to show everyone in the office that you are watching stock quotes instead of working.

So my suggested solution is to use Google Desktop and use Google Finance Gadget. You may or may not already know about Google Desktop. It is well known for its desktop search function and the Gadgets – nice little programs that you can dock to the Google Sidebar or detach and locate it any where on your desktop screen.

You can enable Google Sidebar by selecting it from the option menu that you can access from the Taskbar icon.

Here is the Google Sidebar in action.

By enabling Auto-hide , you can conveniently make it appear or disappear by hovering your mouse on the screen border (edge).

By clicking on the Plus (+) button on the Sidebar’s top menu, you will be able to access ‘Add Gadget’ screen. Type in ‘stock’ in the search keyword field. You will be able to see many available stock related gadgets. However, I only recommend below two gadgets titled ‘Stocks’ and ‘Stocks gadget’. It appears these are from the Google and provides real time quotes.

To install, you can click on the ‘Add’ button located below the icon which appears when you move your mouse over it. Once you add the gadget, it will appear on the Sidebar. You can add the stock symbol by accessing the gadget’s option menu.

The ‘Stocks’ is the original version and I believe ‘Stocks gadget’ is the upgrade version. Basically they both provide the real time quotes and the same functions such as showing detailed stock chart and information in a new popup window when you click on a stock symbol. Also you can just drag these gadgets out of the sidebar to position anywhere on your desktop.

See below image for the gadgets in action. You can see that ‘Stock Gadget’ is little bit bigger than ‘Stock’ . For this reason, I prefer ‘Stock’ over ‘Stock Gadget’

So enjoy the real time stock quotes using Google Sidebar gadget. By the way, you may want to disable Desktop Search function of the Google Desktop especially your computer system is slow.

Here is the last word of advice before I let you go. Unless you are a professional day trader, try not to watch the stock quotes too often. Too much stock quotes monitoring is meaningless and bad for your health (especially for your heart) when the market is volatile and fluctuates severely.

Thank you for visiting How to buy stocks.

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