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

If you're interested in testing trading stratagies you should check out Omega Research's TradeStation (www.omegaresearch.com). It's software that does exactly what you are suggesting: tracks changes in the market and makes trades according to rules you design. It allows you to test the stratagies on historical stock market data to see how things would have panned out.

It's pretty cool stuff. I don't know how well it works, though ;).