You should know that there are two types of quotes – real time quotes and streaming quotes. The streaming quotes are those which you usually see on TV channels and most financial websites. These streaming quotes are generally delayed by around 15 to 20 minutes from real time. Therefore, these are not accurate since the price of stock could have changed a lot in this period. The investors cannot rely on these quotes to make buy or sell decisions.

The other type of quotes is called real time stock quotes. As the name suggests, these are real time quotes giving the true price of the stocks at that particular time. This stock quote is very important to the active traders. There are various ways through which you can get real time stock quotes. There are many websites like Yahoo Finance, CNN Money and Google Finance which provide this information.

These websites have loads of information apart from the real time stock quotes which help investors remain up to date with market news and events. This information also helps the investors to make informed decisions. Most of the websites which offer free online quotes may have some delayed data. Most websites which give real time quotes need you to subscribe to their website by giving some fee. You should be careful while deciding which website subscription you choose. Some websites also provide free trail period as well. If you are going to just use the trial period, make sure that you cancel the subscription before the trial period ends else you will be charged the subscription fee without any notification.

Another factor which should be considered while choosing real time quotes is that you should get quotes from all 3 major exchanges namely New York Stock exchange (NYSE), National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) and the American Stock Exchange (AMEX). Some of the real stock quote providers require you to download an executable program and install it on your computer. While this makes the interface easy to use, you should make sure that it is free from any kind of virus. It is always better to subscribe to a reputed website which has a credible history.

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On such tool is the free stock quote tool. These stock quotes are provided to you on the real time basis by the brokerage firms as well as MSN, Yahoo or Google finance.  

Then there are we b based brokerage houses that also give you the option of downloading their tool bars and plug ins that will provide you with stock quotes.  

These tools help you get the real time information on your finger tips as well as you can then watch the trending and decide if you want to buy or sell a particular stock.  As a stock market for beginners guide free stock quotes are a good tool to use and build a portfolio.

There are companies that provide excel based free stock quote tools for the same.

The benefit of these excel based tools is that excel based tool provide you the plug in for excel and help get the data in excel easily as opposed to web based information.  

With excel you can actually then do analysis with numbers and develop tools within excel itself to do analysis.  

You can develop a stock portfolio analysis tool using the stock quotes to increase your chances of making money with the stocks.  

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