Stock Price Charts

Why are stock quotes usually delayed by 15 or 20 minutes?

Don't you think that a site offering actual real time quotes would give their customer's an extreme advantage? Even the official Dow Jones page lists quotes with a 20 minute delay. Is this a legal issue or a technological issue? If legal: why? What would the legal ramifications be for a real time stock quote? If technological: why? Data can be transmitted over the internet with certainly less than a 20 minute delay. I could understand a full minute (maybe) but not 20. If other, why? There's a whole lot of "I think..." and "But, I'm not sure." I'm looking for an answer, not a guess. If you don't know, go but someone else.

Public Comments

1. I think it is for legal reasons, although I don't know this for sure. I do know that if you have an online brokerage like etrade. You can get real time quotes as a customer.
2. cuz they're lame.
3. You can get real-time quotes. Typically it's a paid-for service. There is no legal or technological reason why the other services don't give them. It's a money issue. You can get real-time quotes from Fidelity, e-trade, Schwabb, SSB, and others if you have a trading account with them.
4. so the rich can get richer
5. i have seen real time stock quotes on different internet trading sites. they just charge a premium for this privilege. the prices were between 14.99-24.99. per month.
6. There is a legal, technological and economic reason for this. Realtime stock quotes are typically used by institutional and more professional stock traders. The exchanges can charge a fee for this which helps them defray some of their operational costs. However, stocks need to be quoted in papers, so the pricing on stock quotes goes to zero when they are 15 minutes old. If you are an institutional trader using 15 minute old stock prices, you are dead - it's like knowing what the traffic was like 15 minutes ago when crossing the street now - timeliness is important to the value of the information. Thus, having free 15-minute old stocks creates a useful pricing scheme. Those that want them ASAP can pay a monthly fee, and the rest of the public gets the information for free. There are likely SEC rules or laws stating that the information needs to be widely available without restriction (I haven't seen them though). This is part of what makes an efficient market (pricing info available to all). You can now economically get realtime stock quotes via the internet through such products as E*Trade "power users", which is free if you have a certain $ amount of equities/cash with E*Trade.
7. A lot of sites only update at regular intervals. If you want constant changes, you have to find one that has streaming. In fact, Yahoo! Finance has just gotten streaming, so you can start there.
8. You get what you paid for.
9. It's neither a legal or technological issue but rather a revenue source issue. Exchanges charge fees for sites/firms to use their data and distribute real time quotes so the sites are simply passing on the costs along with a small margin for themselves of course. see source below regarding issues relating to fees charged by the exchanges for data/real time quotes
10. I think there is a legal issue. If you want to find out when you sign-up for real time data there is a document that you need to sign specifying that you are not an insider, you dont own 10% or more of any corporation and stuff like that. There is defenetly a legal issue