Rating the Quote Servers - Investing (Canada): 4/12/1999

For the last two weeks, the Canada Stockwatch quote server I have on my Quotes and Research page was inaccessable due to overload problems for much of each day. They were restricting access during these peak periods to paying subscribers to their real time service. The problem seems to have been fixed, but the experience had me checking out other servers for a while.

All quote servers are not created equal. Each has something different to offer - some seem to be unique to particular servers. For example, I only found one that gives historical stock prices. You simply enter a stock symbol and a date and the price on that day will be returned, adjusted for stock splits. That handy tool comes from Big Charts.

Canada Stockwatch is one of the few servers that gives you multiple quotes and lets you enter both American and Canadian stock symbols simultaneously. You also don't have to bother with those annoying stock exchange prefixes or suffixes. Canada Stockwatch will return all stocks from all exchanges that have the same symbol. This is why it is my favorite server and why I use it on my research page.

Quote.com provides ten minute delayed charting of current trading action. Just enter the stock symbol in the appropriate box and you can watch the bids and asks being posted and get a feel for the market activity (albeit ten minutes late - real time is available for a fee). It handles both American and Canadian exchanges.

There are free real time servers and a host of others. Below is a table of some quote servers comparing their features. I have included only free servers, though I've noted if certain features, such as real time quotes, are available for a fee.

	Big Charts	Canada Stockwatch	Checkfree	Quote.com	Telenium
Cdn & US Quotes	yes	yes	yes	yes	CDN Only
Multiple Quotes	no	yes	yes	no	no
Real Time	no	fee	no	fee	no
Historical Charts	yes	yes	no	yes	yes
Historical Quotes	yes	fee	no	no	no
Intraday Charts	yes	no	no	yes	no
Live Charts	no	no	no	delayed	no
Symbol Lookup	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Data	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Portfolio Tracking	no	fee	no	yes	no
Emailed Reports	yes	fee	no	fee	no

There are two quote servers providing real time quotes but both handle only American exchanges. One of them, Thomson Real Time Quotes, was the first to provide this service. Ironically, it is a subsidiary of Canada's own Thomson Corporation, one of the many reasons Thomson is often considered an Internet stock. The other is FreeRealTime.com. Both are linked on my Stocks Links Page under Quotes.

Thomson indicates they may add Canadian real time quotes in the future. In the meantime, you can get real time Canadian quotes by opening an account with E-Trade Canada or subscribing to paid services from Canada Stockwatch or Quote.com.

So which are the best services of the above? Depends on what you are looking for. I use Canada Stockwatch for reports on my stock holdings because I can enter up to ten Canadian and American stock symbols on the same line and generate a report. And a bonus is that you don't have to add in some whacky prefix or suffix for the exchange. I say whacky because there is no consistency between quote servers. I've come across TSE:BII, BII.TO and T.BII as indicators for Bid.com on the Toronto Stock Exchange. With BigCharts you simply add a CA: prefix for Canadian stocks.

For historic prices I use BigCharts's historic price search tool. I used this extensively to put together my Canadian Internet Stock Average. It is the only source I have found for this sort of information.

And for watching the trading action I look at Quote.com's ten minute delayed live chart. This is quite fascinating to watch and if I were a day trader, I'd pay for the realtime version of this service.

There are other sites supplying Canadian stock quotes on the Internet, but the above ones are the most prominent. Some of the others are listed on my Stocks Links page.

Update: The above has been updated to reflect an amalgamation between Big Charts and Big Charts Canada. You can now access Canadian quotes from the same Big Charts page by adding the CA: prefix.

Additionally, Globe Information Services launched their globeinvestor.com site since this article was written. I reviewed the site extensively as my Best of the Net pick in June. It has an excellent quote server which generates both Canadian and American stock prices. The page generated for a particular stock includes links to additional information on the stock including recent news, financial data and a list of the stock's closing price every day for the preceding thirty days.