Creating a Stock Quotes Manager

I’ve been developing an End-Of-Day (EOD) quote updater for my charting program Trader’s Workbench. I have the basic update functionality available from within the workbench, but as I felt that this might be something that other people could use, I would like to hear from YOU. What do you think about it?

Are people using this kind of tool (end-of-day quote updating tool) anymore or does every charting application out there now, come with a more or less obligatory quote update service?  Is there anyone left doing their analysis on End-Of-Day data?

I do, and I need a reliable quote source so I developed Quotes Library.

I went with the development paradigm of less-is-more. I wanted a software that did one thing really good, and that had an interface that consisted of as few buttons as possible.  I’m pretty happy with the result. Let me tell you about the characteristics.

Quotes Library does the following:

• Update your MetaStock Formatted Quotes from any source
• Recalculates stock quote when split occurs
• Export/Import from Excel
• Ability to create new files from scratch, filling them with data from any source

That’s all. I think that the most important part is in the first bullet above. Ability to update from any source. This means that if you live in India and are interested in your local markets, you can use this tool just as well as someone in the States interested in Nasdaq quotes or in Sweden.

How’s that possible?

I’ve developed this tool with a plug-in architecture where the structure of any webpage can be described in order to get the tool to work with the web source YOU prefer. So for any new source I need, I just add the rules to read the quotes from that webpage, and apply it to the already existing application, without recompiling the main application. Just releasing a new .DLL for the source in question. Pretty neat I think.

For instance, I use Yahoo when I add a new stock to follow. But the daily update of Yahoo is usually a little slower than my local source that only keeps today’s quotes. Then I can use etrade, Avanza, Nordnet or whatever source keeps today’s quotes, to get fresh quotes right at the close of the market, instead of having to wait for Yahoo to get today’s quotes.

So, the brilliance here is that without having to re-distribute the whole application, it could be used for any market, anywhere using any provider. You don’t even have to have an account with that provider which means the cost of using the Quotes Library tool is zero.

I don’t think it’s an immoral thing to do either, since Yahoo is distributing their quotes for personal use for free, and the other sources out there does the same but for today’s quotes. Not historical. All this tool is doing, is to make the collection of the already free quote data more efficient and automatic, instead of manually having to collect it.

That’s it. I’d really like your impressions of such a tool, and if you think it could be of interest to you. I appreciate it. Thanks.