I haven’t placed a stock trade in over a year, and when I did it was only a hobby and I usually gravitated towards Nasdaq tech stocks.

One of the sites I frequented was Island.com (INET) – “Island accounts for a leading percentage of Nasdaq market volume and is often the number one market participant in such popular stocks as Yahoo!, Cisco and Intel.”

I’m guessing 60% of the trades I made showed up in the Island book.

This evening, by chance, I discovered that INET now has a REST web service, it’s FREE, and has a whopping 100,000 query/per day limit. Very cool. This should be a very easy way to get some real time stock data into Excel.

I’ll put together a simple Island Book Viewer in the morning when the market is live.

Aside: I rarely ever used Excel for analyzing stocks, I preferred Wealthlab. There wasn’t any scenario I couldn’t test with a little code, and there is a large community/codebase too. The only drawback was I had to learn the basics of programming Delphi.

Also, If you do use Excel to analyze stocks, and don’t mind converting Delphi to VBA, Weathlab has a large repository of scripts publicly available over here.