RE: Live Shares25 Feb 2019 13:18
I too was using MoneyAM until it went down and am yet to find an acceptable replacement.
Shares Magazine - I took up the £9 offer and logged in over the weekend, but there was no stockwatch tool whatsover and a message suggesting it would be available in a few weeks. Seriously? I read on the old bugs thread that it would not include trade data anyway, but that may be wrong. What a shambles!
London South East - I used to be a member here, and although the tools appear OK, both the level 2 and watchlist tools randomly and frequently stop working throughout the day. Unless you continually refresh manually you will be totally unaware that the order book has changed, the price has moved or a whole load of trades have gone through. Totally unacceptable IMO.
ADVFN - I subscribed to that last week and although it appears better than LSE for reliability the service is still riddled with a large number of pauses in data delivery throughout the day. No trades are reported for minutes and then suddenly a whole load of trades from the last few minutes appear at once. This too is not good enough.
There are other data providers, but they do not offer the kind of functionality that LSE, ADVFN or MoneyAM have. For example, some of them are desktop JAVA application or are part of broker or spreadbetting interfaces. There also appears to be a move recently to rewrite interfaces as mobile friendly. Unfortunately this has usually been accompanied with a massive degredation of service and functionality. Barclay's awful Smart Investor is a good example as is Digital Look's new website. Unfortunately it appears that service providers have told a bunch of programmers with no market experience to go write a mobile safe interface. The programmers have promptly used it as an opportunity to showcase their latest fancy programming skills instead of writing an application that fits the needs and requirement of people manging investment porfolios in the stock market.
To be honest the Money AM service was truly exceptional, with near instant reporting without dropouts of all LSE trades for any number of stocks all from the same page. For those of us that are managing investment positions in illiquid small cap AIM stocks the provision of accurate live market data is critical and IMO none of the alternative services are good enough. I really feel that MoneyAM's move has dramatically diminsihed the market transparency available to retail investors and I'm sure that will affect trading volumes for the likes of AJ Bell itself, the parent company of MoneyAM. Not a smart business move.
I think it would be a good idea if former MoneyAM members keep in touch via this thread and see if we can encourage Share Magazine to reimplement the same MoneyAM functionality on the new website. We don't need another third rate mobile platform for doing a deal a month while taking the kids to school, we need a proper retail data service.