Aha!

Now that’s a losing trade!!!

Fraud Costs Bank $7.1 Billion - New York Times

Financial data has now gone open source. The company Opentick has an api that allows you to get real time streaming quotes of your favorite stocks using you favorite programming language. The software that Opentick has developed is open source as well as the data.
I tried Opentick and wasn’t able to get their sample app to work. I then but I set up a java project and ran their code sample with my login and changed the stock symbol to \YMZ7 which is the current Dow mini futures contract (the futures contract on the DJIA 30) (it is free for real time data) and voila it works. The quotes were streaming in real time to the console window!
But I wondered if this data was valid, so I ran Tradestation and opened up a time and sales window for the ym. I put both programs side by side and hit the print screen button and copied it to paint brush. Every trade in both programs matched up perfectly (all in the same order). I did this about 5 times with no differences. That’s pretty amazing! Not bad for free.

1000% hedge fund wins subprime bet

A company that bet against subprime returns 1000%