Google Finance launches real-time stock quotes

Getting real-time stock quotes used to mean subscribing to premium services for $10 or $20 a month. Now, Google Finance is making real-time quotes accessible to everyone, for free.

The service launched this week and covers only NASDAQ-traded stocks. (NYSE stock quotes are still delayed 20 minutes.) Just visit the Google Finance page for any NASDAQ stock (like this one) and you'll now see the price update in real time, once per second. Charts update in real time, too, though they aren't as immediately visible on a by-the-second basis as the raw price is.

The service works flawlessly but can be maddening for investors. Watching your portfolio rise and fall in real time is almost insanity-inducing and can lead to knee-jerk trades when you might otherwise have been wiser to bide your time. It's one of the reasons why I don't actually invest in pure stocks, just mutual funds. (The other reason is that it avoids any conflicts of interest as I write about various companies on this blog and in other outlets.)

Before people start complaining that Google wasn't first, I will concede that real-time quotes are available for free from other outlets, but each of those has a catch. On MSN Money you have to log in to MSN, agree to a lengthy contract, and even then you can only get 1,500 quotes a month. (It's easy to burn through that in a day if you're an active trader.) The quotes are also not updated in real time on the page; you only get a single real-time snapshot that remains static until you reload the page. Other services also require registration and logins.

Congrats to Google and NASDAQ for making this service (a pilot program for now) available to everyone without a lot of overhead.