Some of my trading funds had cleared up a bit (meaning I sold before I lost my shirt), and now I am back to researching and gathering information for my next trade. I have yet to make a Scottrade account for the Level 2 quotes (and I'm not even sure if Scottrade's L2 is good for penny stocks) so I was in need of some other way of knowing the real-time price of a stock I am watching.


Vantagewire was the easiest one I found to work well enough. All I had to do was fill out a generic form, answer a couple questions as to what kind of trader I am, and then I activated my account. Now note that it is not exactly what a true L2 platform is, but it is close.



Once you login, all you have to do to find the real-time PPS of a ticker is enter the ticker symbol, click Depth/L2, and refresh the page every time you want to check the real-time PPS. It is basically an easy work-around to paying $20-30 a month, especially if you are a casual trader like myself.

It might occasionally be 1-2 minutes behind, but that is considerably better than Yahoo Finance or OTCBB's 15 minute lag time. The website can also be unresponsive occasionally, so be prepared for a drop in communication once in a while.