Me and some of my friends would want to start a side project which we will work at our spare time. Here is our criteria
1) A challenging project which will teach us skills which has business value in the future.
2) A potential to make money from the project itself.
Quite obvious targets.
We are looking into the possibility to create a live price feed. We understand we cannot match the ones in the market now. But we are looking into the possibility to provide a feed which could at least provide a “live” feed, even though it cannot match the real time performance provided by the insane hardware and software resources the “biggies” could provide.
If we could host the feed in a website which can show prices even 5 minutes late, that could do.
The current skills pool is C++ and C#.
We have WPF, asp.net, silverlight skills for UI (UI doesn’t matter much anyway)
The questions
1)How is it possible to get the raw price feeds for cheap(or free)?
2)Is it possible to do this idea at least as proof of concept(which means it might not have any commercial value) in a year by 3 developers working 20 hours a week?
3)Is there any information available in the internet to start with?
4)Is there any open source projects in this area?
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OK, things might have changed but this is what I can tell from working in the business of providing that data (albeit several years ago):
- it doesn’t come cheap
- delayed data is cheaper than live data (that’s one big reason why most stock quotes you find on website tickers are delayed by 15 minutes to over an hour, the cost that way is radically lower)
- I can’t see how you’re going to create something new here as your plan seems to be to take a feed from a provider and just repost that through some other channel without doing anything with it. That’s going to be a problem with most providers as they won’t allow you to resell their data as is.
- There are unlikely to be open source projects about this as the data is proprietary and not publicly available (you might find some screen scrapers that steal data from a website listing prices, but those mechanisms are a) unreliable (those websites change regularly) and b) a violation of the terms of use of those websites
To provide a full service platform would likely take you more than 3 people and more than a year, but you could create the raw basics in less than that if your skills with your chosen tools are good enough.If I were you I’d start by creating my own feed, using some trending algorithm seeded with maybe real stock data you pull from say Euronext or NYSE websites for start values. That way you simulate real data without having to buy it (of course it won’t be at all accurate or reflecting reality, but it’s going to be free and as a simulation it works fine).
Store the incoming feed data in some database and you have your dataset that’s constantly getting new data points for you to work with.
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