Philadelphia Reflections

The musings of a physician who has served the community for over six decades

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George (3)
It's often desirable to get live financial data and everyone knows. XML is the thing to use but actually writing programs that work takes a bit of trouble. Plus, once you've got the data you need to display it.

Graph Real Time Option Prices

When buying or selling options it is helpful to be able to see the information graphically rather than just looking at the tabular option chain tables. (I sell puts instead of placing buy limit orders; and I sell covered calls when I want to sell a position that may continue to appreciate.)

The feature below allows you to see how all the puts and calls are priced for a particular stock; in a glance it is often possible to see if the strategy you have in mind would be worth the trouble.

The data is from Yahoo Finance and the process of repetitively querying their XML streams takes a while, so be patient.

To see the messy, ugly code, click here

Originally published: Monday, December 24, 2012; most-recently modified: Tuesday, May 21, 2019