SHARE PRICES ON TLF ?? Do you want them?

[stooz]

Hi all,
We have access to provide end of day price's (and therefore %age change on previous day) data direct into this website. There maybe other data we can add later. We can even get to live share prices and i don't mean the 15min delayed ones either!!

This could take the form of;
you enter some stock ID's in your profile (hidden to you)
and they will appear in the menu at the top with some relevant info.
We appreciate there are some dedicated sites out there for portfolio tracking - but to ease your life from jumping from here to other sites, and to give you a little side glance option we thought this might be helpful..

The question is this
Would this or some version of stock data be of interest before we go developing something you dont want?

for example I have created a very basic page that shows Vodafone at the moment.... financecalculators/stox.php

[dspp]

Stooz,

Some comments,

1. I have put a Biscuit Bar link up to tell people to comment here, and here only.
2. Are there any financial (cost) implications for TLF ?
3. My personal view is that momentary (whether daily or near-instantaneous) prices are important, but that longer term historical data so as to review trends is the real key.
4. That in turn means a need to operate a database and a graphing tool, and filtering tools.
5. It also likely means a place (thread/board) for each share ticker - which gets to be quite a significant restructuring of the boards.
6. Then continuity & maintainability are important, not an abandoned hobby project.
7. Then people will want a portfolio tracking capability.
8. And price alerts, and RNS feeds .......... and an app ..........

So I'm not necessarily saying that is a bad thing, but it ought to be discussed and understood before just diving in.

regards, dspp

[stooz]

Thanks for the points dspp.
Very valid. This is in its infancy but I just didnt want to commit time and money to an endevour that was not of interest. So it is at a 'market research' stage right now.
I was playing about with it for m own interest and saw the opportunity to introduce it.

There maybe some costs
so I might have to do a tiered approach like 5 symbols for free? No idea as yet, it depends on take up.

[PinkDalek]

Being picky but why is this not at “Financial Software - Discussion” or “Lemon Fool - Improve the Recipe”, as against “Share Ideas”?

To the main question, probably not in so far as I am concerned.

[JohnB]

I personally don't want them, but I have no problem with their introduction, provided it doesn't generate lots of new posts I have to mentally ignore.

[dspp]

Being picky but why is this not at “Financial Software - Discussion” or “Lemon Fool - Improve the Recipe”, as against “Share Ideas”?

To the main question, probably not in so far as I am concerned.

Because Stooz just piled in and posted down here ! That's why I put a locked post on the Biscuit Bar to alert others and send them here.

Can you give any insight into why you think not, as that will help in assessing this suggestion.

regards, dspp

[Gengulphus]

The question is this
Would this or some version of stock data be of interest before we go developing something you dont want?

I'm afraid that in my case, the answer is basically no, it would not be of interest. As regards daily, near-instantaneous or even instantaneous price data, I have more access to it anyway than I really need, via a multitude of other websites. I understand your "ease your life from jumping from here to other sites" point, but it's just as easy for me to jump from a TLF tab to another website's tab as to another TLF tab. So it would only ease my life if the TLF-supplied price data appeared in the same TLF tab as I was working in - but the number of different shares that I'm interested in is quite large even if restricted to the ones I own myself, and a good deal larger still once all the shares I might want to look at as a result of reading others' posts are taken into account. Share prices in the same tab as I am reading or composing a post in would therefore either be quite restricted in number, making them usually irrelevant to that post (so that I would need to change the shares involved, which is bound to be a more cumbersome procedure than flipping to another tab), or quite large in number, so that they would use too much screen real estate...

While writing that, I have thought of one possible exception to that "basically no" answer. If there was a facility for the author of a post to tag it as being about a particular share, and that resulted in the post being displayed with data about that share (or a button to bring such data up), I can see that being useful. To be properly useful, more than one such tag would need to be allowable - otherwise, the author of a post comparing e.g. AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline as pharmaceutical plays would be stuck about how to tag it. But some limit would have to be placed on the number of such tags - otherwise sooner or later someone will post a review of their 40-share portfolio with all 40 holdings tagged, and the resulting displayed post is likely to be a total mess! I think one would also want to make replies tag the same shares as the post they're replying to by default, but allow the author of the reply to add or remove tags - adding might be wanted by someone posting a "I wouldn't buy ABC because XYZ is a better purchase - look at how they compare: ..." post, and removal by someone responding to a comparison of two shares with a detailed analysis of just one of them.

I only say that it's a possible exception, not a definite one, because I see two potential problems. The first is just that the facility might be quite hard to design and implement properly, given the considerations I mention above (plus any others I haven't thought of). The second is that it looks pretty inevitable to me that some posters won't think about tagging their posts appropriately (including removing tags 'inherited' from the post they're replying to when they're not actually replying about the tagged share). That's liable either to render the facility less useful or even useless if left uncorrected, or to require extra moderator effort if it's to be corrected. I.e. I think it's a potentially useful facility, but to actually be useful in practice, it may require quite a lot of resources, both to set up and to run once it's been set up.

Moving on from the short-term data I've discussed above to longer-term stuff like share price histories, charts, etc - as dspp has indicated, that looks likely to be a slippery slope:

3. My personal view is that momentary (whether daily or near-instantaneous) prices are important, but that longer term historical data so as to review trends is the real key.
4. That in turn means a need to operate a database and a graphing tool, and filtering tools.
5. It also likely means a place (thread/board) for each share ticker - which gets to be quite a significant restructuring of the boards.
6. Then continuity & maintainability are important, not an abandoned hobby project.
7. Then people will want a portfolio tracking capability.
8. And price alerts, and RNS feeds .......... and an app ..........

His point 5 might be addressed by share ticker tags, but otherwise I agree with him.

Gengulphus

[PinkDalek]

Yes, I saw your viewtopic.php?p=396676#p396676.

Can you give any insight into why you think not, as that will help in assessing this suggestion.

Just lost a lengthy reply (fat fingers) but I don't think my comments would be insightful.

Very briefly, I use a variety of sources and I don't feel I'd gain anything from share price snippets available here, as I prefer to see much more which I already have available via my own self-created spreadsheets, Yahoo Finance, https://www.londonstockexchange.com/exc ... mmary.html etc and, if needs be, I can also check my online brokers for my various portfolios. Albeit with the 15 minute delay I can live with, being a very LTB&H.

Thus my own personal probably not in so far as I am concerned but I'm sure they'll be great for many on here though and if they assist TLF in any way to increase the number of users then that might be beneficial. Always hoping that it doesn't become similar to advfn level 1 type chat on intra day minor blips.

[SKYSHIP]

Stooz - thanks for asking; but very well served by ADVFN, so no need for another platform telling me less than I already get.

[dealtn]

It wouldn't add anything for me either.

Now if you could provide free L2 access ...

[GrahamPlatt]

I take it this stems from discussions with FinnCap & kiloran’s search for a dependable and sufficiently extensive data source.
Like others, I am not really interested in intra-day prices, and have in any case plenty of other sources (some I even go as far as to pay for!), so incorporating this as a website feature, no, but in a standalone app (e.g. rather than the simple-scrape, a super-scrape), then I’d be for it.

[GoSeigen]

Like others price information would not add anything for me: I have good sources for prices and they have the manpower to ensure they remain accurate and available.

Personally I'd prefer if energy and money went into improving the forum aspects. However I understand as owners stooz and Clariman will have their own priorities, maybe leading to the site being self funding or growing its user base, so I'd add that anything which enhances the site and makes it more viable is welcome by me.

And a big Thank You for what it's become so far...

GS

[tjh290633]

I would not object to having it available, but it's in the category of "Nice to have" rather than "Essential".

There are many sources available, with different pros and cons.

TJH

[AndyPandy]

I drop in here once a day at the most, usually out of UK trading hours so Live prices aren't.

I'm here for the chat and I have ADVFN Live streaming and StockMarketEye for prices & portfolio Management during the day if needed. I suspect that a lot of the membership have no desire to track real-time prices and have access to other resources if they do. As has been mentioned, just a ticker price is something and nothing really & why reinvent all the sharetrading tools and analytics already out there? Where do you stop?

If Admin is itching to expand the site, why not move the Forum off the root of the Domain so that there can be a Home page with options such as "Forum" (obv.) and "Useful websites", "Beginners guide to investing", "Zen and the art of HYP maintenance" and so on. Could even include some Affiliate links etc to monetise the website. Guest Bloggers?

I'm not saying go down the route of a fully blown (and timeconsuming) financial website but a few other relatively static sections may increase the website's appeal and Google presence.

[absolutezero]

Short answer. No.

Long answer. No.
It would generate loads of posts and topics that would then bloat the place.
This data is available easily elsewhere.

[Gengulphus]

If Admin is itching to expand the site, why not move the Forum off the root of the Domain so that there can be a Home page with options such as "Forum" (obv.) and "Useful websites", "Beginners guide to investing", "Zen and the art of HYP maintenance" and so on. Could even include some Affiliate links etc to monetise the website. Guest Bloggers?

I think one just needs to look at the history of TMF to see a reason why not to do that: aiming to "monetise" the website is liable to lead to the boards being marginalised and eventually dropped...

Gengulphus

[TUK020]

How would this interact with the HYPTUSS tool?
Would it offer the possibility of speeding up the data access?

[kiloran]

How would this interact with the HYPTUSS tool?
Would it offer the possibility of speeding up the data access?

I don't think there is any possibility of this. It would require the storing of data for all HYP (and non-HYP ) shares. That's a lot! And it would also be another potential failure point in the process.

--kiloran

[88V8]

Thankyou for this thought.

For me, price without context - up, down, % , yield, SP last week, - is of little value.

And for the web managers, maintaining external links can become a pain. I remember the links gradually crumbling on OBR's site.

So, not for me, but thankyou.

V8

[dspp]

How would this interact with the HYPTUSS tool?
Would it offer the possibility of speeding up the data access?

I don't think there is any possibility of this. It would require the storing of data for all HYP (and non-HYP ) shares. That's a lot! And it would also be another potential failure point in the process.

--kiloran

kiloran,

Imagine for a moment that TLF took a market close shareprice snapshot each day and put that in a database. Imagine that all dividends and splits and etc were also stored and coded into that database. That would give HYPTUSS a reliable single source of information to call from would it not ? That might make things easier rather than harder.

I'm not necessarily advocating this, indeed you will have seen my comments that tend towards the "where are you going" type. Nevertheless one can see the potential.

regards, dspp