Comment by inigyou

Only extremely wealthy people participate in stock markets, in general. Other people use one of those wealthy people as an intermediary.

To participate directly in a market you usually need to lock up at least several million dollars at what is effectively an escrow service, so they can shift it between accounts when transactions happen. All your shares stay locked up in a similar service.

The line graph of stock prices you can see on Google is a lie. Real market data is, like, a live feed of who's buying and selling and at what price and quantity. That doesn't seem very useful to someone who isn't trying to trade on that market, and if you can't trade on that market why bother getting the data?

There also isn't just one market. Any two large financial firms can just agree to directly trade with each other, would you mandate realtime data on that?