Google Finance to offer Free real time Stock quotes and Last sale prices

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Google and Reuters announced on January 11, 2007 that they are going to offer real-time stock quotes and last-sale prices for free across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Google Mobile and of course Google.com. This partnership of Google with the SEC, the New York Stock Exchange and their D.C. trade association NetCoalition is pending approval by the SEC which upon approval will allow you to have free, easy and fast access to real time prices from NYSE on Google. If the SEC approves the plan, the NYSE will allow Web sites to publish trade prices with nearly no delay in return for payments of $100,000 a month, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Google Finance is currently lagging behind in being the most favored web destination for Financial information behind Yahoo Finance.

Yahoo Finance currently shows you delayed stock data of around 20 minutes. For someone involved in day trading or any other financial consultant, having free, easy and fast access to real-time quotes is very important and you know how the market or your company is doing now and not twenty minutes ago. According to WSJ, this test program might be available as early as March 2007.

Some blogs report that this might give a major head start to Google Finance over Yahoo Finance, but I do not think so. Google is a member of a trade association called NetCoalition, which has complained about a lack of real-time stock data offered through services owned by the NYSE group and the Nasdaq Stock Market. So, when this proposal by the NYSE gets approved by the Securities and Exchange commission, guess who else gets to offer free real time stock quotes.. yes, Yahoo! too where along with Google, it is one of the NetCoalition trustees.

However, this is an extremely good news from the online financial services/market in general. Earlier, these real time stock feeds used to be sold by the Stock Exchange which bought in considerable income for them and the stock exchanges tightly regulated the re-distribution of this real time data and took steps to prevent anything that might undermine their income. Reuters reports that web firms might now have to pay around $100K a month for this data which could easily be recouped by Google or Yahoo by providing contextual advertising on those pages.

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