this is what happens when you--okay, this cannot be a sane life lesson

So market_roulette is sort of--getting away from me.

There's a reason there is no single great and wonderful site to get up to date stock quotes for every exchange in the world. I don't know what it is, but it has to be there, since I can't find one that will give me global range (lots of partial). Which means I'm having to pull from a surprising number of sites.

You would think--theoretically--that I'd conclude that the reason is it's kind of fucking impossible since I can't even get public listings from the Iranian Oil Bourse (did you know they don't take US dollars but do take yen? I'm so going to win at Jeopardy someday) and good luck getting anything on Islamabad Stock Exchange in Pakistan. Cause I'm having problems.

Part of it could be that my Arabic is non-existent, granted, but I'll be frank, that's not the problem here. I don't actually need stock quotes from Pakistan, the Channel Islands, and Tunisia. I mean, really; my participants are honestly not losing out because I can't get a full length company list and stock quotes for the--and wow, didn't see this coming--billion stock exchanges of the world. I used to think I was good at geography. Not since the Channel Islands and Tunisia. And apparently Northern Cyprus may or may not be an independent nation only acknowledged by Turkey, and I'm starting to think in GMT and I'm GMT -6 and why do I say that before I say US Central Time now?

Right, getting back.

So there no single powerful entity that has all the stock quotes of the world (not to mention a complete list of stock exchanges; Tunisia. God). There are amazingly good reasons, I'm sure, like accessibility, ease of use, language barrier, and some countries really don't like other countries to look at their exchanges. And yet, I haven't slept in twenty four hours because I'm a completionist; there should be a single, shining, worldwide site where you can get stock quotes from Japan and Morocco and Lebanon all in one-stop shopping.

The thing is, I know I cannot with the power of the import functions in googledocs create a magical spreadsheet that has every public company, every ticker, and every stock price in the world on every single exchange in the correct local currency with an insta!converter for currency exchanges. I mean, I do know this. I just haven't convinced my completionist instincts to stop leaving an Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and--*breathes*--Greek dictionaries (do not judge; Athens Stock Exchange is awesome) open for when I stumble across another financial site to add to my import list.

I feel this will end either in insanity or possibly, tears at the fact that I cannot learn to read Japanese in five hours to figure out if they have a cvs download function on Yahoo's Japanese finance site. And China's. And India's. And maybe Taiwan's?

I really have no other news. God, that's sad.

Comments

Re: *whistling*

[nagasvoice]

Ayyyuuup.
That right there.
*embarrassed cough*
Which of course could be presented to them as a useful and viable app for, oh, rather a lot of folks.
Yeah, I'd suggest keeping some nice solid documentation which you have mailed to yourself so you have postmark untouched-envelope proof about the date of your concept, the way some of the creative folks with media ideas to protect might do.
Now, there is the awkward little question whether this might be stepping on the toes or the expertise of quite a lot of other folks who make a living coordinating all this stuff in that very fallible human way, in their heads. But of course Google et al have dealt with that kind of challenge before (mapping comes to mind as a specialist thing) and of course they could *hire* those folks for their expertise.