Real Time / High Resolution Stock API?

Question

I'm looking to get my hands on an API (hopefully one that's platform agnostic) that allows me to retrieve real time (or as close to it) equity prices / volume (hopefully).

I'm not a professional trader and can't afford anything really expensive (although I'm willing to pay a fair bit a month for such a service). I'm seeking to monitor about 500 equities (SP500) to start.

Does anybody have any suggestion? I don't want to use something like Google, because I would in effect be stealing a lot of bandwidth and could be blocked for abusing the service.

Answer 1

Google is a relatively shockingly developer friendly company. I have had some interactions with them about volumes of API use. You can hit them quite a bit without getting blacklisted.

One project that I am aware of being developed by Collaborative Software Initiative: FeedHandler: http://csinitiative.com/products/feedhandler/

I am not sure what the cost of the feed would be like. They would be able to track all of the stocks.

Jacob