Member Avatar for fbocch

Hi Folks, my company is a small Boston based, non-profit who has written stock market game software to be played at the middle and high school level. We're looking for a company to provide us a free or discounted real-time stock market feed for our game. Does anyone know if that's possible? There is an obvious and unique marketing opportunity for the company that helps us out.

We're also looking for a web hosting space and programmers to improve and update our program and create and maintain our web site.

Sincerely, Frank

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Thanks to for the clear brief and to and for the initial pointers. Short answer: true exchange-level, millisecond real-time data is normally licensed and not given away for public redistribution, but there are practical, lower-cost paths that work well for a middle/high school stock game.

Three practical approaches

  1. Use a modestly delayed or low-frequency "near real-time" feed and treat the game as minute-by-minute. This avoids expensive redistributor contracts and is how most school contests operate.
  2. Seek a sponsorship/educational license. Prepare a one-page sponsor pitch (user counts, schools, publicity, logo placement, sample UI) and ask a vendor or local brokerage for donated or discounted access and clear redistribution terms. Be explicit about expected requests/sec and caching.
  3. Use a broker/API for internal, closed-use data (paper trading) if redistribution is not required. Confirm terms before relying on it.

Implementation and reliability tips

  • Cache aggressively and keep the original source timestamp for auditability.
  • Throttle requests to stay within vendor limits and batch symbols into group calls where possible.
  • Store quotes with a tight schema and index for fast lookups; e.g.:
CREATE TABLE quotes (
  symbol VARCHAR(16),
  ts TIMESTAMP,
  last_price NUMERIC(12,4),
  bid NUMERIC(12,4),
  ask NUMERIC(12,4),
  volume BIGINT,
  PRIMARY KEY (symbol, ts)
);

CREATE INDEX idx_symbol_ts ON quotes(symbol, ts);
  • Use a single fetcher job (cron/worker) that validates, writes to DB, then pushes updates to clients via WebSocket or short polling to keep load predictable.

Hosting, programmers and compliance

  • Approach local universities or CS clubs for volunteers or capstone projects. Many cloud vendors have nonprofit credits—check current programs.
  • Always get written confirmation of redistribution rights, display rules, and required attribution. Log data usage for audits and show a clear delay/disclaimer to users.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for jbennet

Most sites provide stock information in the form of an XML (RSS) feed. It is easy to capture these using a web language such as PHP or a client side language such as C#. The exact same principle is used by most of those small weather applets.

Member Avatar for fbocch

Hi, thanks for responding. I'm looking for realtime up to the minute quotes. I don't think they'd provide that.

Member Avatar for Sturm

You might want to look at this

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