>This was just an experiment for my own use. Does Yahoo have the latest prices?

Every internet site that has stock prices for free has delayed prices (15 minutes or so). I doubt that you'll find real-time prices without paying for it.

> I was just going to experiment with charting changes. I thought about trying to create an app that I could experiment with and play with "fake" money. Try to have the program buy and sell with some rules that I set up for it. The program will keep track of the total amount of money available, buy when things are going up at an alarming rate, and then try to get out when the first sign appears that it is going down. I was curious if the "day trading" was an actual science or just plain luck. I figured a program could analyze things faster than someone trying to watching 2000 stocks flash by in front of them.
>

Well, I have a little insight on this. from both a programmer and a trader, day trading is luck. By the time you notice a change, the change is made, and a downward turn cannot be used to predict the action in the next minute. The SEC recently forced several day trading companies to publicize internal audits that showed the percentage of day traders that came out on top, and the average was like 1 in 65. Funny, you only hear the really incredible positive stories. IMO, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to make money in any market by trending. I have studied many theories and formulas, and tried them, and when it comes down to it, they are all just different ways of guessing that work out to throwing sticks in the air. The only way to make money, IMHO, is market, industry and company research.


>If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to know how you did this. Getting accurate prices is a must for this little experiment. The other example from Seattle was nice to see how they used XML, but the prices were only updated every 20 minutes.

The concept I used was similar, but the timer interval was faster. Use the IE browser control or automate IE to navigate to the site and post your ticker symbol, then parse the resulting page text for the price. You can also use wwIPStuff for this, but if cookies are vital to the site's operation or the site works using SSL, you'll have to use the IE option.

But you'll still run into the delay that's built in to any free quoting service.