UK Small Cap stock quoting problems
Since the beginning of the week share price quotes for the smaller UK stocks seem to be completely unreliable. Google Finance and Yahoo Finance do not see any trades at all intra-day for some stocks although Yahoo do seem to be working for close-of-day again.
Sites like Moneyam and ADVFN seem to have spent the week firefighting to get some kind of support re-established. But most remarkably, the London Stock Exchange itself is not reporting these trades, so sites like Reuters are quoting an intraday price (presumably from an accurate feed) plus the LSE price which is often days old.
The cause appears to be a change that the LSE have made in the way that off-order-book trades are reported (or not) on their feed, which might be related to the MIFID2 changes due to come in at the start of 2018.
This seems quite scandalous to me. I can't be the only person starting to think that if I can't get accurate timely info about a particular stock then it would not be safe to hold it any longer. I've gone from being able to easily check the price of any stock to not being sure unless I cross-check against a number of sites. It is especially a problem for those of us that download historical prices.
Is anyone else suffering from these problems at the moment?
Disclaimer
This is not financial advice. Our content is intended to be used and must be used for information and education purposes only. Please read our disclaimer and terms and conditions to understand our obligations.
26 comments
I suspect its been spotted, but just in case anyone missed it - google finance is working again during trading hours (at least for me). This includes my AIM holdings.
Google Finance shows some stocks fine, others there is no data at all since before the change, e.g. IGR
Can people please use the "Report a problem" link at the bottom of the Google Finance page. It's very simple and quick to use and the more users report problems, the more likely Google are to fix it ASAP.
Emailed Google Finance - as Philip says, v straightforward.
So, on top of LSE not bothering to regulate AIM properly, we now have them failing to provide decent data.
What an incredible shambles - almost makes one want to buy a (but just 1) share and go along to the AGM....... Great advert for our financial services industry.....
Yes, ive been having problen=ms with AIM listed stocks on the HL site. A price (not sure if its wrong or right) shows for a few seconds then disappears. So its difficult to tell how a stock is going day to day. Im surprised LSE customers getting these feeds arent jumping up sand down more. What about those huge trading rooms?
This is annoying me now. Over a week on and there's still a problem with AIM stocks. I like to use Google Finance for live intraday prices and for detailed charts I use 4-Traders. Google Finance is not working at all for AIM stocks and 4-Traders lacks volume information for AIM stocks.As somebody who likes to buy volume breakouts its like trading with one arm tied behind my back. I hope this can be resolved soon!
Well done to Stockopedia for having accurate volume information for AIM stocks on their charts.
7 of my 24 shares are not showing the correct price on google sheets. A quick way to show if there has been any price movement is putting this formula into the sheets, replacing with the correct ticker.
=sparkline(GOOGLEFINANCE("D4T4", "Close", TODAY()-10, TODAY(), "daily"))
If its a straight line across then google hasnt change the price within the last 10 days
Thanks for that - better still you can use the Googlefinance function - tradetime - which gives you the date and time of last trade for your chosen ticker(s).
I have a feeling Google do not update Google Finance anymore, hence the app no longer exists. I have an android app simply called 'stocks' which has been unaffected by these problems.
I'm finding morningstar has stopped sending me RNS alerts though which is far more annoying!
Does this mean that as things stand Google Finance will no longer show accurate prices going forward?
I'm still getting RNS's through via investegate.co.uk
I'm still getting some but have had very few recently so not sure I'm getting all of them, I will have to check.
London Quotes seem to be working OK for me on Google Finance & a Google Sheet that I use for keeping track of prices is working fine today (& yesterday) - so maybe they fixed it? Like you I have also stopped getting RNS e-mails from Morningstar but Investegate is still working, albeit belatedly this morning as their site was down first thing. Maybe that was them applying a fix too?
What price does it show for Mattioli Woods (LON:MTW) ?
It should be about 780 (785 mid) at the moment. But the Google Finance website is showing 801.25 (last updated 16-Jun)
I have noticed that Google Finance charts are only showing daily and weekly intervals for some stocks, eg BVXP, implying they don't have interday prices.
But looking at GSK as another example the charts are the same as before.
They aren't seeing "O" trades. So for a stock like GSK that makes pretty much no difference. There are masses of "A" trades every day. But for smaller stocks like MTW or BVXP they have almost exclusively "O" trades and so the price reported by Google et al is useless - in fact maybe dangerously misleading.
Agreed - guess it is a problem for smaller / AIM stocks as per this thread. Seems fine for bigger main market stocks as far as I can tell?
There's more than a hint of irony in what has happened. The changes have been made to meet the new MiFID II trade reporting obligations, which are intended to standardise the way that all quotes and all trades are publicised to the market to make things fairer for everyone.
However so far for many end-users the effect is to lose all the "O" trades, so we are all currently getting worse info.
Gradually this is being fixed, but it does highlight a problem with services like Google Finance. It's free and in beta and so they can take as long as they like to fix problems, and I do not see any way to report problems to them or to see any reports that they are are aware or working on fixes.
It looks like the LSE tested the changes with the customers of their feed to make sure the switch would go smoothly, but then those customers presumably did not test that their own customers would handle it. So the chain fell down one stage further along.
Hey Nick,
When you say "Each data user is now having to rewrite their code to handle this" on the other discussion post for focusrite; Is the data user Google itself or each user of google finance. If its each user of google, does anyone know how to get the correct result if =googlefinance(TICKER,"price") doesnt show the correct price?
Thanks guys
I think he means Google itself. I.e. Every app and website that uses the data will need to issue a new version of their app or update their website to handle the change.
It doesn't bode well for the stockwatch app that I use which is slow to update when things like this happen.
Carey
No - I meant the big companies, not individuals. I see that Moneyam are nearly there and I think ADVFN. Yahoo I think are getting end-of-day correct but not intraday yet and Google have done nothing at all so far.
Moneyam chose to try to fix some of it as quickly as possible which meant they were bombarded with reports of what they hadn't fixed yet. So maybe Google will fix completely and then roll out, rather than risk rolling out partial fixes.
Thanks, I've been searching to try and find the problem all week. I use an app JStock that picks up prices from Yahoo and Google finance and I assumed it was related to these feeds. Has anybody got any back up method to get by until this is resolved. Although, I expect there's no alternative being that's a problem with the LSE.
Thanks for the info Nick.
This has been annoying all week. It appears that AIM stocks are worst affected. Volume information has been sporadic. Anybody have any idea when this is going to be fixed?
This is what has happened. The big question is how long it is going to take to recover from it. Apparently there have been "Dress Rehearsals" so I am not sure how it has been such a diabolical roll-out. (also baffling: why are the LSE themselves getting this wrong too on their charts? Surely they knew what was coming.)
http://www.londonstockexchange...
Yes this has been going on all week. Some prices on my broker HL are incorrect, ie selling price higher than bid price, this is not just on small companies, Kier was one and it was about 100p difference. No trades during the day displayed. Seems to be caused by the LSE.
Yes, same here. It is very infuriating. I'm also currently using a number of sites to try and keep informed.
Thank you for explaining the route cause. I am indeed having the same problem, and it impacted my attempted purchase of Frontier Developments (LON:FDEV) this morning.